Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Someplace, No Place, and All Places Between: An Introduction to Innovations

Ben Ristow and Jon Udelson

Story as Connection, Story as Community: Expanding Creative Writing’s Reach Through Art-Based Advocacy

Susan V. Meyers

Trans Creativity, Problems of Reading, and Creative Writing Studies

Trace Peterson

Queering Creative Writing Studies

Audrey T. Heffers

Entering the Room: Qualitative Research in Writing Workshops

Erika Luckert

The Meow Wolf Model for the Marketable Creative

Michael Sheehan

Interpretive Quantitative Methods, Applied Literariness, and Creative Writing Studies

Justin Nicholes and David Hanauer

Making Meaning: Content Analysis in Creative Writing Studies

Tanya Perkins

Creative Problem Solving as a Promising Method for Creative Writing Studies Research: Insights from the Creative Humanities Initiative

Brandon McFarlane

Narrative Medicine as Creative Writing Methodology

Janelle Adsit

Creative Writing Studies, Unbounded

Graeme Harper

Tracing Literate Activity: Methodological Moves Toward Sociomaterial Perspectives of Creative Writing

Kevin Roozen

Tracing Literate Activity in Creative Writing Studies

Joyce Walker and Samantha Moe

Beyond Creation: New Materialist Research Strategies for CWS

Christopher Leary

Professional Technical Communication Perspectives in Creative Writing Studies: Deconstructing Creative Writing Guidebooks as Social Artifacts

Sarah Taylor

The Affective Flows of Creative Writing Research: How Do Bespoke Research Assemblages Provide the Methods and Methodologies Needed to Open Up New Possibilities in Creative Writing Research?

Francis Gilbert and Vicky Macleroy

Digging In: Artificial Intelligence and Creative Writing Research

Andrea Delgado, Trent Hergenrader, Juan Carlos Reyes, and Chris Scheidler

Afterword: Maps, Mirrors, Mumblety-Peg, and Mess

Eli Goldblatt

Notes on Contributors

Index

Studies in Composition and Rhetoric

Edited by Alice S. Horning

Acknowledgments

This collection celebrates and wishes to acknowledges the pioneering work of all writers and scholars who have worked at the intersection of creative writing and writing studies over the last several decades. A book such as this would not have been possible without the efforts of countless individuals, groups, and organizations. We first and foremost extend a champion thanks to the contributors, whose tireless work and commitment to this project created this volume. Each chapter went through a rigorous process of proposal, drafting, review, and revision, and we appreciate the efforts of every writer featured here. Among many other fine organizations, we would also like to thank the Creative Writing Studies Organization for hosting their yearly conference and helping put creative writing studies on the proverbial map, as well as the Conference for College Composition and Communication for creating spaces for creative writing studies, including its Creative Writing Standing Group. We are indebted to Studies in Composition and Rhetoric series editor Alice Horning for her support and insight throughout this process and acquisitions editor Tony Mason for his kindness, assistance, and belief in this project. And we are, of course, grateful to Eli Goldblatt for this guidance and mentorship—in so many ways, he was truly the “third editor” on this collection. Last, we would like to thank all of the reviewers of both the proposal and manuscript.

Our initial conversations around putting together a methods-based collection focused on creative writing studies began in 2018, and we are overjoyed to now see this project completed. Working with all of the contributors, all of the editors, and everyone who worked in an “unofficial” capacity to offer advice has been a genuine honor. We so appreciate having had the opportunity to work on this project and share it with everyone who made it possible.

—Jon & Ben

Someplace, No Place, and All Places Between: An Introduction to Innovations

Ben Ristow and Jon Udelson

Placing creative writing as a research field has often meant plucking the right metaphor to describe its unique institutional position in English Studies and higher education more broadly. Its qualities as a field of study and research, however, are often distinct from the metaphors deployed to describe the activity and processes associated with the act of writing. Or maybe not. This collection draws methods from metaphors for the purpose of locating creative writing in the methodologies required to study it as an academic discipline, institutional artifact, and site of artistic production. Creative writing cannot and should not be disentangled from the act and actions connected to making art. The artifact of writing, the result, the conditions, the pre-conditions, and the writing we do should be included in any speculation of how and why creative writing can be studied. Our greater objective is to seek through exploration rather than prescription the methods and methodologies that future researchers—whatever their stripe or artistic affiliation—might use to do the research work of understanding what that thing we call creative writing is, what it does, and how it functions in the institutions and cultures it is born of and into.

This project, however, is not a wholly new one in the writing studies discipline. In his 2010 essay in College Composition and Communication “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies,” Doug Hesse discusses the disciplinary relationship between creative writing and composition studies by presenting the limitations and affordances of both fields. His balanced critique identifies the ways creative writing and its affiliated graduate programs have carved out a space in academia that is insular and often avoidant of the demands of traditional research, civic discourse, and institution-wide or programmatic service. Composition studies fares no better in the essay, as Hesse argues that composition studies has eschewed research into and contributed little to the discourse and development of imaginative or literary writing. The place, then, of creative writing is often conceived of as a kind of no place, or, rather, as a place between literary studies and composition studies that is defined less by what it is and more by what it is not and what it could be. From this someplace of no-place, we set out upon our journey of methodological inquiry.

