Creative Writing in the Digital Age: Theory, practice, and pedagogy 9781474219952, 9781472574077, 9781472574084

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1 Introduction Michael Dean Clark, Trent Hergenrader, and Joseph Rein

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reative writing scholarship has experienced slow but steady growth and diversification since the turn of the millennium. Earlier, most articles pertaining to creative writing focused almost exclusively on craft-based issues. Fortunately, however, the past two decades have produced more scholars willing and eager to address the long-overdue work of examining pedagogical practice and theorizing the creative writing classroom. Of course, craft concerns will always be central to the discipline; however, this recent wave of scholarship asks more fundamental questions that analyze the purpose and effectiveness of creative writing pedagogical models. Where there were once only a handful of books—among them, Joseph M. Moxley’s Creative Writing in America, Hans Ostrom and Wendy Bishop’s Colors of a Different Horse, D. G. Myers’s The Elephants Teach —instructors now have a wide variety of texts that focus exclusively on creative writing both as a discipline and as classroom practice. Where essays on creative writing pedagogy used to appear only in broader English journals, they can now be read in New Writing , a journal focused exclusively on the issue of creative writing theory and practice. Creative writing studies have advanced because of the work done by scholars such as Heather Beck, Paul Dawson, Diane Donnelly, Katherine Haake, Graeme Harper, Jeri Kroll, Tim Mayers, Kelly Ritter, Carl Vandermeulen, and Stephanie Vanderslice. Among others, they have expanded the possibilities of teaching in the field by presenting new and exciting avenues for the future.

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And yet, despite this surge in creative writing scholarship, very few works deal with the profound impact digital technology has on our discipline. Simply put, creative writing remains more doggedly reliant on, and rooted in, print culture than almost any other discipline. The genres with which creative writers primarily engage—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and in some programs, drama—are often viewed and studied as disparate from those “digital” genres: multimodal presentations, fan fiction, social media posts, digital narratives, wikis, and blogs, just to name a few. This happens despite the fact that all these genres contain similar craft concerns creative writing instructors already discuss in their classrooms. Creative writing has been hesitant to join other writing disciplines, such as rhetoric and composition and professional writing, that have recognized the importance of digital influences and have theorized how these technologies impact their writing classrooms. Perhaps this is because creative writing instructors feel the digital tools themselves are intricate, hard to master, and ever changing. And, of course, this is true. But rather than conceiving them as an obstacle, creative writers ought to view digital tools as providing an opportunity for students to broaden their creative skill set. Creative writing has been—and always should be—about exploration and play, two linchpins of creative work in the digital realm. Regardless of the composing tools students use, the fundamental tenets of creative expression, be it precise language, narrative, or self-reflection, will always remain. Creative Writing in the Digital Age seeks to redress this situation, challenge this hesitancy, and mark a starting point for a new line of discussion in creative writing pedagogy. This collection seeks to enter the ongoing conversations surrounding digital creative writing from a variety of avenues, addressing both theoretical concerns and practical applications. Our contributors include both prominent scholars in creative writing studies as well as groundbreaking scholars working in digital literature. These contributors present myriad approaches intended to inspire both the novice and the expert, to encourage the use of both simple tools and innovative technologies. Creative writing instructors, not only in the United States but also in Great Britain and Australia, are already experimenting with digital tools in fascinating ways; as a discipline, we simply haven’t talked enough about it. More than anything, we hope this collection gets people talking. The collection is divided into two sections. The first, “Digital influences on creative writing studies,” contextualizes the impact of the digital age on our discipline. Graeme Harper’s opening essay “Creative writing in the age of synapses” focuses on the ways in which the discipline might be reenvisioned as a “synaptic” digital response system in tune with life in a digital world. Adam Koehler’s “Screening subjects: Workshop pedagogy, media ecologies, and (new) student subjectivities” discusses the need to reconstitute the

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writing workshop in light of both the digital humanities and posthuman theory, leading to a better understanding of twenty-first-century students/writers. In “Concentration, form, and ways of (digitally) seeing,” Anna Leahy and Douglas Dechow balance using various facets of technological platforms in the classroom while still focusing on craft principles central to poetry writing. Next, Trent Hergenrader’s “Game spaces: Videogames as story-generating systems for creative writers” argues that instructors can use students’ knowledge of videogame narratives to reconfigure the classroom and push student writing in new directions. In a similar vein, Michael Dean Clark posits in “The marketable creative: Using technology and broader notions of skill in the fiction course” that ideas from sources as diverse as engineering, business, and network theory can be used to broaden student writing and skill. To conclude the section, Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher, in “Two creative writers look askance at digital composition (crayon on paper),” inquire about disciplinary ownership of multimodal writing and how we might tackle the question of aesthetics in new media forms. The second section, “Using digital tools as creative practice,” explores practical classroom applications for digital instruction. Joseph Rein’s essay “Lost in digital translation: Navigating the online creative writing classroom” explores best practices for teaching creative writing online, a quickly growing trend in creative writing programs at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Janelle Adsit takes on the issue of creative writing, identity, and technology in “Giving an account of oneself: Teaching identity construction and authorship in creative nonfiction and social media,” showing how students can expand their concept of characterization through exploring their alreadyexisting online personas. In “Reconsidering the online writing workshop with #25wordstory,” Abigail Scheg discusses social media microblogs as a focused workshop environment that can dissolve the walls between the classroom and the wider literary community. In the first of three speculative pieces, “Writing with machines: Data and process in Taroko Gorge,” James J. Brown Jr. argues that working with executable computer code is actually quite similar to writing within the constraints of formalist poetics and demonstrates how such limitations focus student attention on language. Aaron A. Reed draws on similar experiences in “Telling stories with maps and rules: Using the interactive fiction language ‘Inform 7’ in a creative writing workshop.” In the essay, he posits that the procedural rules required by a programming language require students think more deeply about setting and characterization. In “Acting out: Netprov in the classroom,” Rob Wittig and Mark C. Marino bring performance into the classroom with Netprov (or Networked Improvisational Narrative) that blurs the line between audience and participants during the generation of unpredictable, interactive narratives. Christina Clancy discusses the ways digital storytelling platforms have challenged and improved the

