Publication Day: Imaginative Teaching Through Creative Writing

Here it is! You can find it here online.

You ever hear the story about the book that started as some loose thoughts penned on a coffee shop or bar napkin because someone said, “Yeah, we should do this…”? Somewhat of a common origin tale in writing circles. A metaphor of sorts as well.

And, as publication day has arrived for my co-editors and me, it actually happened. Today, Imaginative Teaching Through Creative Writing is available. In the fall of 2018, the book was literally a conversation at a BBQ joint in North Carolina and a couple of napkins full of maybes. 

The primary topic of that discussion—other than whether or not the brisket was the best thing on the menu—was the following question: Why isn’t there a book that connects solid, accessible creative writing theory with the best practices already happening in standards-driven secondary language arts classrooms?

Before grad school and teaching at the college level, Chris, Amy, and I all taught at the secondary level. And, in some ways, we’ve remained connected to those experiences even as we’ve pursued our creative and post-secondary work. 

So, we sketched those napkin notes, reconvened a little later for a fire-side continuation of the conversation, and then left the conference we were at with a rough plan. Then we wrote a call for chapter proposals, reached out to some folks in Creative Writing studies circles who had useful pieces of the theory puzzle they could bring to the book, and started the long process of pulling a proposal together (twice, actually). 

And now, it’s here, and it is fantastic. Part collection of excellent, tested models for teaching creative writing in ways that better explore educational standards than many currently preferred approaches. Part foundational theory that aims to broaden the perception of creative writing as a pedagogical tool and offer a variety of ways to establish its necessity in secondary cultures that privilege functional-literacy. And all written by people committed to establishing a truth we all hold as unappreciated: creative writing should be central to the language arts classroom experience, not merely an add-on or “break” from more serious subjects.      

Imaginative Teaching came together more seamlessly than we had any right expecting. Much of that is due to the work of my co-editors who were an absolute joy to work with, even as we shoehorned the majority of the work into pandemic schedules turned upside down and morning Zoom meetings half editorial in nature and half group therapy. This process was by no means easy, but I appreciate the way we shared the burdens and also the process. 

I’m also happy to be working with Bloomsbury Academic again, particularly with our commissioning editor Lucy Brown. This is my third collection with them, and I have felt supported and thoroughly understood each time. Also, working with the chapters of this book has felt particularly fulfilling (including getting to publish an essay from one of my former students as well as one from the most talented educator I know personally). 

If I’m being honest, Imaginative Teaching completes a thought I had almost 20 years ago when I came up with a lesson one Sunday night I called Novel in a Week and then, on that following Monday, taught my ninth-grade students (more on that in the book and in a blog post to come). I wondered then—as I do now—why so many English classes teach creative writing as an object rather than an action. Something to read and respond to rather than write and release. 

Fortunately, others have wondered the same thing and doing something about it. It’s truly my hope that this book will encourage more teachers to engage the work of creative writing with their students and support their efforts along the way.   

The downside of down time

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

Turns out this joke photo I posted at the beginning of sabbatical is actually the way some people assumed the time would go for me. It’s like they don’t know me at all…

“So, you’ve got, like, a half year to just hang out? Really?”

No, not really. Sabbatical is designed to produce rest and recharging, but it is not a vacation. Add to that my Type A tendencies and nascent-but-still-present workaholism and no, I was not lying around…

…except when my depression flared and kept me from writing or researching or doing, well, anything much meaningful in terms of all the projects I’d given myself and the ones that presented themselves along the way.

I took this picture in the middle of the worst of that season. Looking at it now, it shows.

Days lost to bone-deep fatigue and crushing self-doubt piled up in the early portion of my time away. This was supposed to be when I could focus, when I could swipe away all the distractions that truly do get in the way during my busy semesters.

Depression, it seems, doesn’t hold much concern for my hopes and dreams. As it settled in, I was paralyzed and piling on, chastising myself for being lazy even as I know that I was working harder to stay level than I would when the words were flying from my fingertips to the screen.

Early sabbatical was a gray period, inside and out. The view from where I did most of my writing.

