Teaching Creative Writing - December
Can you teach creative writing? Theory and practice of the creative writing workshop
Julia Bell, Philip Langeskov and Hirsh Sawhney
Thursday 3 December
14:30 - 16:00 | Microsoft Teams
Going ‘behind the scenes’ of the mythical centre of creative writing in the academy: the writing workshop. How does it work? Does it work? What are its assumptions? What are the challenges to disciplinary orthodoxy? What are different writers’ teaching approaches and experiences?
Julia Bell is a writer and Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is the Course Director of the MA in Creative Writing.
Her recent creative work includes poetry, lyric essays and short stories published in the Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Mal Journal, Comma Press, and recorded for the BBC.
She has also published three novels with Macmillan in the UK (Simon & Schuster in the US) and is the co-editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan) updated and re-issued in 2019.
Philip Langeskov is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UEA, where he co-convenes the MA Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) and teaches at all levels of the curriculum from first year undergraduates to PhD supervision. His fiction has been broadcast on the BBC and appeared in Five Dials, The Ninth Letter, The Warwick Review, Unthology, and Best British Short Stories 2011 and 2014. His first book, Barcelona, was published by Daunt Books in 2013.
Hirsh Sawhney is the author of a novel, South Haven, which was a 2016 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick and nominated for the DSC Prize. He is the editor of Delhi Noir, a critically-acclaimed anthology of original fiction. His writing has appeared in The TLS, The Guardian, Harvard Review, and The New York Times Book Review. He teaches at Wesleyan University.
Series Overview
Creative writers teach in schools, universities and the community, on retreats, in theatres and in workshops. Teaching is often a key part of a writer’s career, and there are rich possibilities creative arts education across a huge range of contexts. But how do you teach creative writing? Can you? This series offers anyone considering teaching creative writing as part of their career development the opportunity to look in detail at the theory and practice of creative writing pedagogy in a variety of institutional and community settings.
The series will address the historical principles and contemporary critiques of creative writing pedagogy, and how these are responding to wider institutional and societal developments. It will consider in detail the theory and practice of employing these pedagogical skills both within and outside higher education. Attendees will be invited to reflect on future possibilities and challenges for the development of creative writing teaching, enabling a deeper awareness and knowledge of creative writing as a subject of study, a future career, and a creative practice.
Students are not expected to attend all the sessions, but the series has been designed to allow for an arc of learning from theoretical principles to practical engagement.
The sessions will take place online via Microsoft Teams, once a month for the 2020/21 academic year.