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personal narratives of her creative nonfiction students in “The Text Is Where It’s At: Digital Storytelling Assignments That Teach Lessons in Creative Writing.” And finally, Amy Letter’s “Creative writing for new media” gives an honest and accessible account of the successes and challenges of using new media in the creative writing classroom. The book also has a companion website, available through Bloomsbury’s homepage. On the site, each author has provided additional lesson plans, ideas, and assignments to augment the ideas discussed in the essay. We also urge readers to check out our social media sites, where instructors can share their successes and struggles with digital approaches. We hope, above all, that this collection becomes the starting point of a lively and consistent conversation within the discipline about embracing and engaging the powerful opportunities technology provides. Finally, we wish to acknowledge that the digital world opens opportunities not only for our creative writing classrooms but also for collaborations both campus-wide and beyond. The digital humanities continues to grow at universities both in the United States and abroad; creative writing can, and should, play a central role in its evolution. Scholars and students working in fields from computer science to graphic design continue to build projects around compelling content; who else are better to give these projects the artistic resonance and deft use of language they need than creative writers? We suggest contacting colleagues in on campus to inquire about working on interdisciplinary projects, guest lecturing in each other’s classes, or co-teaching a course. Creative writers may never master writing code and programmers may never master literary forms, but both sides have much to gain from active collaboration. Far from diminishing the discipline, such collaborations will bolster creative writing as a discipline, while continuing its vital work in the modern university.

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2 Creative writing in the age of synapses Graeme Harper

Making the change The world changed, many people noticed, but not many reacted. Further focusing on such a comment will certainly appear accusatory, and yet I will. Alongside changes in ways of reading, the writing and distribution of works of creative writing changed. Many people noticed, but only a very small percentage of those teaching creative writing reacted to these changes. Because of that, much in the teaching of creative writing continues to address a predigital world rather than the environment in which we now live, learn, and teach. Fortunately, some of us have noticed this has happened and are beginning to do something about it. The specific phenomenon we need to target today clearly owes its origins to digitalism. It has arisen out of digitalism to be our contemporary modus operandi, the ethos of our era, our guide, and in many ways, our gift. We can refer to this phenomenon as “synapticism.” Synaptic technologies are those contemporary technologies that support reciprocal human experiences, not material manifestations, of our human presence in the world. That is, they are technologies of action and experience, not primarily technologies associated with materialism. Depending on the specific device, these contemporary technologies were born when the sometimes immediate and sometimes gradual changeover from analog to

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digital technologies generated opportunities for more direct, accessible, domesticated, and reciprocal human connections (or what can be called “interconnection”). Certainly, such synaptic technologies can produce material results; that is, they can be used to produce artifacts (in the case of creative writing, such artifacts as novels, poems, scripts). But these technologies are not, in essence, about materiality. Rather, they are about the human experiences they initiate, support, and empower. They empower these in interconnected ways. So, for example, texting on a cell phone does not primarily produce words on a small screen. True, this material element is obvious and undeniably relevant. But it is secondary to the cell phone’s support for an experience of reciprocal human connectedness, often combining this with a sense of immediacy and almost always involving a personal and interactive conversation between persons. The developed world in the twenty-first century is one of technological interfaces with human experiences. Synaptic technologies, or what might thus be also called experience technologies, produce and support opportunities for human interaction and interconnection, well beyond the local or regional geography of direct physical contact, at a pace of experience and level of convenience never before accomplished. Indeed, include here the technologies of the cell phone and the internet; in fact, include all those contemporary digital technologies that offer experiential opportunities. They each might also initiate and/or support material results, but that is not the primary consequence. As the name suggests, synapticism involves a network of reciprocal connections or junctions, and synaptic technologies are those that allow such connections to operate. Synapses are openings or bridges. They are nodes in a network. These networks are not based in linearity. By being structured in a nonlinear fashion, networks of this kind support and both literally and metaphorically encourage nonlinear thinking and acting. Digitalism, as we most often consider it today, is associated specifically with the arrival and rapid spread of digital media technologies toward the latter part of the twentieth century. This contemporary instance is not the only instance of the digital in human history. The digital has a wider definition and the digital technologies we associate with our contemporary world are distinct to our era. That said, digitalism generally means the bringing together of discrete interrelated entities rather than a continuous connected linear flow in one direction. It involves joining together to create interconnected experiences and the opportunity for nonlinearity. So, for example, digital sound technologies produce less distortion because an increase in capacity can be addressed by adding more data units at points in a sequence, whereas analog sound technologies rely on maintaining a continuous linear flow, and

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thus the likelihood of distortion rises with increases in the size of material to be stored. Nonlinearity means an opportunity to combine more or interconnect greater, and to do so successfully. That these additions might not be in a single line of connectivity is exactly what the definitions of nonlinearity and interconnection suggest. But there are other things here as well. In creative writing pedagogy, imagine a set of activities, encouragements, and alignments that were not fixed on an end result—that is, actions that relate to the learning of ways, modes, understandings, and relationships; in essence a creative writing pedagogy that is about the interconnectedness of human action. Whereas linear creative writing pedagogics predominantly rely on notions of material completion, achievement defined by reaching a material end point, nonlinear pedagogics can produce a wider variety of results in the area of creative writing understanding and knowledge. In this way, nonlinearity makes more of the aspects that all of us involved in creative writing have always recognized. Nonlinearity does not necessarily reduce the goal-directed, or teleological, nature of much of our human action. Humans often act with goals in mind, even if those goals can occasionally be short term, badly conceived, or in the realm of the unconscious. But nonlinearity highlights human actions that linear-based technologies couldn’t easily highlight. First, nonlinearity affirms that teleology in creative writing relates both to extrinsic and intrinsic ends and values. Extrinsic ends and values in that the goal might still be to produce final artifacts, whether poems, plays, novels, or some other end or final result. Intrinsic in that the actions that make up creative writing are valuable goals in themselves, that is, the explorations and understanding that come from such exercises. Any teacher of creative writing (and I say this based solely on anecdotal evidence, but with a degree of confidence) will confirm that intrinsic goals in creative writing have value, whether during the production of drafts, writing of pieces of exploratory but unfinished material, reciprocal communications with family or friends about works-in-progress, investigations through doodles or sketches, diary entries, or any and all of our students’ actions, thoughts, and imaginative engagements. Unfortunately, it is the extrinsic goals of creative writing, not the intrinsic ones, that have been promoted and most discussed culturally in the modern period—the period in which the sale of products emerging out of creative writing became tantamount, that is, primarily from the eighteenth century to the later twentieth century. During this time, the intrinsic goals were often ignored, downplayed, misunderstood, or misrepresented. Because of this, we saw such things as the elevation of the notion that to understand creative writing you had to read certain kinds of written works most often defined as “literature,” that you had to study these to be able to value and