The lowest lows are manual labor of the soul and no one is equipped for that work alone. Fortunately, Heather kept checking my negativity. Kept reminding me that on my good days I could be very very good, so the bad ones weren’t just a loss. Kept reminding me that staving off burnout was one of the reasons we’d needed me to have this time so badly.

And then it passed and I was working. Writing. Exercising. Actually sleeping at night. Shoulda known it was too good.

Soon enough, a weird and persistent calf injury sidelined me for most of the spring and early summer, eliminating my ability to do the work on my health I’d wanted to. Which led to more depression. Which led to more missed days of writing.

Writing this here is part of this process for me,

And yet, I kept going. What’s the alternative?

And then the end of my sabbatical rose on the horizon and I was not where I wanted to be on my primary projects. It was bad. But Heather was better.

She pointed to what I had completed. The people I’d helped with their studies and texts. The book I’d edited without expecting the project in the first place. The friendships I’d reengaged.

Life is like that. Never all we want, but maybe all we can give and that should be enough. For ourselves and for everyone else in our lives.

Rejections, an acceptance, and reminders

Check out the full version of my story here.

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

Early in the spring of my sabbatical, I submitted my short story “The Best Thing” to Bull & Cross, a journal I’ve been watching for a while after a couple of my students placed work there. I was struck by the range of stories and the particular care the editor, Dan, takes with them.

Larger, Terry and Butter (the main characters of my story) needed a particular home. My stories tend to run on the quiet side (except the novel I’m at work on, but that’s a different matter). Small moments that connect to the largest parts of our humanity are what interest me.

With that in mind, and like most working writers, I saw “The Best Thing” get passed on by a number of journals. Twelve to be exact. That’s typical, but also it sucks and, like anyone putting their work in front of an audience, I had some moments of doubt as to whether it would get seen for what it is.

Cue Bull & Cross. They got it. Published it with a rather appropriate tweet to promote it (if I do say so myself.

And the reaction I got was really gratifying. The people who read it and reached out got what my characters were going through even as they didn’t like where going through it with them took the piece.

The best kind of discomfort, that. The whole experience was a great reminder that stories aren’t for everyone, but they’re always for someone. Even writing teachers need that lesson retaught from time to time. 

Books — The Irreversible Sun

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

The Irreversible Sun

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, West End Press (2015)

Find this book here. Check out more of Lim’s work here.

Just before I left on sabbatical, my university and department welcomed poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim to campus for our annual lecture series. I was not familiar with her work before the event and, given the pressure of trying to tie up all my loose ends to leave for several months at the end of the term, I didn’t have time to read up before she came to read.

I did, however, purchase her book The Irreversible Sun on the strength of what I heard her read that night and it was the first thing I read after I filed my grades for the fall term and leaned into setting my course for all my projects.

It felt a bit providential, if I’m being honest. Lim’s work in this collection is a meditation on the external environments of Southern California all of us experience if we would but slow down and pay attention to it. If we would care for it more intentionally.

This encouragement to deep observation—an element in every poem throughout the text—landed in my mind at the exact moment I was turning over an essay that required the same level of focus on the peculiarities of California’s climate, particularly the drought culture. I literally stopped mid-stanza while reading her poem “California Sun” and scrawled notes on my essay and her poem before returning and re-reading the following lines multiple times.

“Paradise is thirsty this November.

Seven months without rain, it’s sober,

a drunk without a drink. Still, tourists

come for sun and ocean, list

rare wine in pretty bottles,

pretty girls in bare sandals

and smiles….”

Most of Lim’s work carries this seemingly straightforward delivery of the sublime. It is not ornamented so much as subtly styled toward the objects of her fascination as likely to be found on her morning walks as they are in spaces demarcated as particularly meaningful.

This is the power of quiet poetry. Sometimes, it exerts a force on our preexisting concerns in such a way that it clarifies what reams of explanation and prose cannot. These moments are epiphanous. And for me, the lightning bolt was this:

Thirst and hunger, rest and fatigue, all are imbalanced in the mind of the tourist and the tyrant, both of which are roles we sometimes play without intending to or recognizing that’s what we’re doing. 

Books — Paintings that Look Like Things

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Paintings that Look Like Things

Derek Updegraff, Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2018)

Find the books here and here. Check out Updegraff on his university page here.