After more than a decade since his essay, Hesse’s provocations are still relevant, and the question remains–what is the place of creative writing? What has changed since Hesse’s essay is no less remarkable. His question is being answered by a field that has fledged and flown but has yet to define its place fully beyond the margins or apart from the simplifying label of subfield. In material, consequential ways, however, creative writing studies has found places: it has academic journals publishing research, it has national and international conferences, and there is a burgeoning number of professors who secure tenure-track writing studies jobs and achieve promotion in those lines. What remains is glaring nonetheless, and it is in this collection we seek to bridge a gap identified by Hesse’s essay—how do we develop, expand, and enhance research methods and methodologies in creative writing studies?

The collection Seeking Our Places: Innovations in Creative Writing Studies Research, Methodologies, and Practices offers more than one answer to the question of the place of creative writing. One place is inside this collection itself, where we curate a discussion among creative writing researchers about methods, about rigor and ethics, about inspirations and justifications, and critically, about how they conceive and enact methods of research in our field. We are interested in how researchers have studied creative writing from its historical inception in the 1990s and how methodological choices were and are made in ways that illuminate aspects of a field of artistic practice and teaching. In the name of learning outcomes and to examine theoretical or pedagogical matter, we make methodological choices, we gather data, but for artist-teachers-researchers contained in the metonymy of Creative Writing, we are also charged with honoring the ineffable and those that write out of no certain truth or no particular outcome or order in mind. What method shall we call this?

Ways of producing knowledge are intimately tangled up with the lives of those who make the attempt to write. And in their attempts to create, learn, share, and protest, they learn from others how to write as well. We imagine this collection as a bridge toward somewhere in writing studies where creative writing has yet to occupy fully. It is out of our deepest desire to understand the ethics and interests of the people who make this field as practitioners and teachers that this collection is beholden. The fuel is already here in the critical mass of MFA and PhD students who now produce scholarship on creative writing. Creative writing studies researchers are drawing from experience in MFA programs or utilizing their PhD training in composition studies to produce scholarship that establishes the place of creative writing. It is from this growing number of graduate students interested in creative writing studies that administrators and architects of graduate programs are well served. Evidence-based, qualitative and quantitative research serves the needs of departmental and institutional assessment and humanities initiatives, and in this collection, we hope successful teaching, program design, and assessment are communicated to those who may not know how creative writing works and can be researched, and who it serves through the writing workshop.

“Placeness,” we argue in this collection, is created through research and understood better through metaphor. The sizable and significant influx of articles, monographs, collections, and dissertations on or about creative writing is the clearest evidence we have that a systematic investigation of creative writing is underway. Researching creative writing as a socio-cultural, historical, and material phenomenon is relatively new, but it is what Hesse was calling for, and it brings to light the innumerable ways in which the disciplinary mindscape of creative writing and creative writing studies evolves.

In their 2012 book Writing Studies Research: Methods and Methodologies, from which we draw much inspiration, Nickoson and Sheridan speak to the development of writing studies, and their argument forms the impetus for our collection. They write:

Dramatic changes in digital writing and research, for example, challenge traditional monomodal assessments of what constitutes writing; a greater understanding of classrooms as nestled in complex networks calls for alternative approaches to these traditional sites of study; and the increasing recognition of extracurricular writing demands that we expand where we study (1).

Along similar lines, Seeking Our Places argues that developments in the discipline of creative writing and the teaching of creative writing have shifted our understanding of what it means to understand and study creative writing. Changes in the discipline of creative writing are becoming sites for researchers to occupy. As examples, we can now note the growing role creative writing plays across university campuses (as with Creative Writing Across the Curriculum); the social and networked nature of publishing and circulation for literary genres; the perpetually shifting relationships between reading practices, writing production, and the nature of identity and narrative; and if that were not exhausting enough, scholars are questioning the social-cultural-material dimensions of craft.

There are a dizzying array of topics facing researchers of creative writing today. Our collection asks readers to consider: What unexplored or underexplored sites and modes of creative writing are fit to investigate? What methods in the fields of composition and writing studies might be adapted for the study of creative writing? What new methodological, ethical, and pedagogical concerns must researchers consider in the context of creative writing studies specifically? What do fields outside of writing—such as medical humanities, craft studies, and theater performance—possess that might support new perspectives and the interpretation of data in creative writing research? Where does creative writing studies fit in the future of the humanities? And finally, how might a renewed focus on methodological thinking answer the question of the disciplinary place of creative writing studies, or, must creative writing studies resist current methodological thinking?