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ultimately understand the actions of undertaking creative writing generally, and equally that your creative endeavors were most worthy if you produced certain kinds of finished works and less worthy if you did not. We might ask whether this is a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding of its intrinsic nature, or both. Additionally, we might ask if my assessment is overly harsh because material results are of course part of the undertaking of creative writing and so, in that sense, not extrinsic. Nevertheless, such value judgments often had something of the extrinsic about them, being located in the material artifact rather than in the undertaking and experience of creative writing itself. When teaching creative writing, many of us continue to emphasize reaching a final material condition more than the intrinsic aspects of the practice. It would not be unfair to say that many still teach as if a final material object is paramount and the intrinsic, though so often recognized, valued, and discussed (even if only informally), is left to occupy a liminal space. These teachers often clearly recognize the intrinsic but cannot attend to it in their teaching or in their declarations of the learning outcomes of this teaching. The reason for that relates as much to the impact of physicalism on contemporary education as it does to any criticism of those creative writing teachers. There is so often a stated obligation to produce tangible, measurable, and fixed final results. Secondly, both digitalism and creative writing involve multiple levels of human engagement and action, not only action and artifacts we can see but the movements of memory and individual writer disposition: further too, the interaction of immediate stimuli with plains of reference that draw from previous experience or even projected experience founded on personality or dream or cognitive leaps of faith. Such a highlighting makes inroads into recognizing the relationship between the creative and the critical and into seeing these as interconnected modes of human engagement with the world. In other words, creativity and critical thought are reciprocally connected, more like each other than they are separate from each other. Synaptic technologies have thus supported a significant and exciting challenge to the narrow thrust of the modern period. If space has been traversed by digital communication and time has been challenged—or, in the sense declared by Henri Bergson a century ago,1 real time has been better approached and understood—has the condition of the world thus been irreversibly altered? Certainly, space can no longer be considered in the same way when virtual space has become as real to human sight and hearing as physical space? Equally, real time is surely no longer the same when the interconnected digital world of communication runs 24 hours a day in every time zone of the world and simultaneously we can visit these— whether by tablet computer, cell phone, or however else—and be present there, elsewhere, in some other time, while remaining in our own time, in our

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own chronology. Surely, these situations are different to those experienced prior to the end of the twentieth century, prior to our contemporary synaptic technological period. Imagine more actively addressing this as an analog both for the undertaking of creative writing and for creative writing pedagogics: so, rather than fixed points of entry and determined material results, interconnectedness, which can be defined as reciprocal connectedness. The learner and the teacher thus enter their conversation as an exchange that is bound only by seeking out some forward movement in understanding. Imagine if this is borne also, as is the world of synaptic technologies generally, on exploring and contextualizing the experience of making works. Imagine exiting this conversation (if only because of the limitations of formal educational semesters or years) with results defined nevertheless according to a network of discoveries. For example, ●

Student 1 improved his or her knowledge of modes of patterning in prose;

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Student 2 came to a greater understanding of structure and form;

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Student 3 advanced his or her overall work in relation to voice and tone;

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Student 4 improved compositional chronology, reconsidering productively the sequence of his or her writing process;

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Student 5 reexamined assumptions about the audience for his or her finished works.

And so on. If perhaps we have not seen a change in the properties of space and time from the point of view of physics, mathematics, and mechanics, we have certainly seen a change in space and time from the point of view of human perception, human ideals, and human attitudes. Surely there should therefore be an aligned transformation in our creative writing pedagogies.

Creative writing and synapses What Daniel Bell2 and others described as “post-industrial society,” arriving as it did toward the end of the twentieth century, made much of a refocusing of societies to highlight both creativity and knowledge. Creative writing has always involved a heightened sense of both these and incorporated synaptic ways of acting and thinking upon them. Logically, then, we are here at the beginning of a time in which creative writing will more likely be included in general discussions of human knowledge, more regularly, and with the opportunity for its practices to be knowledgeably explored and

