February 19, 2016
Trudy Lewis is the author of the novels The Empire Rolls (Moon City Press) and Private Correspondences (Tri/Quarterly/Northwestern University Press) in addition to the short story collection The Bones of Garbo (The Ohio State University Press). Her short stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, Cimarron Review, Cold Mountain Review, Meridian, New England Review, New Stories from the ...
February 12, 2016
This is a continuation of last week's Part 1 post of "'Pure Craft' Is a Lie." The series continues in Part 3 and Part 4.
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Some of you may be thinking, fine, what’s wrong with teaching student writers to write using cultural norms? Why shouldn’t we teach writers to reach a “wide” “mainstream” audience? And if people want to experiment, then they should know what they’re experimenting “against.” ...
February 07, 2016
This is the second of a series of guest posts on teaching creative writing. A while ago I organized a series of posts on race and the creative writing workshop at Gulf Coast. In my essay, "The Reader vs. POC," I argued for a serious and more direct consideration of who "the reader" is in workshop. I started from the "gag rule" where the writer stays silent while everyone else talks about her work, quoting author and ...
February 05, 2016
This is the first post in this series, "'Pure Craft' Is a Lie" continuing in Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Some alternate titles for this post:
The MFA Story
Craft as Colonization
Craft vs POC
Why Writers of Color Don't Write Pure Craft Essays
A Lot of Craft, A Lot of Ideas
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Just before the beginning of this semester, writer (and friend) Christine Hyung-Oak Lee was asking for craft essays ...
