Garrett Highley
Creative Writing in First-Year Composition
Overview
The debate over how and why creative writing techniques and methods might be used in first-year composition is a strange one. Almost since the inception of separate creative writing programs in the 1940s, academics in both creative writing and composition have argued for the benefits of including more imaginative or creative work in first-year composition pedagogy. These benefits are obvious: creative projects markedly increase engagement; they offer novel and extremely naturalistic ways to teach practical, transferrable skills; they generally make both the writing and reading of first-year composition projects actually enjoyable for students and instructors. There hasn’t been any serious argument against any of these claims. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any argument articulated at all against the idea of working creative writing approaches into composition pedagogy.
On the contrary, there are decades of consensus that creative nonfiction in particular is a genre historically and structurally tailored to bridge the gap between creative writing and composition pedagogies, especially in first-year instruction. While it is often valued and taught currently for its aesthetic value, creative nonfiction remains the most popular and nakedly effective form of factual, rhetorical writing in our culture, and it could potentially resolve contradictory threads in composition pedagogies itself—specifically, the (seemingly) mutually exclusive threads of expressivist and social-epistemic approaches to teaching writing. Creative nonfiction offers the best example works for reading, as well as extremely effective methods for composing and teaching composition; it is uniquely aware of all the concerns first-year composition aims to teach, and could be an ideal genre for study and practice.
And yet this is all the progress that has been made in seventy years of discussion on how and why to integrate creative writing into first-year composition. In fact, very little beyond these large-scale hypotheses has even been argued. From the first CCCC working groups in the early fifties concluding that imaginative writing could only benefit first-year students, to a haunting article by Jennie Young in 2018, the academics who discuss this issue always arrive at the same uncontested points: creative approaches would be a boon to composition pedagogy, compositionists and creative writers should support one another (and fail to at the peril of both), and the time is now to develop a holistic approach to the production and theorization of student writing. The discussion essentially begins again once every few decades, almost from scratch, and brief flurries of interest follow—in the fifties, the seventies, the nineties, the early 2000’s—but the trend over these cycles reveals growing intradepartmental turf wars, and all the petty academic squabbles and resentments between the compositionist and creative writing camps. Young illustrates this rather starkly, in relating how the simple presence of nonfiction publications and a nonfiction approach to pedagogy essentially denied her a tenure-track position as a compositionist, despite being the most qualified candidate. Essentially, the reasons we don’t work creative writing into the first-year classroom are not theoretical or practical, but political.
Consequently, for an idea whose promise is so universally agreed upon, very little experimentation has been documented. Very little work has been done to develop workable theoretical approaches, curricula, even classroom exercises—and all because we are too busy fighting each other.
Annotated Bibliography
Bourelle, Andrew. “Creative Nonfiction in the Composition Classroom: Rethinking Antithetical Pedagogies.” Journal of Teaching Writing, vol. 27, no. 1, 2012, pp. 37-65.
Bourelle argues that creative nonfiction offers a natural medium through which to bridge two seemingly antithetical approaches in first-year composition: expressivist and social-epistemic pedagogies. The former model, rooted in the idea that we write to learn—and specifically, to learn our “authentic selves”—has been broadly critiqued both for its suspected navel-gazing and its debatable (and alleged) philosophical assumptions about the self and its accessibility. However, creative nonfiction illustrates how critically useful this kind of introspection remains, and how we might use it to help young writers find their voices (if not their souls), as well as to teach them how to use writing as a method to reflect and think critically. Bourelle shows that not only are the claims of the alleged narcissism of creative modes unfounded, creative nonfiction in particular accomplishes all that social-epistemic pedagogues could hope to see out of writing: the kind of socially-aware, author-effacing (or acknowledging) writing that is entirely conscious of its audiences and purposes. Ultimately, Bourelle claims that good creative nonfiction pieces often serve the functions of both pedagogical models simultaneously, and thus illustrate the false dichotomy between them.
The essay doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete activities or assignments, or even course structures that might arise from this approach, focusing instead on the kind of existing literature students might be exposed to in assigned readings. Bourelle also cautions in his closing notes that he isn’t endorsing a conversion of first-year composition into a creative nonfiction workshop; he believes the work of teaching FYC must remain more targeted and more instructor-guided.
Drew, Chris, and David Yost. “Composing Creativity: Further Crossing Composition/Creative Writing Boundaries.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 42, no. 1, 2009, pp. 25–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25674354. Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
As with much of the discussion on the issue of creative writing in the composition classroom, the most pragmatically useful information is typically the oldest. In terms of theory, Drew and Yost identify a trend among the many (many) creative writing students who end up teaching first-year writing: namely, that they sneak creative writing, or at least creative writing styled assignments and techniques into wherever and whenever they can. Drew and Yost offer discussion and analysis of three particularly useful exercises creative writers had introduced to their freshman courses:
Hesse, Douglas. “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 62, no. 1, 2010, pp. 31–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27917883. Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Hesse concerns himself with the theoretical, organizational, and political divides that keep creative writing and composition separate. He writes this as former chair of the CCCC, and a close personal friend of the then-current chair of AWP—organizations that sprang from similar roots at a similar historical moment, but which have diverged as widely as the academic disciplines they represent. Hesse provides an overview of the origin of the historical divide, back in the fifties and sixties, when there was a shining moment when the two fields could have been united; he discusses how creative nonfiction, once residing firmly in the domain of composition (“albeit by default” 37), was ceded to the creative writers; he discusses the petty cultural resentments between creative writers and compositionists which, circa 2010, were already becoming pronounced; he details how interest in imaginative or expressive work had dwindled in composition circles to insignificance by that point. However, he also points out two lines of thinking from early in the discourse that have since been forgotten, but which are worth further consideration:
Young, Jennie. “Creative Writing in the First-Year Writing Classroom: To Colonize or Theorize?” Writing on the Edge, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 59-70. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26808998.
Young’s was the most recent publication I could find, and also the most haunting. The article is built around her own experience being rejected at the very last minute for a tenure-track composition position not for lack of her lack of qualification, but for her creative nonfiction publications, and her general interest in bringing creative writing approaches into composition pedagogy. “[S]ome faculty felt this would be inconsistent, if all composition instructors did not use the same approach, or that Dr. Young’s utilization of creative nonfiction would establish an expectation that all instructors must follow suit. Dr. Young addressed both concerns during her visit, explaining why neither of these would be the case. Following extensive discussion, the faculty vote resulted in 13 against and 9 for recommending Dr. Young…” (61).
Young uses this anecdote to discuss a broader reality: that despite the flurry of discussion by scholars like Bishop and Hesse in the nineties and early 2000s about the utility of creative writing approaches in composition pedagogy, and despite all the calls for departmental unity (or even just alliances between the “producers” of writing against the “interpreters” of literary studies), the departmental borders between the two have only grown more entrenched. But she calls, again, for a “conceptual[ly] holis[tic]” approach to writing pedagogy, to “stop fearing that one writing genre is going to cannibalize or colonize another and instead work toward a cooperative and interdependent theorization of the one genre that already ties them together: creative nonfiction” (68). She frames this in terms of teaching students to be “public intellectuals,” and points to the vast reach of creative nonfiction as a “crossover” genre, consisting of “texts with academic value that are nonetheless accessible and appealing to the general public” (68).
Application to Teaching
If the history of the debate about creative work in the composition classroom teaches us anything, I think it’s that creative approaches are already being utilized in FYC, but surreptitiously. Honestly, I suspect that the mistake Young made was not in how she articulated her pedagogical theories (which is how she framed it), but in that she felt the need to tell the truth at all to an audience so hostile to it. Perhaps creative nonfiction really isn’t the answer.
So, I propose a very fictional classroom exercise, adapted from the roleplaying exercises identified by Drew and Yost. “Tell My Kids I—” could take up to two class sessions, and begins with the casual announcement that Lawrence is about to be obliterated by an ICBM. There are only fifteen minutes of advance warning.
