The Radical Future of Teaching Creative Writing
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G. Harper
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Abstract
The migration of readership from the paper page to the e-page forces teachers of writing to address major changes in publishing and the kinds of outputs writing students produce. Stephanie Vanderslice notes that with web 2.0 'the terrain shifted' for creative writing teachers and admits that, like many teachers, she was tempted 'to hide from this new technology' (Vanderslice, 2013: 138). Graeme Harper observes 'the impact of contemporary digital technologies' on writing and publishing, especially how- using the internet - writers now publish and distribute their own work (cutting out traditional publishers) and talk directly with their audiences. Harper suggests that the 'role universities play in supporting and developing creative writing needs to be considered in light of this 21st century evolution' (Harper, 2012: 22). While forward-thinking individual academics note the changes and ask questions about them, university creative writing programs have been slow to reflect, or even recognize, this evolution. Discourse at departmental levels has largely avoided questions like: 'With the prospect of paper publishing becoming a thing of the past, what writing processes should we teach?'; 'What will everyone be reading in 10 or 20 years' time, and what will publishers be looking for?'; and 'What do our students need to know now in order to make a living in the future?' Writing for hypermedia has been thought of as someone else's business - belonging to the IT and Communications people, or the New Media Arts people. Creative Writing, and the English departments it is often housed in, need urgently to address this situation.
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Creative Writing and Education
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© 2015 Multilingual Matters. This is the author-manuscript version of this paper. It is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the publisher’s website for further information
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Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting)