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The creative writing learning community webpage.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This article describes a Creative Writing Learning Community Webpage. This Learning Community comprises components addressing writing as process and writing as profession. A unifying component, the Reader Response Forum, addresses audience awareness and analysis. This interdisciplinary webpage thus spans composition, literature, and creative writing.

Background

North Georgia College & State University currently offers one creative writing course in its professional writing and publication concentration, a course typically offered once every other year. When offered, this writing intensive course usually enrolls 28-30 students and takes its place alongside the three other courses each instructor here is required to teach per semester. These include two survey courses that each enrolls up to 40 students and usually one upper-level literature course, enrolling between 15-30 students.

This demanding schedule, as well as the possible inconsistency of the course's being offered, keeps my classroom creative writing instruction to introductory workshop levels of prosody and narrative and so can prevent my helping, in a sustained way, those students who want to develop their writing beyond the introductory level. The AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs distinguishes undergraduate from graduate creative writing course workshops, stating, "Undergraduate workshops, especially at the introductory level, require students to work in various forms, styles, modes, and genres" (349). These course demands can require structured workshops, sometimes preventing more flexible workshops that build student confidence in their individual voices, their abilities to analyze audience, and the knowledge of (creative) writing as process. My course's classroom workshops require student feedback on works in progress so that students begin to learn the (creative) writing process of draft and revision. Additionally, my course teaches students the constituent elements of this type of writing: plot, character, setting, figurative language, and theme. Students in literature courses learn to identify these elements, to analyze their effective use in literature. Developing such critical and analytical skills also helps student writers to consider the generic pressures on these constituent elements, how plot reconfigures in narrative poetry, how character becomes action in drama, how setting evolves meaning in story.

This course teaches students themselves consciously to use these elements to achieve deliberate ends in terms of theme, character, event, or story. For example, one course assignment asks students to write a character description intending a specific reader response to this character; such responses could be disgust, horror, fear, or respect. Fulfilling this assignment requires students to select concrete descriptors that elicit their intended response, to select action and speech patterns that do the same, thus composing a piece of related elements that together create the character the writer envisages. If the reader does not relate these elements in the way that the writer hopes, however, then the writer most probably will need to revise the piece by selecting more focused details, more telling actions, more speaking words. Reactive reader feedback makes such conscious revision possible.

Creative Writing Learning Communities

Creative writing workshops elicit such reactive reader feedback. Among the many functions of creative writing workshops is creating a community of learners to support the writing activities of student writers. Such a learning community supports what can generally be a solitary task, what Warren Wilson College's MFA program description states as "the solitude and life patterns that are necessary for creative work" (AWP Official Guide 213). Low-residency programs, such as Warren Wilson College's, give student writers the opportunity to build such learning communities and networks; similarly, national and local annual, monthly and even weekly writing workshops as well as writers conferences and festivals provide such opportunities to student writers and to life long learners of creative writing.

Added to these resources for inspiration and exchange are a fast-growing number of online creative writing webpages, such as One of us, a creative writing webpage with links to a collection of individual writers' poetry and stories as well...

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