The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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Creative writing
A
I M You can of course setup a website cheaply that acts as a forum for discussion and presentation of work. Online workshops of this type have the virtue of taking place whenever it suits the individual and allowing a record to be kept of new work and discussion-threads. It also allows participants to monitor the progress of the group.
Recommended reading
For voice work, relaxation exercises and voice projection, new writers should read the invaluable work of Cicely Berry in Your Voice and How to Use It (Vir- gin Books) and Patsy Rodenburg in The Right to Speak Working with the
Voice (Methuen,
1992
). What works for actors sometimes works for writers,
and finding a public voice in this way may even help you find another literary voice through spoken art. This goes for visual art, too. John Hollander’s
The Gazer’s Spirit (University of Chicago Press) is a fascinating investigation of how poems speak to silent works of art (paintings, sculpture) as well as an anthology of beautiful examples. It will give you powerful ideas for your own work. There are many fine examples of writing as public art. Recommended visits include the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, which holds fine examples of writing as carved or as illuminated sculpture and the
Wales Millennium Centre, which carries inscriptions on its copper portico,
side by side in Welsh and English by Gwyneth Lewis In these stones / Horizons Sing. The poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s visionary garden project can be visited at Stoneypath in Scotland, but first read Little Sparta The Garden of
Ian Hamilton Finlay by Jessie Sheeler (Frances Lincoln. For new writers, a stimulating exhibition of Finlay’s writing and public art is Ian Hamilton
Finlay: A Visual Primer by Yves Abrioux (Reaktion Books. The notion of storyboarding is evinced by Kenneth Koch in his wonderful The Art of the
Possible: Comics Mainly Without Pictures (Soft Skull Press. Here, Koch creates poems as comic strips or storyboards, finding surprising connections between the rhythms of poetry and comics, approaching language visually,
something you might try yourself in class. Graphic narrative is epitomised in the work of Alan Moore, while graphic anti-narrative and graphic poetry is exemplified in Peter Blegvad’s The Book of Leviathan (Sort Of Books,
2000
).
Shape poems reach something close to sublimity in Calligrammes, reprinted by
Guillaume Apollinaire (University of California. The digital revolution continues rapidly the landscape of its literature changes daily. For interesting and forward-looking ideas for writers and artists about hybrid electronic arts and transaesthetics, read Margot Lovejoy’s Digital Currents Art in the

Performing writing
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Electronic Age (Routledge,
2004
). Online literary journals and magazines are legion and vary greatly in quality. A good place to start is the superb Jacket
Magazine (www.jacketmagazine.com), which has generous international links.
The Electronic Literature Organisation (www.eliterature.org) is a nonprofit organisation initiated into promote the creation and enjoyment of electronic literature. Since 2001, the organisation has been based at University of
California at Los Angeles. They host the electronic literature directory, where you can access hypertext fiction and poetry works of fiction published solely or initially on the World Wide Web that require its capabilities kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects interactive fiction;
novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages or blogs poems and stories that are generated by computers collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work and online literary performances that develop new ways of writing.

Chapter 10
Writing in the community and academy
All of us who write workout of a conviction that we are participating in some sort of communal activity. Whether my role is writing, or reading and responding, might not be very important. I take seriously Flaubert’s statement that we must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honoring one another’s creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us . . . Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And when we as individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.
j o yc e carol oat es, Paris Review interview (Plimpton,
1989
:
383–384)
Made well, shaped well, writing ceases to feel like artifice and becomes alive, and the moment that happens it ceases to be your own and becomes communal.
There are creative writers who argue that you cannot be a good writer without also conducting your life with a degree of care, with a kindness, a kind of accounting for oneself within a larger community. William Carlos Williams went so far assaying that one reason to write was to become abetter person.
Richard Hugo reads this statement as a private understanding that a lifetime of writing was a slow, accumulative way of accepting one’s life as valid . . what dumb animals know by instinct and reveal in their behavior my life is all I’ve got (1979: 72). There are also writers who argue that the opposite suits their work better, but that too is a choice of conduct, of life as an artlessness or artfulness depending on your point of view. They may speak behind their hands, as it were, but that does not mean they do not intend their voice to be heard. How a writer reaches a balance between these private points of view is always revealing it reveals itself in their work, and in how they position themselves and their writing within public arenas. In this final chapter, we explore two important and sometimes conflicting public arenas for creative writing students, writer-teachers and writers community and academy.
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Writing in the community and academy
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