Sometimes I read poetry because it is suggested to me, sometimes because I encounter it out in the wild, and sometimes because the author joins the department where I work. Such was the case with Paintings that Look Like Things, a collection by my newest colleague Derek Updegraff.

Reading through the pieces in this book, I was constantly moved by small moments that call the reader’s attention back to the present tense in the face loss, of love, of life, and of the things we long for. These moments are realized, usually, too late for the person at the center of the poems. 

For example, this piece of “Between Pit Stops at Late-night Diners:”

                          “Now in uncertainty,

let’s keep each of our shorter hopes at hand

but not neglect the long ones we have planned” (29).

Or these lines from “On This Loss:”

“He’d pictured some things right when the day came,

but he misremembered the one who’d shoulder

his absence….” (16)

Or this moment in the first of “Four Exeter Book Poems (from the Old English):”

“In carefree conversations we so often claimed

that nothing could divide the two of us

but death alone. Well that has been undone” (41).

What I appreciate in Derek’s work here is his ability to ball up the energy his pieces quietly build and then release it in these stark, clear moments of insight that redirect the reader’s focus from the people they find in the stanzas to their own lives.

In essence, he captures that moment when what we see in the lives of the people around us unexpectedly aligns with something we’d forgotten we needed to remember. This is not an easy response to elicit, and he does it consistently.

“Disruption” of the best kind

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

I dropped my grades the second possible day I could in the middle of December and began my sabbatical with three weeks of not working on anything.

Well, that was the plan anyway…

A little context: I haven’t taken three weeks away from working since before the turn of the century. The myth of the open summers where educators frolic carefree and workless? Sure thing, Boss.

See, I had this plan. Unplug completely for three weeks. Spend the break my wife and kids had in their schedule with them and nothing else pulling me away. Then another week with just myself to recharge a little. Maybe play some video games. Maybe a book for no other reason than I liked the cover.

I jokingly posted this on the first day of sabbatical. Secretly, though, I kinda hoped for a little more of this than the first month provided me.

It was a good plan. Then I pulled the sucker’s card. I opened my email to check on something completely unrelated to work, only to realize I had a deadline I’d forgotten about. For an academic essay I’d pitched months earlier. And had accepted. And then promptly filed in the “I’ll Get To It” file.

About that…the deadline was just a couple weeks away when I opened the email.

So my third week of coasting, the one for myself, became a bit of a mad dash to pull myself together, lay my hands on some sources I needed but didn’t have, and bang out the essay. I haven’t felt that much like the daily journalist I once was in a long, long time.

Fortunately, the topic was a present concern of mine, something I had spent a good deal of time thinking about in the recent past and for the several years before that. So, at the end of the week, I had a good version of what would become “Toward Disruption Creation in Digital Literature Instruction,” a brief exploration of one of the more fanciful flights I’ve taken pedagogically in my almost 20 years as an educator.

You can read about the specifics here, but the gist of it is this:

What if the future of learning is in turning over the majority of control to the students and then consistently disrupting their work—creatively and for their own good, of course—over the length of the term until they make something together for a public audience?

I know, right? It’s the youngest child’s fantasy work environment!

Turns out, though, that my theory seems to have some merit. Also, it’s just a fun class. Don’t take my word for it. Check with my #DigLit crews who likely have something to say about the matter and are more active on the socials that I am. 

I finished up and hit send and then read the fine print. Not only was I writing a piece, but I was part of a truly collective effort to crowd source edit the 11-article journal edition I was going to be a part of.

In specific, I got to be the first-round reader of two of the other pieces. Which, because I’m the type of nerd I am, was fascinating. It was also work I’d not planned on doing during my time away, so it also felt like a bit of an imposition…until I started commenting and receiving comments on my work from two other scholars in the field.

I can honestly say this was the smoothest and most collegial academic editing process I’ve ever been a part of. I benefitted from all of the conversations I had about my article and feel like I was truly able to help the authors I worked with move their pieces toward the expressions of their ideas they wanted them to be. #unicornedits 

So, yeah, I had to “give up” some time on the novel. But for this kind of an experience, I’ll take it. Check out the results here in the full volume of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies.

“I’d say just…write the damn story.”

