Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing

Craft lives inside the artist, and it operates in the mind, not in standards or techniques. Creative writers navigate thresholds in consciousness as they develop their arts practice. Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing explores what it is to be an artist as it traces radical, feminist, and culturally embedded traditions in craft. The new term "craft consciousness" identifies the nexus from which writers explore making processes and practitioner knowledge. Writers, as with all artists, create and reimagine themselves anew, and it is in this perpetual state of becoming that they find ways to enlarge their sense of artistry through an exploration of forms, processes, and mediums beyond the written word. For writers, this book initiates a reexamination of the mission of creative writing through disrupting patriarchal, racist, colonialist, ableist, and capitalist associations with dominant craft. Drawing from twenty-five interviews with living artists outside of writing and in a host of fields from conceptual art to leatherwork and dance, the book shines a light on how the processes associated with craft are embodied. Craft is an internalized matrix; it need not be commodified for the marketplace or codified in the standards necessitated by institutions of higher education. By redesigning writing workshops and MFA/PhD programs through craft consciousness, new potentials and collaborations emerge, and it becomes more conceivable to imagine dynamic, inclusive relationships between writers, scientists, and other artists.

Ben Ristow is an Associate Professor in Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, USA. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in BOMB, AMBIT, Indiana Review, Southwest Review, Gray's Sporting Journal and has been noted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and podcasted for Fiction for Driving Across America (BOMB).

Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, Australia. She was the inaugural director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, and remains a core member of that Centre.

Her main research interest is the relationship between what Pierre Bourdieu termed 'the field of cultural production'-the broad sphere of creative practice-and the social domain, including the political and sociocultural, the practical and the economic, the local and the global. Her current major projects investigate aspects of creativity, and creative production, and the creative producer, and she has been supported in this by several ARC Discovery projects, the most recent of which is So what do you do? Graduates in the Creative and Cultural Industries (DP160101440).

Academics working in the creative field typically have their own creative practice, and Jen's works include lyric and prose poetry, short fictions, and artist books. She is the holder of the inaugural ACT Poet of the Year Award, as well as many other literary awards. She is also the ACT editor for the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry mini-anthologies (2015–2017), chair of the NSW Premier's Literary Award (Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry), and co-editor for the Australasian Association of Writing Program's literary journal, Meniscus.

Jen's recent works include the scholarly volumes Researching Creative Writing (2015), Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; 2016); and the Oxford University Press bibliography entry for Pierre Bourdieu (2017). Her recent volumes of poetry include Stolen Stories, Borrowed Lines (2015), Sentences from the Archive (2016), and Moving Targets (2018). She produced all the photographs for a collaborative poetry/photography volume, with Paul Hetherington: Watching the World (2015). With Paul Hetherington, she is also editor of the bilingual (Chinese/Australian) anthology of poetry, Open Windows: Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016); and of the academic journal Axon: Creative Explorations.

Julienne van Loon is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Melbourne University, Australia and Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include feminist literary practice, contemporary narrative fiction and literary value. Publications include The Thinking Woman (2020), Harmless (2014), Beneath the Bloodwood Tree (2008), and Road Story (2005). She is managing editor at TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, see https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/

Bonnie Sunstein is professor of English and education at the University of Iowa, USA, where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Writing in English and Program Chair in English Education. She teaches courses in research, non-fiction writing, American folklore, and English education. She has over thirty years of teaching secondary and college English in New England, where she continues to teach in the summers, at the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University's Martha's Vineyard Institute on Writing and Teaching.