Dispatches from the Classroom : Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy

With emphasis on practical classroom application, this up-to-date and refreshingly honest collection of essays is a wonderful resource for teaching creative writing. "Dispatches from the Classroom" is a collection of pedagogical essays written by graduate students, with an emphasis on practical classroom application. Divided into four sections - "Laying the Ground Rules", "What is 'Appropriate' for the Workshop?", "Teaching 'Technique'", and "The Hybrid TA", it explores issues of daily concern to creative writing instructors from many viewpoints. Although these essays draw on recent theoretical scholarship, the emphasis remains on ways in which theory can be applied to course structure, student interaction, and other practical concerns. Also examined is the unusual blend of teaching assignments that Teaching Assistants face, addressing ways that the creative writer can apply her skills to composition instruction and even writing center tutoring. These essays have been selected from the work of current graduate students in creative writing, all of whom have very recent experience of dealing with these specific issues in the classroom. This anthology will not only provide Teaching Assistants with an introduction to current issues in creative writing pedagogy, but also with a much-needed teaching resource for their introductory courses.

Joseph Rein is currently the assistant coordinator of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is pursuing his PhD. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The Wisconsin Review, Concho River Review, Fiction Weekly, Ampersand Review, Twisted Ink, and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, David Yost recently returned from his second trip to Thailand working with Burmese refugees to pursue a PhD in fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His fiction has previously appeared in more than twenty journals, including The Southern Review, The Sun, Pleiades, Witness, and Asia Literary Review, while his critical articles have appeared in MELUS, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and War, Literature, and the Arts. Chris Drew is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a writer who focuses on the rural and small-town places of southern Indiana. His writings have appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, The Evansville Review, The Sycamore Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Concho River Review, and The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.