Author Ryan Gattis and I, back a few years, talking about his book All Involved. We don’t generally use microphones to talk to each other when we get together these days.

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

One of the first things I did on sabbatical was hit up my friend Ryan for some advice on the novel I’m trying to write. Well, that and to get some chorizo he’d been raving about. More on that later.

Early one morning in January, I drove the hour southwest from where I live, hit the 710, and shot across the bridge to San Pedro, a small part of me disappointed that I didn’t get the chance to reproduce the scene in Gone in 60 Seconds when Nic Cage—excuse me, Memphis Raines—jumps a line of cars in unbelievable fashion to take the last stolen car on his list to a guy who’d go on to play Destro in the G.I. Joe movie.  

My mild annoyance was put to rest, however, with the breakfast we got at a diner called Rex’s Café. The food was great, the conversation better.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Ryan is he wrote one of my favorite multi-voiced novels, All Involved. It is the fictional treatment of the King Riots in LA and a masterclass on carving one story from numerous perspectives.

That’s what I asked first: how did he navigate all those voices without them bleeding into and overwhelming each individual story? He paused, moved his napkin a couple inches on the table, and then looked at me. 

“I’d say just…write the damn story. I didn’t plan mine beyond knowing who my characters were. Felt like trying to know more would make the stories harder to get to.”

Ok, so maybe I was projecting my issues onto his process. I’ve been working on this thing going on eight years, so sometimes I feel a little like this:

We talked a little more about the craft of multiple voices, but more helpful was my living a little vicariously through where Ryan was at in his work at the time. One book in the pipeline, and idea for another brewing, some screenplays to write. A soccer match to watch when we got done that morning. Speaking of that coming book, it’s called The System and you should check it out.

It was more than vaguely comforting to see what’s possible, even if it’s not a probable outcome for me. In an odd way, his having numerous projects in the works made me feel like I might—someday—get one of mine out the door.

Oh, and about that chorizo. Yeah, you should make the trip to the ChoriMan’s laboratory kitchen tucked in a residential San Pedro neighborhood. Go buy a pound of the traditional red or the maple habanero or grab one of the burritos they’re selling that day. It is all phenomenal.

When it comes to food, Ryan has yet to steer me wrong. Pretty solid with the writing advice too.

Imaginative Teaching, considerable planning

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

This the eighth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer. Note: Just over two months ago, my co-editors and I submitted the full manuscript of the book described below. It will be out in the spring of 2021.

My sabbatical began, not with writing the fiction that would define the time away, but with two academic projects. For specifics on the first, check out next Wednesday’s post. The larger of the two, however, stretched across the entire time I was away and is still in progress as I write this.

But that is excellent news as I am under contract and co-editing my third collection for Bloomsbury Academic, a new and exciting take on teaching creative writing through and beyond all of the perceived limitations to doing so at the secondary level.

The book is called Imaginative Teaching and puts the ideas of creative writing theorists and secondary teachers in conversation over a long form for, really, the first time. To say I’m excited would be an understatement given I’ve taught at both levels and truly believe in the power of creative writing in inspiring the most important forms of learning we need to do as humans.

To say I was not excited by the back and forth of the proposal process and how often I was balancing it and my attempts to write my novel in the time I’d been given is also very, very true. The outcome—a contract and firm publication schedule—is, of course, what I’d hoped for.

But the amount of revisions and response in the process of working our way from proposal to contract made for some tricky maneuvers on the narrow surface of the time-management balance beam.

Given that this is not my first time through the process, in general and with Bloomsbury, this was not new or surprising. But against the backdrop of my “wide open” sabbatical calendar, it felt so much more restrictive than it had in the past, something so counterintuitive it’s hard to type it without feeling like I’m whining.

But, just as excitement or love can expand to consume the attention of the person experiencing them, so too it is with work regardless of the busyness surrounding it.

And somehow, I feel like that’s an important lesson. There is no such thing as free time when that freedom is contingent on seeing it as such. 

Maybe free time, like meaning, is more a by-product of our choices along the way and less an item we can place on the calendar and access when we arrive at the prescribed time.

Another former student, another first book

This book is gorgeous and nails every one of the characters it centers on the page. You can find it here.