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better understood. Of course, I mean the inclusion and understanding of the actions that constitute creative writing not just as recognition of the final artifacts that emerge from it, which has been a constant of the modern period. There is absolutely no evidence that the kind of inscription that writing involves, and the activities we undertake to produce these inscriptions, is undertaken by any other creature on the planet. Writing is clearly and entirely human. As a species, we have thus spent much time on the relationship between our spoken and written communications. The spoken word has been valued for such things as its immediacy, spontaneity, and ability to address changing needs and the fluidity of daily activities, while the written word has been valued, very often, for its persistence over time, solidity, definitiveness, and often formality. Creative writing has been awkwardly placed in this relationship, not because its modes of inscription have been different from those of other writing—largely, they are not—but because of the willingness of creative writing to unsettle writing intentions and attitudes. Creative writing is all about writing released from conditions of formality, accuracy, clarity, agreed address, or aspects of recognizable voice. To say this could be seen to be disingenuous, because creative writing does often deal with accuracy and clarity, and its artifacts do have aspects of formality about them. But the point is that the intention of any act of creative writing is not to firm up convention but to put convention into a form of relief, to challenge, even in the most conservative of outcomes of creative writing, our expectations of something, of form, of content, of structure, of outlook, of voice, and more. Thus, creative writing has always by necessity been an interconnected synaptic activity, one that looks to associate multiple plains of reference, the literal and the metaphoric, the current and the historical or the future: a human activity that seeks junctions and conjunctions, bringing together emotions with observations, speculations with discoveries, the personal and individual with the public and cultural. All art does these things to an extent. However, creative writing is the only art that does these things and uses writing as its primary tool. Given the significance of written communication in our perpetual human sense of the world, even that unique feature of creative writing alone would make such a practice a likely highlight of the digital age. But if we usher in a period in which creativity and new forms of knowledge—the key components of post-industrialism—are socially, economically, and personally heightened, then the advantageous position of creative writing—with its eclecticism, its conjoining of the personal and the cultural, its history of incorporation into the industries of publishing, entertainment, the media and performance—in relation to our age becomes abundantly clear.

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Finally, teaching synaptically The period in which we live—which could even now be called the “postdigital age” if we are to take the technologies of the past 10 years to have actively refined and built upon digitalism—has intensified space and time transformations. It has made nonlinearity a literal and metaphoric guide to human understanding and interconnection. Thus, we have an increase in reciprocal connections relating to individual and group empowerment and choice, nodes of access and support for experiences that often arrive instantly and dwell in personal as well as cultural space. Such experiences go well beyond immediate surroundings, well beyond a sequential narrative of day-to-day. They give a stronger ontological voice to the conditions of creative writing that those who engage with creative writing have long known to be real and important. In light of all this, if it is to advance or even to be truly relevant, creative writing teaching must evolve to embrace the condition of our synaptic world, in the many instances where it has not done so already. Doing so will result in improved understanding, as well as greater learner and teacher empowerment. In this, the intrinsic teleology of creative writing must be brought to the fore, so that the practice is understood as human action and the artifacts it produces are understood as evidence of a distinct human practice. Because creative writers spend something like ninety percent of their time engaged in the actions that constitute creative writing, consider then a creative writing class in the synaptic world where most of the interactions are related to action. Consider such things as defining creative writerly choice according to the selection of techniques and applications, not according to the judgments beginning with final artifacts; undertaking comparative explorations of sequential action, what might often be called the compositional components of drafting; and, using our interconnected world to explore action and response between writer and audience. Final artifacts produced by creative writers are often things of great aesthetic worth and beauty; they might capture in the form of a written artwork aspects of human life, existence, belief, and understanding that touch us very deeply and inform us greatly. But these are not creative writing: they are some of its evidence. Because of the reflective alignment between creative writing and digitalism, creative writing has never been so obviously something that we humans use to explore and articulate our sense of life and the world. To teach in our age, to teach synaptically, we must: 1

Keep in focus the intrinsic value and goals of creative writing as well as the extrinsic situations, factors, and representations of creative writing.

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Create courses that do not rely on final artifacts to confirm the level of achievement and the level of knowledge, but rather that see those artifacts as part of the evidence trail of writerly action.

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Recall that digital technologies as we know them are distinct to our age, but that digitalism is not. The particular kinds of digital technologies that have brought about our contemporary sense are technologies promoting, supporting, and developing experiences.

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Know that creative writing, too, is experience and the artifacts that emerge during and at the end of any instance of creative writing capture only a relatively small portion of the total experiences that ensued during the creative writing. Teach to the experiences. Raise the potential for seeing how our action informs, and the evidence of that action and any artifacts that emerge from it.

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Recognize the multiple layers of experience, observation, and knowledge that creative writing involves—not least in its bringing together of creative and critical understanding. Creative writing draws from all of human discourse and engagement in the world.

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Teach with synapses in mind. We know that all creative writers have potential avenues of exploration in front of them, and that digital technologies have opened up the possibility of synapticism and the volume of reciprocal human connections. Teach to empower the creation of conjunctions and meeting places, of opportunities to create bridges that might draw into play new possibilities in their work.

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Teach to emphasize the role of particular writing situations that define creative solutions. Whether in relative freeform explorations, or whether the final results are being explored as end points presented with elements of formal expectation, teach to show that, just as in our reciprocal interactions with others, the situation defines the solution. Many times a writing situation can be approached with any number of solutions.

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Avoid the idea that the classroom—whether physical or virtual— defines the parameters of action. Creative writing is action beyond and across boundaries. Such is the nature of the creative, but such also is the nature of the digital (nonlinear and connective, elements brought together for a purpose), and such boundary crossings only assist in developing critical understanding.

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Finally, allow for the learning and teaching of creative writing to take the routes that action defines. In the digitally informed world, where

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we can create synapses with which we personally and culturally engage, we need to encourage individual and group learning of a kind that best uses and encourages synaptic choices. It is true that twentieth century mass education brought down many conditions of conformity, but in the twenty-first century world, we can see that technologies have given us opportunities for individuality even in this mass education world, and where better, indeed, than the learning and teaching of creative writing to see that individuality flourish and reassert itself? And so, here we are. The world changed, many people noticed, and we moved on; we changed too. But in the case of creative writing, we changed to return to the core values and goals we have always known but have not always been so wonderfully galvanized to pursue in formal education. Creative writing, which has for so long been a human activity of considerable significance, flourishes in our colleges and universities. Creative writing in our age, in this age of synapses, will grow further as human practice, be understood more, and flourish further. For those of us who teach creative writing, we are entering an era of immeasurable opportunity to elevate the successes of our students.

