Serious Daring Now Available
Serious Daring: Creative Writing in Four Genres is now available for course adoption from Oxford University Press.
It's been a rewarding three-year journey as I have worked with the editors at Oxford University Press to create a new introductory Creative Writing textbook to serve a wider range of online and face-to-face teaching and learning situations without losing the key focus on craft elements that has served the workshop well for so many years.
A few issues we considered:
* How to demonstrate the rigor of Creative Writing both as a field of academic study and as a way of life and thinking.
* How to make the structure of the book flexible for the variety of ways instructors like to structure their courses.
* New demands for online teaching where detailed explanations need to be provided textually rather than through lecture and discussion.
* The range of class sizes that Creative Writing students and instructors now encounter, and the ways in which we can prodcutively add to our pedagogical methods within and outside of the workshop.
And, of course, in terms of the book's reading selections:
* Representation across gender, race, ability categories, religions, and nationalities.
* A sampling of various genres and references to numerous other authors that students might want to track down on their own.
* Attention to various stylistic modes and time periods (from a few classic modernist masters to language poets to cutting-edge younger authors).
This blog will be updated with thoughts, ideas, links, and materials that will be helpful to both instructors and students of Creative Writing.
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