Translingual Creative Writing Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy : Daoism and Decentering Monolingual Workshops

In a challenge to monolingual, Anglophone dominated creative writing workshops, this book explores why and how students’ multilingual backgrounds and lack of fluency with the English language can emerge as assets rather than impediments to artistry and creativity. Grounded in the Chinese tradition of Daoism as an ongoing discourse, this exploration uses rigorous academic readings of the philosophical text, the Zhuangzi, as an analytical framework and takes a translingual approach to writing where translation and composition intersect, inscribing one language upon another within a single text. With concepts that resist expression such as inspiration, uncertainty, non-knowing, spontaneity, unity, forgetting the self, and the perfection behind the imperfection of language, Jennifer Quist demonstrates how Daoism’s theories and metalanguage can re-imagine creative writing education whilst de-naturalizing the authority of English and Euro-American literary traditions. With analytical lenses derived from East Asia given context through translations of Chinese educators’ primary accounts of the history and theory of postsecondary creative writing education in 21st-century China, Quist develops a method for examining the practices of exemplary translingual writers from China, Japan, and their diasporas. Featuring translingual writing prompts and practices for individual or classroom use by students at all levels of multilingualism, Translingual Creative Writing Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy opens up the current workshop model and discloses the possibilities of linguistic transcendence for instructors and students. With writing strategies based in cross-cultural collaboration and balanced with de-Anglicization of creative writing pedagogy, this book calls to rework the structures, methods, and metaphors of the workshop and presents ideas for more collaborative, collective, equitable, diverse, and inclusive programs.

Jennifer Quist teaches in the Department of English at the University of Alberta, Canada. Alongside her critical publications, she writers fiction, including three novels; her debut novel was long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award.

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.