Notes 1 Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Print. In this work, among other places, Henri Bergson differentiates between mathematical time or scientific time and real time, and notes that real time is continuous and indivisible, whereas scientific time is divided into units and measures and does not reflect reality, as such. It could be said that the digital challenged scientific time by making the indivisible and continuous nature of time more visible. 2 Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974. Print. Bell and others speculating on the future rise of postindustrialism spoke of ways in which the “knowledge economy” would outstrip economies based in manufacturing and thus the production of goods. Creative writing, combining human experience with some tradable artifactual outcomes and drawing on a range of knowledge and creative actions, fits well in such a postindustrial world, as depicted by Bell, and as more recently defined in discussions by John Howkins of the “creative economy” (in Howkins, John, Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas, London: Penguin, 2013. Print.). In some ways, creative writing offers a “service” to individuals and communities in terms of self-expression, communication, and individual and communal empowerment; in other ways, it contributes to an economy of a certain type of knowledge exchange in formal education and elsewhere.

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3 Screening subjects: Workshop pedagogy, media ecologies, and (new) student subjectivities Adam Koehler

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efore we look forward into what digital creative writing pedagogy entails, we must look back and see how our scholarship—and practice—has been leading up to it. In their 1989 article “The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop,” Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh argue that the fiction workshop is not a “neutral” place where insights are developed, ideas/advice freely exchanged, and skills honed. It is a site of ideology: a place in which a particular view of reading/writing texts is put forth and through this view support is given to the dominant social order. By regarding writing as “craft” and proposing realism as the mode of writing, the fiction workshop in collaboration with humanist critics fulfills its ideological role in the dominant academy by preserving the subject as “independent” and “free.”1

Referring to Raymond Carver’s minimalist or “dirty realist” influence on creative writing programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Morton and Zavazadeh’s article argues that this way of reading/writing texts perpetuates patriarchal forces and bourgeois economics that, ultimately, turn the fiction workshop into a politically and culturally oppressive space—all in the guise

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of “freedom” and “voice.” “Freedom,” after all, is just another ideological construct, and they argue that fiction workshops, although claiming to be spaces where students are “free” to discover their voice and develop their individual talent, actually serve ways of reading/writing texts that are monolithic and undertheorized. Such a classroom, so their argument goes, turns creative writing students into replicated automatons, all reaching for the same aesthetic goals. In other words, fiction workshops don’t provide students any space to interrogate the “free” subjectivities these workshops claim to enable. And because of this, creative writers, along the lines of Morton and Zavazadeh’s argument, graduate from creative writing programs as cogs in a capitalistic wheel, as writers merely trying to hawk their goods in a market that has decided literary realism is the only important aesthetic project. It is just so tragic, according to this argument, to see so many great minds destroyed by the lack of opportunity to interrogate the “freedom” their creative writing programs provided. I point out this article not because I disagree—they actually make several important points, even if they do overstate the role critical theory should play in creative writing programs—but because they provide a starting point for imagining the subjectivities we produce in our workshops. As our practices and scholarship begin to incorporate digital technologies, we must be attentive to the ways those developments resist, reproduce, or recode the subjectivities of students crafting imaginative texts. In an era of creative writing practice and scholarship that has largely widened beyond the realist project Morton and Zavazadeh reference to include digital interests—a shift this collection pluralistically argues in favor of—what subjectivities do we see our practice and scholarship (re)producing even as they expand? If we look at the subjectivity Morton and Zavazadeh claim we reproduce in creative writing classrooms—stable modernist selves, rational, deliberative, and instrumental in their approach toward language—we can begin to re-imagine those selves at the start of the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I set out to imagine what sort of subjectivities a digital turn in creative writing pedagogy might produce. As creative writing scholar Kenneth Goldsmith points out in his book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, popular notions of “creativity,” notions nearly synonymous with the kind of “freedom” Morton and Zavazadeh find problematic, must be broken down in our technological age: Living when technology is changing the rules of the game in every aspect of our lives, it’s time to question and tear down clichés [about creativity] and lay them out on the floor in front of us, then reconstruct these smoldering embers into something new, something contemporary, something—finally—relevant.2

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What happens to student subjectivity when creative writing tears down its clichés rooted in print-based ideologies and begins the work of re-imagining creative writing in the digital age? What is at stake in such work and how can we insure that it is in the best interest of our students? How can we use the ways in which creative writing must grapple with the digital as an opportunity to imagine the ways we shape the writers who emerge from our classrooms? In taking these questions on, I aim to reclaim the creative writing workshop as a space where we can begin the project of not only accounting for the ways print-based practices and theories intersect with screen-based (or digital) practices and theories but also how that intersection affects our students. How do we, in other words, understand the smoldering embers of our postmodern and digital subjectivities? Can we remake them into something relevant?

The “Big T” text and the “little t” text In a 300-level undergraduate fiction workshop, I recently found myself navigating a heated discussion about the ways short stories as print artifacts encounter the digital artifacts found so regularly in our lives. We were workshopping a story in which the main character—a socially awkward misfit who yearns for the capacity to connect with his peers while entirely alienating them—communicated mostly through texts, tweets, and Facebook status updates. Instead of dialogue, most of the communication between characters came through screen-based media, and the writer was trying to figure out the best way to make the page mimic the screen. The story, indebted a bit to Tao Lin’s digitally soaked short stories and novels, was more or less a traditional short story, driven by a three-part narrative structure (as opposed to being made up of only the tweets and texts themselves), was broken up by the texts and tweets throughout, and was positively received by a classroom filled with students eager to criticize what they saw as the vacuous and shallow form of communication that is texting and tweeting. But as the workshop chugged along, while students addressed the specific ways texts and tweets worked well for humanizing the main character and illustrating his social paralysis, I noticed a young man, ordinarily engaged and vocal in class, staring out the window with a blank stare. “What do you think?” I asked him. “About what?” “The story. These comments on character.” His answer surprised me. He said that he just didn’t think texting and tweeting had any place in a short story. None of the short stories he had read ever

