Review of Theories and Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing Online

[1] When we imagine a creative writing classroom, we often imagine a room full of students interacting in a workshop setting, reading to one another, and providing critique and notes, or perhaps the traditional “writerly silence” workshop where the writer sits in bated breath listening to their peers analyze their work. The online classroom provides a much different experience for both educators and students. Theories and Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing Online (2021), an edited collection from Routledge edited by Tamara Girardi and Abigail G. Scheg, seeks to reimagine the creative writing classroom from the physical to the digital space.

[2] The text includes 13 chapters from authors Amy Withrow, Stephanie Vanderslice, Patrick Bizzaro and Tamara Girardi, Paul Gleed, Laraine Herring, Lex Williford, Nicole Anae, Cynthia Pengilly, Lori Ostergaard and Marshall Kitchens, Carrie Etter, Lucy Biederman, Sarah Layden, and Ashley Jae Carranza. The collection begins with Withrow’s “Don’t Short Circuit the Muse: Creative Writing in the Digital Age,” which chronicles innovation in writing from the development of the printing press through the work of Malala Yousafzia before delving into her own work at a community college in central Pennsylvania and the challenges and rewards of what she calls a “paradigm shift” toward online creative writing pedagogy. Withrow writes:

A full shift toward acceptance of online education will not happen without the knowledge that students are receiving the quality of education they deserve. Like the invention of the printing press, access to education, and, perhaps even more importantly, greater equity in how students can access education has taken another leap forward. There is no going back. (Girardi & Scheg, 2021, Chapter 1)

[3] Much of the work pertains to transitioning the work of in-person creative writing workshops to online platforms in either fully asynchronous, mixed mode, or real-time virtual modalities. Examples of this include Stephanie Vanderslice’s “Teaching Creative Writing Online without Tears: Discovering the Many Ways Online and Creative Writing Best Practices Overlap to Enhance Digital Learning” and Lori Ostergaard’s and Marshall Kitchens’ “Designing Peer Review: Research and Intentional Practices for Effective Online Creative Writing Workshops.” Of particular merit even to non-scholars of creative writing are methods and strategies for conducting asynchronous or partially asynchronous peer review in online writing classrooms.

[4] These approaches may find homes within composition, rhetoric, and other online writing classrooms as well. Lex Williford’s “Software and Hardware Tools for Teaching Creative Writing and Self-Editing Online” and Paul Gleed’s “Making the Write Impression: How to Use Written Materials to Boost Rapport and Connectivity in Online Creative Writing Classes” discuss tools beyond the learning management system for proctoring connectivity among writers, including the use of social media platforms like Twitter (now X) and file sharing services like Blackboard and Dropbox to facilitate what Williford labels “democratic workshops” where he sees writers as apprentices learning to comment on each other’s writing.

[5] The fifth chapter, Laraine Herring’s “Navigating Trauma in the Online Creative Writing Classroom,” contains useful information for trauma-informed practice in all writing classrooms, as the contributing author holds both an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Counseling Psychology. Herring begins with an overview of trauma and how it impacts the body, along with a list of adverse childhood experiences that we may find that many of our students, or even we ourselves as instructors, bring into our writing and into the online classroom space. The chapter ends with a list of seventeen trauma-informed online classroom management tools and stress management tools for instructors. In a particularly poignant note, Herring states,

Instructors are human beings. Many of us are trauma survivors. Just because we have advanced degrees doesn’t mean we check our humanity at the beginning of the semester. Teaching requires a great deal of energy expenditure, and it can be easy to forget to practice self-care… I hold so many student experiences in my heart, and I’ve read so many encounters of their trauma in their memoirs and essays, that if I didn’t know how to process that energy and keep my own boundaries, I would burn out and not be able to continue teaching. (Girardi & Scheg, 2021, Chapter 5)

[6] Overall, this edited collection contains not just excellent resources for creative writing teachers facilitating creative writing courses in the digital classroom, but also, all teachers of writing seeking to add the flavor of creative writing pedagogy and the spirit of workshop into their online writing courses.