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Event Details
Special Issues Editor: Kathi Inman Berens
Theme: Creative Making as Creative Writing
Historically, the phrase “creative writing” has stood for writing closely aligned with printed literature. However, digital technologies have caused us to rethink the relationship between author, medium, story, and audience. The transformed media landscape has also meant that we’ve needed to expand notions of what types of activities make one a “writer” and what constitutes “literature.”
This special issue on “Creative Making” seeks scholarly essays and statements of creative practice that tackle questions of “creativity” and “making” in the context of creative writing. It considers questions of craft, pedagogy, embodiment, and experience.
What practices fall under the umbrella of “creative writing” in the 21st century? How does the experience of “making” creative writing influence how we understand literature today?
What about the work of digital circulation of creative expression? Are people who repost memes “writing” because they’re making creative statements? Is there a threshold for experiential creation that demarcates active “writing” from lurking, reading and “liking” in digital environments?
Creative writers should feel at liberty to experiment with the form of an artist’s statement. It could be
- Text only
- Multimodal
- Collaborative or single-authored
- A collection of student work (we have instructions for securing permission)
- A publisher’s mission. What is “publication” in the era of always-on micropublishing in social media?
The goal is to connect one’s creative praxis with the study of creative writing.
A non-exhaustive list of possible scholarly subjects includes:
- Analog creative making: face-to-face workshops, zines, letterpress, other forms
- Creative making and service learning. Example: “Writing in the Community,” a course created by Stephanie Bower and John Murray.
- Creative making and the origins of creative writing as experiential (c.f. Elbow 1998, Writing Without Teachers; Bishop 1990, Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing).
- Creative making in required writing courses
- Creative making as cultural critique
- Student-run journals or reading series as creative making
- Digital literary exhibition or curation as creative making
- Creative making and writing with disabilities: drugs, therapies, adaptive strategies
- Game mods as creative writing
- Fan world building as creative writing
- Social media as site and occasion of creative writing
Submission directions
Abstracts are due July 15, 2018 by 11:59 PM Pacific time. Please submit 300 words for scholarly articles (citing any works mentioned) and 150-200 words for statements of creative practice.
Click “Submit Article” in left navigation panel on the Journal of Creative Writing Studies website: http://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/
Indicate SPECIAL ISSUES above your article or abstract title.
Be sure to remove identifying information: we conduct double-blind review.
If your statement of creative practice reveals your identity (by directing reviewers to a website that reveals your name, for example), understand that review will not, in that case, be double-blind. It’s not always possible for artists to remove identity markers from their digital work.
Completed work -- due November 1, 2018
Questions? Contact Kathi Inman Berens: kberens [at] pdx [dottt] edu
