Authorities Speak

In the afterword of Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, Graeme Harper writes, "Authority in higher learning is only possible if there is meeting of purpose, a coming together of like minds, a communication between points of intuition, and a moment in which to share all these" (206). If Harper is right, then the moment for creative writing pedagogy's authority may finally be here: many young creative writing teachers see pedagogy on a par with literary production, creative writers clearly want more authority for their discipline in the academy, and as the discipline continues its institutional expansion—while the job market grows ever more competitive—the academic conversation on teaching is expanding and becoming more nuanced.

Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, edited by Anna Leahy, serves as a fine example of this expanding, improving conversation on the teaching of creative writing. In just over two hundred pages, seventeen creative writing teachers weigh in on subjects from the familiar (portfolio systems, self-obsessed students, and low expectations) to the exotic (for instance, using myth to guide a workshop and teaching what you do not know as a pedagogical strategy). If one is looking for a comprehensive, unified pedagogy that separates creative writing's thinking on authority from that of other disciplines, this is not the book. But the "meeting of purpose" in these pages comes from a commitment to students in the form of serious discussion; there is intuitive, original thinking in just about every essay. The collection initiates an important conversation about the role of authority in the creative writing classroom. Overall, Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom is generative, ranging, and substantial. It is a book I wish I had read before I taught my first creative writing workshop.

The Essays

Many essays in Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom address gender issues, and, in these essays, perhaps the primary concern is how the gendered body, in the gendered creative writing classroom, achieves or abdicates authority. Leahy is a contributor as well as editor, and in her essay "Who Cares—and How: The Value and Cost of Nurturing," she argues convincingly that the creative writing classroom is a gendered space. She writes, "Creative writing itself is deemed feminine in relation to literary studies or literary theory and based on notions of creativity as a right-brain, intuitive, spontaneous, emotional process. . . . The field of creative writing, creative writers themselves, and the workshop classroom are marked as feminine, regardless of the gender of the instructor" (15). She backs these claims with sound evidence and explores some student assumptions about this gendered space—for instance, that classes will be conversational and not so critical, that students will be nurtured rather than challenged, and that there will be a high degree of interpersonal interaction in and out of class. Though ambivalent at times about student expectations for nurturing, Leahy concludes that nurturing has value and she must "contextualize caring within professionalism . . . [and] define nurturing as authority" (24). Likewise, Mary Swander tries to find a way to nurture while maintaining her authority as a woman in "Duck, Duck, Turkey: Using Encouragement to Structure Workshop Assignments." Swander offers some good suggestions for building encouragement into the workshop process itself. I particularly like the idea of assigning each student writer one "advocate" who describes that student's work, with an emphasis on its vision, before it undergoes class-wide workshopping. Swander also gives a useful short history of militarism in the workshop. Rachel Hall, in "The Pregnant Muse: Assumptions, Authority, and Accessibility," discusses how her pregnant body negatively affected her authority in the classroom. According to Hall, students have a kind of Byronic hero conceptualization of the writer, and they see mothers as antiwriters, dependable and unadventurous: sane. Her solution to the problem is to emphasize, all semester long, ambivalence as a writerly strategy. It serves the double purpose of making student work more nuanced and helping students see that binaries are almost...