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bothered to concern themselves with technology, something he saw as so momentary, so fleeting that it had no real place in a form meant to stabilize and, ultimately, preserve human experience. Forget about the excellent work done in science fiction, the short stories of Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick. That was genre fiction. As Morton and Zavazadeh would have observed, this student was revealing his privileging of literary realism. Human experiences with technology simply didn’t count, and so writing about them in a short story disqualified that story from serious discussion. What actually surprised me most about his response was how rooted in print culture it was. Print culture didn’t bother with digital culture. Print culture was about dramatic human experience: mortality, war, love, political upheaval, the meaning of life. Print culture was high-brow. Tweets and texts and technology were about hooking up with friends, sharing pictures, and showing off. Digital culture was decidedly low-brow. Most important, though, print culture had become so normalized for him that he couldn’t imagine print as a technology itself. This ideological stance carries with it several implications. Most obviously, it sets up a binary between print and electronic texts. This student was willing to adhere to the ideological way of reading/writing that says print texts are worthy of our attention while electronic texts are not. (This position, albeit a shrinking one, is replicated in the privilege—or lack thereof—the academy assigns to print and electronic journals.) Turning again toward Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, we can see that much of the aesthetic theory that emerged in the mid-twentieth century has emphasized the materiality of language. His argument in the book is to build a theory for writing that uses preexisting language in order to fashion poetry and other imaginative texts. This theory, which Goldsmith situates in a lineage of print writers and visual artists including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, Asger Jorn, Guy Debord, and Andy Warhol (among many others), emphasizes the opacity of language, its status as not only symbolically significant, but also physically manageable, something writers and artists can repurpose: Two movements in the middle of the twentieth century, concrete poetry and situationism, experimented with sliding the slider [of language] all the way up to 100 percent opacity. In uncreative writing, new meaning is created by repurposing preexisting texts. In order to work with text this way, words must first be rendered opaque and material. Both movements viewed materiality as primary goals, the situationists through detournement and the concretists by literally treating letters as building blocks. The situationists worked in a variety of mediums, realizing their vision of the city as canvas whereas the concretists took a more traditional tact, mostly

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publishing books. By envisioning the page as a screen, the concretists anticipated the way we would work with language in the digital world half a century later.3 Concretists—a community of artists devoted to playing with the ways language physically occupies our environment in street signs, store fronts, magazines, newspapers, and so on—grew a theoretical framework for their art through experimenting with collage and nonlinear texts that incorporated visual and aural arts. These projects required a manipulation of language that required using it in a material fashion. And as Goldsmith points out above, they wrote books. They saw print as a technology for them to engage: an interface. What’s interesting to note here—and what Goldsmith begins to point his reader toward in the above quote—is the way this forecasts our “management” of language in the digital age. In other words, print is itself treated as a technology, one with material products that can be used themselves as the material for art. As Goldsmith also points out in his argument, this sort of aesthetic theory has largely been normalized in other arts—especially music, where appropriation is considered a classical part of the musician’s education—but has been slow to gain traction in writing. Until, according to Goldsmith, creative writers entered the digital age. Digitally born genres of creative writing, of course, appear all over the cultural landscape. Rick Moody and Jennifer Egan have both published short stories through Twitter. Narrative Magazine (which exists only online) regularly publishes what they call “iStories,” flash fiction pieces limited to 150 words. Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir4 uses its footnotes to alert readers to search those terms on the book’s website, tumbling readers into a variety of other media (videos, songs, other texts) that literally link that print artifact—a book—to its digital counterpart: the internet. Electronic and print reading/writing practices are not as mutually exclusive as convention (or tradition) might want us to believe. In her book Toward a Composition Made Whole, Jody Shipka alerts us to the extreme ways in which new media and our digital moment have been treated in popular mythologizing and our scholarship, reminding us that “literacy has always been multimodal” and that to privilege a text as “digital” because of its final product’s status as an iStory or tweeted poem is to discount the simple fact that writers have always been mingling with a variety of mediums in the production of traditional print texts.5 For example, it’s not uncommon for poems and short stories that appear in workshops every day around the country to have been inspired by, or incorporate, a writer’s favorite song, or for a writer to do research through online archives, or for a short story to emerge from the “network of literate practices” strung together by an author borrowing generic conventions from,

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for example, crime procedurals on television, in the movies, as well as in popular novels. For Shipka, scholars and teachers of writing must find ways of valuing the multimodality that has always gone into the production of the text, whether that multimodality is present in the final product or not. These considerations for the ways in which print engages the digital and vice versa show us that these two ideological ways of approaching reading/ writing practices need not be imagined as mutually exclusive. If we are to look at a creative writing pedagogy in a way that is, as Morton and Zavazadeh want us to, explicit about the ways in which it perpetuates particular reading/ writing practices—and if we want to account for the ways in which digitally inflected understanding of creative writing might work—then we must simply admit that a lot of what we ideologically perpetuate in our workshops will be based in traditions both print and digital. How they challenge and charge each other will be continually shaping our pedagogy. That pedagogy, in turn, will be continually shaping our students. So what does a digital creative writing pedagogy look like? In order to frame it, I turn toward two books, neither of which really have anything to do with the digital: Tim Mayers’ (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies6 and Paul Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities.7 Both of these books provide exemplary arguments about the status of creative writing programs—their limits and their strengths—and the ways in which that field has contributed valuably to both university curriculum and contemporary literature. When these two books are put into dialogue with Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing and N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines,8 I argue, a very clear image of digital creative writing pedagogy appears. From there, we can address what I am most concerned with in this chapter: how that pedagogy contributes to the production of particular subjectivities and the perpetuation of particular reading/writing practices within pedagogical modes employed in the writing classroom.