Overview
The debate over how and why creative writing techniques and methods might be used in first-year composition is a strange one. Almost since the inception of separate creative writing programs in the 1940s, academics in both creative writing and composition have argued for the benefits of including more imaginative or creative work in first-year composition pedagogy. These benefits are obvious: creative projects markedly increase engagement; they offer novel and extremely naturalistic ways to teach practical, transferrable skills; they generally make both the writing and reading of first-year composition projects actually enjoyable for students and instructors. There hasn’t been any serious argument against any of these claims. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any argument articulated at all against the idea of working creative writing approaches into composition pedagogy.
On the contrary, there are decades of consensus that creative nonfiction in particular is a genre historically and structurally tailored to bridge the gap between creative writing and composition pedagogies, especially in first-year instruction. While it is often valued and taught currently for its aesthetic value, creative nonfiction remains the most popular and nakedly effective form of factual, rhetorical writing in our culture, and it could potentially resolve contradictory threads in composition pedagogies itself—specifically, the (seemingly) mutually exclusive threads of expressivist and social-epistemic approaches to teaching writing. Creative nonfiction offers the best example works for reading, as well as extremely effective methods for composing and teaching composition; it is uniquely aware of all the concerns first-year composition aims to teach, and could be an ideal genre for study and practice.
And yet this is all the progress that has been made in seventy years of discussion on how and why to integrate creative writing into first-year composition. In fact, very little beyond these large-scale hypotheses has even been argued. From the first CCCC working groups in the early fifties concluding that imaginative writing could only benefit first-year students, to a haunting article by Jennie Young in 2018, the academics who discuss this issue always arrive at the same uncontested points: creative approaches would be a boon to composition pedagogy, compositionists and creative writers should support one another (and fail to at the peril of both), and the time is now to develop a holistic approach to the production and theorization of student writing. The discussion essentially begins again once every few decades, almost from scratch, and brief flurries of interest follow—in the fifties, the seventies, the nineties, the early 2000’s—but the trend over these cycles reveals growing intradepartmental turf wars, and all the petty academic squabbles and resentments between the compositionist and creative writing camps. Young illustrates this rather starkly, in relating how the simple presence of nonfiction publications and a nonfiction approach to pedagogy essentially denied her a tenure-track position as a compositionist, despite being the most qualified candidate. Essentially, the reasons we don’t work creative writing into the first-year classroom are not theoretical or practical, but political.
Consequently, for an idea whose promise is so universally agreed upon, very little experimentation has been documented. Very little work has been done to develop workable theoretical approaches, curricula, even classroom exercises—and all because we are too busy fighting each other.
Annotated Bibliography
Bourelle, Andrew. “Creative Nonfiction in the Composition Classroom: Rethinking Antithetical Pedagogies.” Journal of Teaching Writing, vol. 27, no. 1, 2012, pp. 37-65.
Bourelle argues that creative nonfiction offers a natural medium through which to bridge two seemingly antithetical approaches in first-year composition: expressivist and social-epistemic pedagogies. The former model, rooted in the idea that we write to learn—and specifically, to learn our “authentic selves”—has been broadly critiqued both for its suspected navel-gazing and its debatable (and alleged) philosophical assumptions about the self and its accessibility. However, creative nonfiction illustrates how critically useful this kind of introspection remains, and how we might use it to help young writers find their voices (if not their souls), as well as to teach them how to use writing as a method to reflect and think critically. Bourelle shows that not only are the claims of the alleged narcissism of creative modes unfounded, creative nonfiction in particular accomplishes all that social-epistemic pedagogues could hope to see out of writing: the kind of socially-aware, author-effacing (or acknowledging) writing that is entirely conscious of its audiences and purposes. Ultimately, Bourelle claims that good creative nonfiction pieces often serve the functions of both pedagogical models simultaneously, and thus illustrate the false dichotomy between them.
