Creative Writing Scholars On The Publishing Trade

In Creative Writing Scholars on the Publishing Trade: Practice, Praxis, Print, Sam Meekings and Marshall Moore, along with prominent scholar-practitioners, undertake a critical examination of the intersection of creative writing scholarship and the publishing industry. Recent years have seen dramatic shifts within the publishing industry as well as rapid evolution and development in academic creative writing programs. This book addresses all of these core areas and transformations, such as the pros and cons of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, issues of diversity and representation within the publishing industry, digital transformations, and possible career pathways for writing students. It is crucial for creative writing pedagogy to deal with the issues raised by the sudden changes within the industry and this book will be of interest to creative writing students and practitioners as well as publishing students and professionals.

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.

Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and the insights it can provide into the writing process. Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Often associated with psychological disorders, it can also affect healthy people at times of stress. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, the book goes on to argue that many well-known literary texts, including Camus’s The Outsider and Sartre’s Nausea, evoke a similar psychological state. It shows how a concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists from widely different traditions, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it maintains that creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from a study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing. Given this knowledge, the controversial writing teacher’s maxim show, don’t tell, so often misapplied or misunderstood, can be repurposed as a practical instruction for taking students’ writing to a new level of sophistication and wisdom.

Publishing is currently going through dramatic changes, from globalisation to the digital revolution. A whole culture of events, practices and processes has emerged centred around books and writing, which means that scholars of publishing need to understand it as a social and cultural practice as much as it is a business. This book explores the culture, practice and business of book production, distribution, publication and reception. It discusses topics as diverse as emerging publishing models, book making, writers’ festivals, fan communities, celebrity authors, new publishing technologies, self-publishing, book design and the role of class, race, gender and sexuality in publishing or book culture. This volume will be of interest to those in the disciplines of publishing studies, creative writing, English literature, cultural studies and cultural industries.

Digital Storytelling and Ethics: Collaborative Creation and Facilitation provides a method for analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive, creative storymaking space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through a new media lens, Amanda Hill situates the digital storytelling genre and writing practice as a co-creative media process created between writers, storytellers, educators/facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and discusses the inter-relationships within the collaborative writing workshop as well as in those found in the dissemination of the final digital stories. Digital Storytelling and Ethics provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling writing spaces and makes use of diverse international case studies as examples. Hill shows that writing educators/facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process. This will ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in witnessing guide the storytelling process and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond to the world. This innovative book is an essential read for collaborative digital writers and facilitators.

When violence breaks out at the stands of far-right publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Beatrice Deft is provoked into action. An alienated Australian high school teacher who finds herself at the centre of the global book industry, Beatrice encounters a cast of characters including the very hot Caspian Schorle (German police officer), Kurt Weidenfeld (left-wing German publisher), and White Storm (a neo-Nazi publishing organisation). Such is the premise of The Frankfurt Kabuff, a comic erotic thriller about the publishing industry originally self-published under the pseudonym Blaire Squiscoll. With The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition, Blaire Squiscoll is revealed as the pen name of Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, who created the novella in the midst of fieldwork at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Published for the first time as a full critical edition, this experimental, playful work combines critical and creative modes for new perspectives on the publishing industry and creative economies. The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition enriches the novella with an introduction, annotated text, 15 essays by leading scholars and practitioners, and additional creative assemblages. This highly unusual research project offers insights for students, academics and publishers alike.

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace brings to light the relationship between writers in Canada and the marketplace within which their work circulates. Through a series of conversations with both established and younger writers from across the country, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli investigate how writers perceive their relationship to the cultural economy—and what that economy means for their creative processes. The interviews in Producing Canadian Literature focus, in particular, on how writers interact with the cultural institutions and bodies that surround them. Conversations pursue the impacts of arts funding on writers; show how agents, editors, and publishers affect writers’ works; examine the process of actually selling a book, both in Canada and abroad; and contemplate what literary awards mean to writers. Dialogues with Christian Bök, George Elliott Clarke, Daniel Heath Justice, Larissa Lai, Stephen Henighan, Roy Miki, Erín Moure, Ashok Mathur, Lee Maracle, Jane Urquhart, and Aritha van Herk testify to the broad range of experience that writers in Canada have when it comes to the conditions in which their work is produced. Original in its desire to directly explore the specific circumstances in which writers work—and how those conditions affect their writing itself—Producing Canadian Literature will be of interest to scholars, students, aspiring writers, and readers who have followed these authors and want to know more about how their books come into being.

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.