Language as technology In Creative Writing and the New Humanities, Dawson argues that creative writing stands poised at the beginning of the twenty-first century to be the discipline that graduates public intellectuals who are literate, critical, creative, and responsive to the cultural/political landscape. Through historicizing the rise of creative writing programs in the United States alongside literary theory and criticism concerned with how we define “creative,” Dawson’s argument sets the stage for imagining what he calls “workshop poetics”: the elements of meaning-making unique to the creative writing workshop. Pausing on

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voice and recalling Morton and Zavazadeh’s argument, Dawson also points out that voice [as it is understood in the creative writing workshop] is a construct [and] Morton and Zavarzadeh’s critique of voice relates to the creative self expression model of Creative Writing. This model tends to be most overt in adult education and community writing classes, where it often operates as a therapeutic technology of the self, although such a concept of voice and selfhood also exists for many writers and teachers of writing at the university level.9 When voice—one of the major pedagogical components of the workshop—is imagined as a construct in the creative writing classroom itself, we open the door for imagining voice as, to use Dawson’s word, a technology as well as a site of ideological construction, a space in which subjectivity is externalized and assumptions and beliefs conducted by that subjectivity can be examined. For example, in the aforementioned workshop class, discussion broke out around the ambiguity in a text sent from the story’s protagonist to his concerned mother: “YOLO.” The class, eager to use this as an example of the horrors texting has brought to the English language, ended up addressing a very dynamic and rich word born from our digital lives, pointing out that this was the language of an excited teenage girl, not a moody teenage boy. This word, as a site of ideological construction, did not match with the ideological construction the author had provided elsewhere throughout the story. In (Re)Writing Craft, Mayers works toward defining what he calls “craft criticism,” a form of “critical prose written by self- or institutionally identified ‘creative writers’; in craft criticism, a concern with textual production takes precedence over any concern with textual interpretation.”10 Identifying an emergent scholarship in which creative writers have addressed the creative process, Mayers imagines the workshop as a space where students investigate the sort of concerns that Morton and Zavazadeh examine: voice as a socially and ideologically constructed production, one that carries with it the everyday assumptions we have about the world and can therefore be a rich site of interpretation. Within the model of creative writing pedagogy Mayers and Dawson construct, student writing is acknowledged as a site, a “technology,” to use Dawson’s word, that students learn to examine in order to inform their own choices as fiction writers or poets. It is material. Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing largely picks up on this and develops a method for teaching digital creative writing that works against print-based ideologies: “While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on ‘originality’ and ‘creativity,’ the digital environment fosters new skill sets that include ‘manipulation’ and ‘management’ of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language.”11 Goldsmith’s project, in fact, largely sets up

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a way of imagining writing that privileges the manipulation and management of language found in digital environments, claiming that “never before has language had so much materiality—fluidity, plasticity, malleability—begging to be actively managed by the writer.”12 Such active management, for Goldsmith, not only requires a lineage of what we could call digital creative writing pedagogy as it has emerged from print-based creative writing pedagogy but also, perhaps more importantly, the value systems and subjectivities we prescribe to such pedagogies. In his workshop, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.13 Digital environments have created access to unprecedented amounts of language, and digital technologies encourage the material manipulation of language. In a more digitally inflected version of my classroom workshop, I could have asked that student to rewrite his story from his protagonist’s perspective using only his (the character’s) Facebook account and the artifacts we would find there: found articles of the internet, memes, pictures, confessional-like status updates, songs from Spotify, the language from their own developing techno-poetics (like “YOLO”). What changes in such a shift? What happens when we provide these two perspectives—the short story form on one hand, the art of reappropriated story telling (through Facebook, in this case) on the other—to our students? According to Goldsmith, a digital creative writing pedagogy would celebrate the kind of reappropriation and context-as-the-new-content approach to constructing an imaginative text. Doing so requires the sort of ideological examination of style and voice that Morton and Zavazadeh claimed didn’t take place in the 1980s. The digital turn, insofar as it has presented more and more opportunities to play with the materiality of language—and the development of theoretically sound pedagogies of creative writing in our scholarship—has produced a way of imagining the writer’s work in the digital age. This allows us a way to imagine the subjectivity of the writer in the digital workshop.

Medial ecologies and subject positions Perhaps the most in-depth examination of such subjectivity is provided by Hayles’ book Writing Machines. In that book, she adopts a cipher through

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which the reader literally interfaces as he engages her argument throughout. When that cipher, Kaye, first encountered the desktop computer and understood it could be used to create literary texts, she realized that everything important to her met in the nexus of this material-semiotic object. It called forth the questions that continued to fascinate her about scientific research: what does it mean? Why is it important? It confronted her with the materiality of the physical world and its mediation through the technological apparatus. When used for electronic literature, it gave her the same keen pleasure as the print novels she loved, through different sensory and kinesthetic modalities.14 Pursuing the materiality of the physical world leads Kaye to challenge many of the ways literary criticism has defined materiality, especially in an age of multimedia. As a result, she situates print and electronic reading/writing practices in a medial ecology, a cultural environment in which books, technotexts, videos, songs, visual art—simulations print and digital—all contribute to a symbolic network that requires a new kind of material-semiotic theorizing. Writers are, of course, situated within this network and once their reading/writing practices, so her argument goes, take this material-semiotic theorizing into account, new sets of theorizing, practicing, and “being in” writing arise.15 For Goldsmith, student subjectivity in a digital writing workshop amounts to playing with notions of the materiality of language that encourages students to see themselves as “unoriginal,” as “managers” of language, as “plunderers and thieves.” In Goldsmith’s digital writing workshop, therefore, students are required to examine notions of individual genius, the writer’s relation to culture and language, and what the effects of the general reappropriation of texts means in relation to their own writing. Their subjectivity, in other words, is constructed literally through other voices. And the classroom is their opportunity to address what this means for them as writers. In Hayles’ argument, writers interface in much the same way; however, language is not the only element they encounter in their medial ecology. They also write with video, sound, and kinesthetic modalities. They may see their work as the material construct of others’ voices, but also working as a confluence of media. Writers engage not only print and electronic ideologies but also ideologies that come from music and “the visual arts, computer games, and programming practices.”16 While notions of originality are at stake for writers in Goldsmith’s classroom, notions of multimodality are at stake for Hayles. These two modes are the dominant ways of thinking about imaginative writers in a digital age. They have in common the requirement that students become active agents in their construction of texts and that voice be seen as a technology itself, yet they differ in the way student writers are invited

