H.06: Getting Creative with History, Spaces, and Programmatic Design
Marriott, Grand Ballroom D, Level Two
March 20, 2015
Phil Sandick
Chair: Jada Augustine, California State University, Northridge
Speakers:
Jessica Labbe, Guilford Technical Community College, Jamestown, NC, “Engaging the
Muse: The Power of Creative Writing in Unexpected Places”
Ben Ristow, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Ithaca, NY, “A Line of Print, a Stroke
of Paint: A Visual Rhetorical Analysis of Creative Writing Programs”
Phil Sandick, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, “Lore 2.0: Creative Writing
Pedagogy as History”
Outline for “Lore 2.0: Creative Writing Lore as a Form of History”
- Today I’m going to be discussing creative writing lore. I’m going to be talking
about:
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our treatment of lore in the classroom
our attitude toward lore as theorists
lore in the framework of history and historiography
- Recasting lore as: the recoverable fragments of a mostly unrecoverable history of
writing production
- Hesse: “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” CCC 62.1 (Sept.
2010)
•
•
Calls for “keeping more open borders” between creative writing and
composition
“For composition this might mean recuperating new interest in writerly
activities and processes.
- Where do we locate material that documents writerly activities and processes?
1. The archive of writers on writing
2. “Teacher lore”
Karen Gentry critiquing the bias against genre in the workshop: “No talking
squirrels…”
Mary Oliver: “Everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school”
- North definition of lore:
The “accumulated body of traditions, practices, and beliefs” that influence “how
writing is done, learned, and taught.”
- Suspicions of “teacher lore”
1. contradictory
2. conservative and anti-progressive
3. repeats
4. not scientific
5. no system of revision
- Pedagogy and scholarship is lore-based if it does not “relate theories of writing to
theories of teaching” (Ritter and Vanderslice, Can it Really Be Taught?)
- Where do we stand today with respect to teacher lore?
- Creative Writing myths
1. mine “creative writing myths” and “personal anecdote” in order to “ask teachers
to reconsider…how student creative writers learn to write.” (Ritter and Vanderslice)
2. “Siegel sets up the familiar dichotomy between the real professor of literature nad
fake professor of creative writing who masquerades as an academic”—this leads to
a reinforcement of “unteachability” and “reinscribes” creative writing teaching “as a
romantic process that exists outside the boundaries of the classroom”
3. “Behind our collective pedagogies as teachers of creative writing lies a collective
history of learning fueled by lore; to ignore this history and its deceptively simple
construction does a great disservice to the field.”
- Proposing a turn to philosophy of history and historiography in creative writing
studies
- Lore not only as fuel, but as a fundamentally historical entity
- Lore as the fragments that remain from a largely unrecoverable process
- Lore helps us imagine the unrecoverable processes of composition by offering us
informative fragments (anecdotes, myths, conventional wisdom, bits of advice)
- Kill your darlings” institutionally re-inscribed, attains mythic status, been deployed
in varieties of ways. We might trace the historicity of that phrase….back to Arthur
Quiller-Couch rather than Stein, Faulkner, Ginsberg
- Hayden White
historical emplotment
metanarratives
self-reflexivity
- Ron Carlson Writes a Story
Lore as fuel for invention and revision
Merges history with creative writing lore
Tries to recover as much detail about the process of writing a short story as
possible
Enacting the process of historical recovery
Not a complete history: but a document of what is recoverable
- Hemingway’s iceberg theory
As a metaphor: each unit of lore points toward an unrecoverable history
All the material below the waterline is that which is not able to be recollected
- I’m hesitant to jettison anything from the house of lore
- Lore 2.0
Conscious acceptance and resistance
Student agency and educational narratives
Resonances to web 2.0
- from Ron Carlson Writes a Story
“I’ve also become convinced that a writer’s confidence in his or her process is as
important as any accumulated craft dexterity or writing ‘skill.’”
- Lore as potential source of this confidence rather than as confidence trick
- I encourage teachers and scholars in creative writing studies to continue mining
the archive of writers on writing with this new framework in mind.
List of Works Cited
Carlson, Ron. Ron Carlson Writes a Story. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 2007. Print.
Drew, Chris, et al. Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative
Writing Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.
Hesse, Douglas. “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies.” CCC 62.1
(September 2010): 31-52.
Mayers, Tim. "(Re)Writing Craft." CCC 51.1 (September 1999): 82-89.
---. (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English
Studies. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2005. Print.
McFarland, Ron. “An Apologia for Creative Writing.” College English 55 (1993):
28–45.
Moxley, Joseph. Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana: NCTE,
1989.
Myers, D. G. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice, 1996.
North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging
Field. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1987.
Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
Ritter, Kelly. “Ethos Interrupted: Diffusing "Star" Pedagogy in Creative Writing
Programs.” College English, 69.3 (January 2007): 283-292.
Ritter, Kelly and Stephanie Vanderslice eds. Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore
in Creative Writing Pedagogy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann,
2007. Print.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins U P, 1987. Print.
---. Tropics of Discourse : Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P,
1978. Print.