I have to say -- I left our last staff meeting feeling a bit uneasy about the creative writing discussion. This uneasiness, I think, stems from a desire to keep the writing center away from drama. In fact, I do not fault the creative writing faculty if they do not want others infringing on their territory. (And perhaps it is fair to say, as well, that this is speculation at this point.)
I tend to agree with Stephen's point: if we want to know how to better serve creative writers who've chosen to come to the center, maybe we would do well to ask a member of the creative writing faculty to attend one of our meetings or to offer us advice in some other way.
If we want to welcome more creative writers in, then it seems likely that Laurie's idea is quite strong: we could host an hour long "creative writing space" once a week or so.
If the Writing & Rhetoric Department housed the creative writers, then it would probably be a fairly benign exercise to have such a "creative writing hour." However, since English owns creative writing courses, and since there has been (I'm told) tension between these two programs, maybe we would be better off staying away from the phrase "creative writing" altogether.
As some of you adeptly pointed out during our brief discussion, we are to be able to take on any writer at any stage working on any project. We have no particular responsibility to welcome more creative writers than we do to welcome any other subgroup of writers.
However, it is possible that we're using the idea of "creative writing" to fill in for what we really want and what is simply much more difficult to articulate (and this is my extrapolation from our conversing and our blogging) -- more writing-in-general; more varied writing; more varied writers; a less clinical setting; more sessions with things other than academic paper assignments at their center; more space for ourselves to write. If this is the case, I believe there may be other ways -- ways with little potential to spark drama -- for us to get to these related (and arguably better) goals.
If we want to hold an hour for writers producing texts for non-academic reasons, we could call this hour "self-sponsored writing hour in the writing center." During such an hour, students could either bring with them or produce there and then writing they are doing for reasons other than school and other than grades. Tutors could participate in such an hour as well. And while some of this writing may fall in to traditional creative writing genres, some will not.
I've also been thinking about the need to make our space look different from the rest of the AEC. It occured to me last week when two of the computers were taken up by baseball players browsing through their facebook accounts that there is a problem with the fact that the Writing Center does not really appear to be anything other than extra rooms in the AEC. I know we are housed there and that we rely on them, but I think it would be interesting to revamp or space to symbolically reassert our separateness.
These are rough ideas, and I welcome feedback.
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I guess I never have understood why creative writing isn't in the Writing and Rhetoric department to begin with. I realize that the English department deals with reading and analyzing those types of texts, but they also look at the types of writing that are more commonly associated with WRT. If it is a type of writing--just like other majors are invited to come--why shouldn't the creative writers come?
ReplyDeleteHowever, setting aside an extra hour just for them seems a little much...I like your idea, Cathryn, of making the hour open to anyone who just wants to come and write in a welcoming environment without making it specifically about writing prose or anything like that. Why cause controversy if we don't need to?
As to separating our space, maybe we could repaint it. The purple and red is cool (my favorite colors), but that's what all of the AEC looks like. For students walking around the fourth floor, seeing the WC rooms painted a different color or with better labeling at the doors would let them know that those spaces are taken.