The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Writing in the community and academy
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one legend of the area, and the life story of at least two people. Try to put yourself into the foreground for most of this piece.
A
I M Work of this type trains you to listen and watch your world carefully, seeing through the everyday smokescreens and filtering out falsehoods.
Community as open space
Writing as a public art is one way of being unequivocal about the place of writing in a peopled landscape. However, writing does not need books, monuments or sculptures to be of a community. Publishing houses, academies and literary festivals are the circuit, a kind of literary three-ring circus. There, the audience is already created, and they largely get what they want – even if what they want is to be challenged. But creative writing thrives in many open spaces, and new writers are often to be found in less visible spaces in which writing thrives just as openly, if less famously.
These spaces include public libraries, schools, community groups, reading groups, prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, refugee centres, YMCA organisations, adult education groups, some workplaces and, expanding exponentially,
cyberspace. Writers have even found themselves plying their art in shopping malls, and teaching their discipline while on public transport, on mountain summits and at Antarctic research stations. There are even official and unofficial versions of writers working as graffiti and installation artists.
Probably the most super-official version of writing in the community is the
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in the United
States. The laureate serves a fixed term, a procedure that now operates for the poet laureateship in the United Kingdom. As a community model, it works well,
and has been imitated by states and cities in North America and throughout the world. The poet laureate’s job is to raise national awareness of the reading and writing of poetry, and some of the projects are exceptionally inventive.
Rita Dove brought together writers to explore the African diaspora she also supported children’s poetry and jazz events. Joseph Brodsky provided poetry in airports, supermarkets and hotel rooms. Maxine Kumin setup workshops for women writers.
Some writers are drawn to community writing because this is simply the milieu out of which they work. Leaving their physical community would mean killing their reason for writing, and being dishonest as artists and as human beings. In some cultures, the idea of a writer not being of a community would be simply bizarre, since the writer is the carrier of their community’s story through history and times of change its maker of tales, its memory-banker, its time-traveller.

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Creative writing

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