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

Around the time I was finishing up the edits on Black Was Not a Label, I received a cryptic message from Heidi, another student who was in the same Master’s cohort as Kathryn. It went something like this: 

I have some news to tell you soon. It’s very exciting.

Heidi is another of those former students who I worked with both as an undergraduate and as a grad student. She is, also, a walking idea factory with interests in everything from music (check out her EP here) to podcasting (two different going concerns you can sample here and here) to youth and musical theater (look no further than her musical version of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces that’s in the works) to poetry (which she doles out on her socials) to academic writing.

And, of course, there’s the fiction I’ve worked on with her for several years now, culminating in serving as her committee chair for her creative capstone at the end of the Masters process.

That project was a collection of four short stories that showed astonishing breadth without losing connection with each other. The pieces, all set against the backdrop of coming of age in Maui in the early 21st century, ranged from the grittiest of realities to unflinching questions of the what lies just beyond our human understanding of reality on the spiritual plane.

The complexity of these stories is only increased by the fact that all are told by characters who exist in a truly narrow liminal space in Hawaiian culture: the white island resident who isn’t a tourist but will also never be a native of the place. Walking that razor’s edge as a writer—where one wrong step could lead to further erasure or co-opting of the Hawaiian—is a delicate balance and one that a younger writer might, understandably, have struggled with.

Heidi, on the other hand, devoted herself to the work and to rendering full characters who live, grow, and change in the light of all those same cultural pressures. The result was a four-story cycle that went on to be published in each of its parts.

After finishing her degree, she kept working, looking for a place that would give a home to her collection. And then her follow up message: the manuscript won the Heritage Prize: the Great Story Project contest and with it publication. 

Now working under the title of The Sacred Art of Trespassing Barefoot, Heidi’s book is in the hands of an audience who have no idea how challenging and moving and powerful what they’re about to read truly is. Oh, and she’s gearing up to move all the way across the country for the next step in her development, and MFA.

I can’t wait to get my copy signed and talk shop with the author herself next time she’s in town.  

Books — Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

Trent Hergenrader, Bloomsbury Academic (2019)

Find the book here. Check out Hergenrader’s website here. And you can find the books we edited together with our friend Joe here and here.

Few ideas have influenced my creative writing instruction around the concept of setting more than those that have come in conversation with my friend and long-time co-editor Trent. Specifically, he is the number one apologist of the effectiveness of collaborative world building as an element of teaching and nurturing the creative process of writers at all levels.

A little backstory: when we were grad students together, Trent took a huge risk—at least in the eyes of the norm core English department establishment—and tied his critical studies to elements of RPG and video game theory.

Then he convinced the powers-that-be of course assignment to allow him to pilot what I would call a radical departure from the traditional creative writing course set up, rolling out a worldbuilding-based course that led his students creating a sprawling, post-apocalyptic version of Milwaukee replete with rules, characters, context, and guiding world principles from which thousands of stories could be written. 

In short, he did what good teachers do: he made the normal strange and the strange a way back to what his students thought they knew. And, in that class, was the seed that became his book Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers. Having seen this idea develop almost since its inception, it was really fun to tear into it while away on sabbatical.

Part teaching manual, part transmedia universe theory, and part idea generator for creating richer, deeper worlds for stories and campaigns alike, Trent’s book is a practical balance of philosophical notions of how settings operate and pragmatic explorations of how to get the most out of hashing out the rules of an environment shared by a writer and her audience or a group of gamers gathered to play Dungeons & Dragons complete with a worldbuilding card deck.

Bigger, though, he makes the case for how immensely helpful it is to re-conceive preparing to tell new stories in this way:   

“Imagine the collaborative worldbuilding process as the creation of an enormous story-generating machine. In this view, the act of worldbuilding is distinct and separate from conventional storytelling” (6).

And, along with being a helpful guide to opening up the creative process, the text also helps readers consider how the limitations to expressing their own worlds most effectively might lie within their own assumptions.

“Worlds are deceptively complex and we must be aware that our natural inclination is to generalize lived experiences….How we distinguish between worlds, what we identify as the rules of different worlds, and how social forces operate in a given world are all matters of importance” (16).

That’s why I suggest this book to my students; it benefits their art and their character in ways they probably aren’t expecting when they fold back the cover.