Creative Writing in Post-Secondary Education

A blend of memoir and scholarly review, this book explores the kinds of thinking creative writing as a distinctly practical subject makes possible within post-secondary education. Taking the idea that creative writing should be grounded in practice, Lisa Martin explores how the nature of the subject gives permission to think specifically, locally, from one's own position, and in a necessarily limited way – without having one's thinking discounted as lacking rigour as a result. Modelling the deep and essential connection between practice and research in the field, this book considers post-secondary creative writing in its three key aspects – artistic practice, pedagogical practice, and practice-led research – in order to articulate the distinctive contributions creative writing makes to what “thinking” means (and whose thinking gets included).

Drawing on Martin's own artistic practice as well as more than a decade of pedagogical experience in creative writing, this book braids together disciplinary history, research-informed autobiographical analysis of artistic practice and pedagogy, and scholarly research in adjacent fields such as creativity studies and educational psychology. Connecting creative writing's central commitment to artistic practice and local, material, embodied thinking with the development of learner-centred pedagogies, Creative Writing in Post-Secondary Education is timely, important and will spark spirited discussion within a debate that has been simmering since the inception of creative writing.