Scholarship of Creative Writing Practice : Beyond Craft, Pedagogy, and the Academy

The first study to explore deeply and intimately the complex and multifaceted nature of creative writing practice, The Scholarship of Creative Writing and Practice offers a new route in scholarly inquiry for creative writing studies, probing beyond pedagogical methods (with which most of the field’s scholarship is occupied) to explore the writing life as it is experienced by a wealth of international writer/academics. With academic creative writing programs beginning to adopt a more pragmatic, industry-focused stance, students of writing increasingly need and expect to complete their degrees moderately prepared to monetize the skills they have learned – so there is now more than ever a great responsibility to present studies, methodologies and experience that can inform students and instructors. In response, Sam Meekings and Marshall Moore have pulled together academic investigations from some of the most prominent names in creative writing studies to take stock of the diverse definitions and pluralities of creative practice, to examine how they have carved out a ‘writing life’, what work habits they have adopted to achieve this, how these practitioners work as creatives both within and outside of the academy and to put forward strategies for a viable writing life. Offering intelligent, philosophical, pragmatic and actionable methods for robust writing practice, this book provides a multi-national perspective on the various aspects of practice and process. Essays explore what writing practice means for individuals and how this can be modeled for students; how the mythic nature of creativity can be channeled though practical working habits; practice through the lenses of social responsibility, sensitivity, empathy and imagination; writing during times of duress and the barriers writers encounter in their craft; the demand of author platforms; the role of the creative writing academic/writer; and the process of learning from published and practicing authors. Wide-ranging in its investigations and generous in insight, The Scholarship of Creative Writing and Practice presents creative, imaginative and transdisciplinary approaches to this under-researched area.

Marshall Moore is Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication at Falmouth University, UK. He is the author of several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (2018). With Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong (2015). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University, UK, and his current research focuses on the disconnects between the publishing industry and the academy, and on the mythology and lore that surround creative practice and pedagogy.

Sam Meekings is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is the author of Under Fishbone Clouds (2011, called 'a poetic evocation of the country and its people' by the New York Times), The Book of Crows (2012), and The Afterlives of Dr Gachet (2018). He has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University, UK, and has taught writing at NYU (Global Campus) and the University of Chichester, UK. He researches issues of identity in grief narratives, and the practices and processes of digital storytelling.