Journal Article

Cultivating Sustainable Creative Writing Practice

Heffers, Audrey

2024

Overview

[...]bell hooks argues that students want us to see them as whole human beings with complex lives and experiences rather than simply as seekers after compartmentalized bits of knowledge (15). In light of the changes that I was making in the composition classroom, I inevitably began to wonder what creative writing habits are fostered by workshops. In \"Embodied Ways of Knowing, Pedagogies, and Social Justice\" Wilcox writes that \"By conveniently decoupling students' minds and bodies in a Descartian [sic] manner even in a lively discussion-it is the thoughts that count; the bodies that think and utter these thoughts are irrelevant-we reproduce the very system of power that we claim to critique\" (107). Rest is too often unacknowledged in the design of a semester, and, even when acknowledged in theory, the practical application can fall short due to explicit or implicit constraints imposed at systemic and institutional levels. hooks was a proponent of acknowledging how, in the classroom, we can be \"striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world\" (15). [...]schedules can be rigid and work against individual intuition.

• Publisher: College English Association, Mid-Atlantic Group
• Subject: Classrooms / Creative writing / Disability / Embodiment / Learning / Pedagogy / Student writing / Teaching / Workshops / Writers / Writing instruction