Dissecting “Shakespeare’s dogfish”

This the twelfth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

One of my favorite types of projects is the kind the turns the same article into two publications. The academics in the house know this particular joy.

I managed one of these two-fers with an article I wrote called “Shakespeare’s dogfish: a case for building Creative Writing Studies from the outside.” I know, I know, the second half of that title is really in-group.

Side note: if you’re not familiar with the Walker Percy essay from which the first half of that title is derived, “The Loss of Creature,” you really should be. Consider that my reading assignment to you for the week. 

Here’s the short version: teaching creative writing is actually a subject that people pay a good deal of attention to, not that popular academic culture would see that as the case. Despite this lack of visibility, the work to legitimize the field has largely and roundly been done.

This opens space for some questions that interest me.

What do other fields of study and the pedagogical approaches instructors are taking in them have to offer professors of creative writing? And what could they learn from spending time with people from my field? 

And if that kind of collaborative work is going to take place, what will that mean for disseminating what gets learned and the notion of shared credit for work that will, in many cases, look unlike most everything in either of the disciplines that are converging?

In essence, I used this piece to dream about what might come next in my field because that’s where Creative Writing Studies is at: we either move outward and into novel, non-legacy spaces with our research or we run the risk of stagnating and slowing the discipline’s momentum.

The piece first appeared in the journal New Writing in the middle of my hectic fall prepping for my impending sabbatical and wondering if I would have a job when I got back from it given some financial strife on the campus where I work.

Then I forgot about it until an email from our editor Graeme reminded me that Routledge had agreed to publish several articles from New Writing—mine included—as a special issued collection in book form. A few weeks later, here it was on my doorstep.

Like I said, get you an article that can fill two lines on a CV.