Moving Against and Beyond Boundaries

The Authority Project's aim is to unify a gaping discipline by suggesting that questions of authority form the basis of creative writing pedagogy. This is no doubt true. Because creative writing teachers teach a somewhat "suspect" discipline, the teaching methods are equally suspect. Where we stand becomes central to our teaching—the very nature of this duality describes the problem. As creative writing teachers, do we stand upon the hyphen, balancing always our teaching and our writing? Does our authority come from effective teaching, administrative backing, successful publication? These questions are interestingly asked and answered in Leahy's book.

Yet rather than resolving binaries, creative writing classrooms themselves are unique places to trouble definitions, displace authority, and invent identity. The most ambitious essays in the book succeed in resisting codification and yet aim high, beginning a conversation with theories that make creative writing a more sophisticated participant in academic discourse.

Katherine Haake's fine essay embraces many of the challenges of teaching creative writing. She finds that in dismantling authority, rather than seeking it, she teaches the true art of creative writing. She argues that when the authority of the professor is decentered and the students' voices rise as loudly and confidently as the professor's, students take responsibility for their own learning. Rather than passively receiving knowledge from the ever-brilliant teacher as if knowledge were gasoline, the teacher the delivering hose, and the students the receptive tank, the students under Haake's guidance instead refine their own knowledge source. This theory does not merely empower the students, it broadens the number and kinds of texts and discussions that are invited into the classroom. With a multiplicity of voices guiding the discussion, "writing itself is linked, in important ways, to other writing and the world, and its practice becomes more explicitly intertextual, the way writers work" (102). A writer discovers, Haake argues. So should a teacher: "It's at least worth entertaining the possibility that, at least some of the time, one true obligation of teachers is to step from behind the shroud of the certitude of what we know and into whatever lies beyond. What we stand to gain may be a place of learning that may be chaotic or unpredictable, but also . . . rich and full of possibility. Only first we have to let go" (104).

Haake is not the only writer here who seeks to establish a new way to understand power by investing it within the students. Brent Royster's essay "Inspiration, Creativity, and Crisis" explains that workshops work best when the author of the text is not asked "how," he wrote, so much as "why." Royster's concern is not so much authority but agency. His idea of writing is not one of product but one of the act of producing. He refers to Kevin Brophy's Creativity: Psycholanalyis, Surrealism, and Creative Writing (1998) to advance a theory of creative writing that does not toggle between author and reader, teacher and student. "In essence, this crisis of subjective agency melds writer with audience, makes the two seem less distinguishable, and reveals the integral parts they share" (31). His claim that the creative writing workshop is the place where art happens seems to be a possible beginning of a new theory for creative writing. "The authority then can be taken not from professorial, doctoral, publishing status but by the dynamic created between the three categories of individual, field and domain" (34). Rather than struggle to define a discipline or what is known as "creatively good," Royster asks (citing Stephen Minot) that we "'draw on a full range' of tastes and address particular student motives for coming to the creative writing classroom'" (35).

In "Reinventing Writing Classrooms," Evie Yoder Miller also contributes to the creation of a new theory of creative writing by championing the interdisciplinary. Metaphor, she argues, comes from outside English classes: "For example, a principle from physics—every action has an equal and opposite reaction—may strengthen a point about the sequence of historical events. Not only do metaphors connect ideas across disciplines and subjects, they also enhance different types of...