The essay doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete activities or assignments, or even course structures that might arise from this approach, focusing instead on the kind of existing literature students might be exposed to in assigned readings. Bourelle also cautions in his closing notes that he isn’t endorsing a conversion of first-year composition into a creative nonfiction workshop; he believes the work of teaching FYC must remain more targeted and more instructor-guided.
Drew, Chris, and David Yost. “Composing Creativity: Further Crossing Composition/Creative Writing Boundaries.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 42, no. 1, 2009, pp. 25–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25674354. Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
As with much of the discussion on the issue of creative writing in the composition classroom, the most pragmatically useful information is typically the oldest. In terms of theory, Drew and Yost identify a trend among the many (many) creative writing students who end up teaching first-year writing: namely, that they sneak creative writing, or at least creative writing styled assignments and techniques into wherever and whenever they can. Drew and Yost offer discussion and analysis of three particularly useful exercises creative writers had introduced to their freshman courses:
- Rewriting the Author. By making a mad-lib out of great works of prose and poetry, instructors can get students thinking about diction functionally as well as stylistically, while also taking the mythical “published author” down a peg or two in their estimation. The exercise illustrates how the writing process actually works, especially in revision, and shows that professional writers have all the same struggles they do.
- Roleplaying. Generally, this is when instructors ask students to imitate the style or voice (often parodically) of another author. Drew and Yost describe an active that specifically asks students to write two contrasting voices addressing the same exigence. The creative writing emphasis on voice is extremely useful in learning how to modulate tone, and is often more natural way to foster student attention to audience and genre.
- Show and Tell. This is an adaptation of a tired old creative writing mantra. The instructor gathers vague statements from old student work, and asks students to revise them by adding specific detail and comparing their results with one another. The wildly different ways students imagine what it means when an author describes a “really unlikable guy,” or thinks Ireland is a “wonderful country” (37) help students to understand the importance of specific detail in creating presence in their writing.
Hesse, Douglas. “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 62, no. 1, 2010, pp. 31–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27917883. Accessed 6 Oct. 2022.
Hesse concerns himself with the theoretical, organizational, and political divides that keep creative writing and composition separate. He writes this as former chair of the CCCC, and a close personal friend of the then-current chair of AWP—organizations that sprang from similar roots at a similar historical moment, but which have diverged as widely as the academic disciplines they represent. Hesse provides an overview of the origin of the historical divide, back in the fifties and sixties, when there was a shining moment when the two fields could have been united; he discusses how creative nonfiction, once residing firmly in the domain of composition (“albeit by default” 37), was ceded to the creative writers; he discusses the petty cultural resentments between creative writers and compositionists which, circa 2010, were already becoming pronounced; he details how interest in imaginative or expressive work had dwindled in composition circles to insignificance by that point. However, he also points out two lines of thinking from early in the discourse that have since been forgotten, but which are worth further consideration:
- That “the purpose of teaching creative writing is not to produce professional writers, ‘but to satisfy a human need to speak in a variety of ways’” (38). Essentially, that there is great personal utility in our craft, and that writing can serve important non- or semi-public purposes which the dominant perspectives in composition largely dismiss.
- That writing is an art, and that the study and practice of it can help writers to develop style and delivery in a way similar to music lessons. Hesse explains how and why style (and craft, more generally) fell out as a concern of composition pedagogy, in lieu of a more boilerplate “writing-with content or writing-as-rhetorical-analysis,” which leaves “little intellectual room for writing imagined not as a conversational turn on a particular subject matter but as a move in a Burkean parlor constituted differently” (41). He then distinguishes between what he calls a “Bartholomaen parlor[,] where rhetors are head by developing given topics along approved trajectories,” and an “Elbovian parlor[,] where writers gain the floor by creating interest, through the arts of discourse” (41).
Young, Jennie. “Creative Writing in the First-Year Writing Classroom: To Colonize or Theorize?” Writing on the Edge, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 59-70. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26808998.
