Teaching Writing Creatively

by David Starkey

Teaching Writing Creatively represents a challenge to conventional notions of genre. It seeks to break down the artificial, antiquated barriers between "creative" and "academic" writing, making the writing classroom experience a more imaginative one. Teaching Writing Creatively features many of the most respected names in composition-instructors with long, successful histories of providing teachers with functional yet inventive methods of teaching writing. The collection begins with articles that assert that all good writing must be, in some important sense, "creative." These contributors offer accounts of the transformation of their composition classrooms; essays that demonstrate that good student writing is only marginally about genre; and a critique of the creative writing workshop as a model for the composition class. Part II offers a variety of ways to approach the teaching of writing as a creative endeavor. It includes articles on helping students better understand their own writing processes and suggestions on alternative composing strategies and their classroom applications. The contributors to the final section offer a variety of new approaches to creative writing that can be successfully applied to expository writing courses as well. Student-centered and process-oriented, Teaching Writing Creatively is a book writing instructors will find immediately useful-particularly composition instructors who feel hemmed in by the conventional expectations of writing courses and creative writing instructors looking to take advantage of the latest innovations in composition studies.

189 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 1998

About the author

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David Starkey directs the creative writing program at Santa Barbara City College.
Among his poetry collections are Starkey's Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press's Spring 2000 chapbook contest. A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel will be published by the Canadian press Biblioasis next year.
In addition, over the past twenty years he has published more than 400 poems in literary journals such as American Scholar, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutbank, Faultline, Greensboro Review, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Nebraska Review, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, Texas Review, and Wormwood Review. He has also written two textbooks: Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008) and Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (McGraw-Hill, 1999). With Paul Willis, he co-edited In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (Iowa, 2005), and he is the editor of Living Blue in the Red States (Nebraska, 2007). Keywords in Creative Writing, which he co-authored with the late Wendy Bishop, was published in 2006 by Utah State University Press.