Creative Portfolios chapter in The Place and the Writer
Recently, The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy, edited by Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in the Research in Creative Writing Series.
My chapter "Creative Portfolios: Adapting AWP Goals for EFL Creative Writing Courses in Japan" can be found on pages 107-128. In this chapter, I share my creative writing pedagogy shaped by years of classroom experience teaching fiction and poetry writing courses to Japanese students at Yokohama City University.
You can read the Preface and Foreword of The Place and the Writer and the full table of contents via the book's Amazon Look Inside feature. This volume contains fifteen chapters that explore creative writing teaching lore and intersections of language, culture and place; offers ideas for forging unique, localized contexts for creative writing; and presents ways to prioritize students' diverse identities.
I'm so grateful to the editors for encouraging me to submit, and to the creative writing instructors in Japan who responded to my questions about their EFL creative writing classroom pedagogy and suggested additional contacts for my research. And I'm deeply grateful to all of my YCU creative writing students who've shared their work with me over the years.
If you are a creative writing instructor, perhaps you might order a copy of The Place and the Writer for your university or personal bookshelves.
You can read recent issues of the YCU Creative Writing Literary Magazine Footprints, which I reference in my chapter, pictured below, on my blog here (2018, 2019) and here (2020-2021).
Creative writing courses are not yet common in Japanese universities. But I believe that alongside the opportunity to read and study literature, university students in Japan deserve the opportunity to create literature.
Rigorous creative writing courses offer students opportunities to engage in literary craft as innovators and to probe their own identity and relationship to the world. My big hope is that one day all students in Japanese universities will have access to undergraduate and graduate programs in creative writing, in both Japanese and in English.
