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.  

“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.

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.