Dianne Donnelly

A reasonably interesting collection of essays surrounding the question posed by the title. It’s unfortunate that the foreword essay is technical and abstruse to the point of being almost incomprehensible (and certainly not a good example of ‘creative writing’, unless the aim is to create the desire to run as quickly as possible in the other direction). For the most part, the essays reflect the personal responses of a number of creative writing teachers less to that question (i.e. ‘Does the Writing Workshop Still Work’) than to the broader issue of where the teaching of creative writing fits within the academic spectrum, and what are the peculiar challenges facing CW pedagogy now and in the immediate future. Although there are contributions from teachers in Australia and the UK as well as the USA, I found the focus (especially in the recurrent references to ‘composition’ and ‘rhetoric’ studies) a little too heavily biased towards the approaches in the latter. This may also have been the reason for the fairly theoretical lit. crit. tone of many of the essays.

Having said that, there are a number of essays that had me reaching for my teaching notebook, and a number of interesting and practical suggestions for ways to work around some of the problems raised. I personally would have liked more of this approach – I come very much from the writer-not-trained-teacher side of the equation, and large amounts of theory did have me yearning for the end of the section. But all in all, an interesting collection of essays, which are various enough in scope and approach to provide something for virtually every kind of creative writing teacher.… (mehr)