Young’s was the most recent publication I could find, and also the most haunting. The article is built around her own experience being rejected at the very last minute for a tenure-track composition position not for lack of her lack of qualification, but for her creative nonfiction publications, and her general interest in bringing creative writing approaches into composition pedagogy. “[S]ome faculty felt this would be inconsistent, if all composition instructors did not use the same approach, or that Dr. Young’s utilization of creative nonfiction would establish an expectation that all instructors must follow suit. Dr. Young addressed both concerns during her visit, explaining why neither of these would be the case. Following extensive discussion, the faculty vote resulted in 13 against and 9 for recommending Dr. Young…” (61).
Young uses this anecdote to discuss a broader reality: that despite the flurry of discussion by scholars like Bishop and Hesse in the nineties and early 2000s about the utility of creative writing approaches in composition pedagogy, and despite all the calls for departmental unity (or even just alliances between the “producers” of writing against the “interpreters” of literary studies), the departmental borders between the two have only grown more entrenched. But she calls, again, for a “conceptual[ly] holis[tic]” approach to writing pedagogy, to “stop fearing that one writing genre is going to cannibalize or colonize another and instead work toward a cooperative and interdependent theorization of the one genre that already ties them together: creative nonfiction” (68). She frames this in terms of teaching students to be “public intellectuals,” and points to the vast reach of creative nonfiction as a “crossover” genre, consisting of “texts with academic value that are nonetheless accessible and appealing to the general public” (68).
Application to Teaching
If the history of the debate about creative work in the composition classroom teaches us anything, I think it’s that creative approaches are already being utilized in FYC, but surreptitiously. Honestly, I suspect that the mistake Young made was not in how she articulated her pedagogical theories (which is how she framed it), but in that she felt the need to tell the truth at all to an audience so hostile to it. Perhaps creative nonfiction really isn’t the answer.
So, I propose a very fictional classroom exercise, adapted from the roleplaying exercises identified by Drew and Yost. “Tell My Kids I—” could take up to two class sessions, and begins with the casual announcement that Lawrence is about to be obliterated by an ICBM. There are only fifteen minutes of advance warning.
- The first step is to brainstorm, as a class, some small set of local stakeholders: parents and children, spouses, government officials (specific city, state, federal officeholders), news reporters, etc. The class should come up with maybe a half-dozen of these personas, and then each student should be randomly assigned one. There should be two to three students with each.
- Have students group up by persona, and brainstorm their potential audiences: parents for children, spouses for spouses, publics for reporters, government agencies for elected officials. Groups should then brainstorm what they would need to say to their audiences, and why (message and purpose).
- When students have figured out their audiences and messages, get them to figure out the appropriate media, circulation, and genre for their messages. Test messages? Emails? Phone calls? Posts to social media platforms? Which ones? Why?
- When appropriate genres and circulations have been determined, students will produce actual texts: videos, voice recordings, official memos, draft Tweets. The production can be assigned either in class—mocking up the actual fifteen minutes to Armageddon—or it can be assigned as homework. Either way, it should be made clear that, given the exigence (impending nuclear strike), production values for the project would understandably be low: videos are going to be roughly shot and unedited, and the various text messages or verbal communications are going to be hurried, harried, and full of errors. The more errors, the more realistic! This will help a first-year class especially early on, in teaching them to prioritize purpose over punctuation and grammar—to illustrate how truly unimportant those can be, in the right context.
- Have the students upload screencaps, recordings, and text documents to Canvas, in order to make a time capsule: the Last Minutes of Lawrence. Share selections from the time capsules of previous classes, and use these as a way to introduce peer critique. Show them similarities and differences in audience, message, and genre selection, as well as in execution. Having just done the assignment themselves (and it being a fairly naturalistic one), they should have plenty of very direct criticism. Tie this back to rhetorical theory: press students to tie their analyses back to effective (and ineffective) uses of ethos, pathos, logos, and the extended rhetorical situation.