Evolving Strategies for Writing Feedback on Creative Manuscripts by McCormack, Leah;

Short description:

A practical and essential resource for instructors of undergraduate and graduate creative writing courses, this book provides instructors actionable strategies for providing feedback to creative writing students, using sample student work and professors’ actual written comments as models for study.

Long description:

Evolving Strategies for Writing Feedback on Creative Manuscripts: A Multi-Genre Pedagogy Guide is a practical and essential resource for instructors of undergraduate and graduate creative writing courses.

Designed for the novice and established instructor alike, it sheds light on a critical but often mysterious aspect of the creative writing classroom: writing comments on student work. Focusing on poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and including a bonus chapter on drama, this guide provides instructors actionable strategies for providing feedback to creative writing students, using sample student work and professors’ actual written comments as models for study. These invaluable insights are provided by experienced, highly-regarded writer-educators working at institutions around the world. An indispensable text, Evolving Strategies presents vital discussions about creative writing studies, pedagogy, and practice. Pressing topics in the field, such as decolonizing the creative writing classroom, meeting the needs of neurodivergent or disabled creative writing students, adapting the workshop tradition for remote instruction, and teaching international creative writing students are astutely and sensitively covered with these pages.

Representing diverse perspectives from prestigious writers teaching at a variety of institutions, from research universities to liberal arts colleges, public and private, in person and online, this guidebook will benefit a wide array of creative writing educators and writers.

Table of Contents:

Introduction I. POETRY 1. The Forest to Come: Notes on a Pedagogy of Process 2. “Notes from Sue”: Commenting on Poetry 3. Seeing the Feedback for the Words: Reflecting on Feedback for Neurodivergent Students 4. Dowsing the Depths, Not Digging the Well 5. Practicalities, Physicalities: Alternative Ways of Giving Feedback (on Visual Poetry) II. FICTION 6. Rationale, in Conversation between Tarini Fernando and Heather Jessup 7. The Writing Workshop: Teaching Students to Rest Easy with Uncertainty 8. Pattern Recognition and the Art of Literary Craft 9. Historical Fiction and the Modern Workshop 10. There’s Always a Reason Why III. NONFICTION  11. Asking Questions, Valuing Voices 12. Deepening and Complicating: The Creative Nonfiction Workshop 13. Workshops Without Real-Time: Fostering Craft-Critical Feedback in Online, Asynchronous Creative Writing Courses 14. A Comment on Comments 15. “Write What You Know”: International Students, Acculturation Stress and Teaching Creative Nonfiction  IV. APPENDICES Appendix A: A Scaffolded, Dramaturgical Approach Appendix B: Writing Identity and Difference