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to imagine themselves as “original” or even “creative.” In Goldsmith’s classroom, students are literally unoriginal—and celebrated for being so. In Hayles’, they are writers who write with media, increasing their capacity for new kinds of originality. A creative writing pedagogy that moves along a digital turn will have to imagine student subjectivities as something that develops between these two positions. I wish I would have told my resistant student that texts and tweets often, whether we want to admit it or not, have similar aspirations as a short story: they aim to connect. I would have added that they have their own sets of conventions and that the construction of good Facebook status updates, while not unrelated to the construction of voice in fiction, certainly requires a different kind of theory and practice. But instead I focused on how the craft criticism I heard that student privileging—print practices were more valuable than electronic—at its most honest would have to admit that even print fiction needs to engage with a culture so heavily ensconced in digital media. My approach allowed this student to remain an intact, stable, modernist (yet living in postmodern times) writer engaged in a realist project. Since that classroom discussion, though, I’ve been imagining what a classroom designed for the character in that short story would look like. Would that social misfit who relied so tragically on social media to define his social reality have benefited from a creative writing classroom built on Goldsmith and/or Hayles definitions of writing? What would that student have learned?

Subjecting history to student authority Another way to ask that question is: how has subjectivity in creative writing theory and practice changed since Morton and Zavazadeh’s article? Perhaps the most striking answer provided by digital creative writing points us toward the workshop not as a site that perpetuates a “neutral” understanding of itself and its reading/writing practices, but as a place where students are both creative and uncreative, human and cyborg: a place where writing is seen as our most intimate technology. A place where “what counts” as writing has widened beyond the page. Any creative writing classroom that uses the digital storytelling opportunities afforded writers will place writers within a network of assumptions that frame the aesthetic act as artificial. This isn’t new. How creative writing classrooms ask students to handle those aesthetic choices, though, will add new elements to that old theoretical position. The cultural politics, for example, of reappropriation require, as Goldsmith says, a “reframing” of the ethics through which writers “write” in his “Uncreative Writing” class. While those students learn invaluable ways of imagining how voice is a refraction

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of other voices, they also construct texts that literally ask them to perpetuate plagiarism. That writer’s sense of originality—while theoretically complex— carries a political and cultural project along with it that asks creative writing scholars to examine histories (and not just poetics, if we can separate the two for a moment) of reappropriation. The multimodal media ecology that Hayles points out, while now including digital manifestations, has a lineage all its own as well: as Shipka points out, “literacy has always been multimodal.”17 Medieval scribes knew this. William Blake knew this. How does its inclusion in creative writing pedagogy, echoing Mayers, help us value methods of production over methods of interpretation? These are the questions we position students to answer when we ask them to write in/through/with digital environments. Twenty-five years have passed since Morton and Zavazadeh pointed out that the creative writing classroom is not the “neutral” space where realism is the only reading/writing practice employed. We have seen creative writing pedagogy develop ways of imagining students and student work as technologically determined. What’s at stake now is how we imagine the ways that technological determinism stands to liberate them—and open the digital creative writing classroom up to the possibilities of finding new connections with diverse sets of older traditions—while serving complex subjectivities capable of wielding an authority conscious of its own place in history. The student who, in my 300-level workshop, initially refused to take seriously a story that even acknowledged social media eventually became the editor-inchief of our student-run literary magazine. Since I was the faculty advisor, we became close and talked a lot about creative writing—in class, out of class, on the page, on the screen. Eventually he went on to work with friends from other universities on their own online literary magazine, and his interests grew. We keep in touch mostly through emails now, many of which come with links to projects he has been working on for various websites devoted to the arts. Do I think a student like that has seen the light? No, I think a student like that has come to acknowledge the diverse—and exciting—role writing plays in the digital age. The trick is to craft classrooms—more spaces—where such exciting writers can begin to grow into such a complex authority while, as this student has, acknowledging the history that has propelled us there.

Notes 1 Morton, Donald and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. “The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop.” Cultural Critique, 11 (1989): 155–73. Print. 2 Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011: 9. Print.

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3 Ibid., 36. 4 Monson, Ander. Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010. Print. 5 Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2011: 12. Print. 6 Mayers, Timothy. (Re)writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies. Pittsburgh University Press, 2005. Print. 7 Dawson, Paul. Creative Writing and the New Humanities. London: Routledge, 2005. Print. 8 Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Print. 9 Dawson, Creative Writing , 109. 10 Mayers, (Re)writing Craft, 34. 11 Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing , 15. 12 Ibid., 25. 13 Ibid., 8. 14 Hayles, Writing Machines, 15. 15 Ibid., 43. 16 Ibid., 45. 17 Shipka, Toward a Composition, 12.

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4 Concentration, form, and ways of (digitally) seeing Anna Leahy and Douglas Dechow

The dangers of going digital In Fiction Writer’s Review, I expressed interest in using digital tools in my creative writing courses but had concerns: “Some initial studies in brain science indicate that digital modes may be at odds with some habits of mind—curiosity, concentration—I’m working to cultivate.”1 Poet Jane Hirshfield writes, in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, “Every good poem . . . begins, that is, in the body and mind of concentration. . . . By concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open.”2 Hirshfield goes on to say, “Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration—expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love.”3 I wondered: how could digital modes foster concentration, not distraction? How could a device that offers us a list of resources tailored not only to the few key words we type but also to our previous preferences encourage difficulty or effort that draws us into our work? Poet Louise Glück, in Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, writes the following about a poem’s agenda: “not simply to record the actual but to continuously create the sensation of immersion in the actual. . . . Where the gaze is held, voice, or response, begins.”4 Glück isn’t worried about

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the digital world here, but when I read her words more than 20 years after their publication, I’m worried that digital technology discourages continuous creation, immersion, and attention being held. After all, I’m tempted to check email or Facebook as I’m revising this paragraph. “We are welcoming frenziedness into our souls,”5 writes Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. His personal experience echoes my own and what I observe in students: Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface on a Jet Ski.6 Carr also summarizes research that indicates students increasingly struggle to read whole books and often skip around on a page instead of reading left to right and top to bottom, and I’ve observed these behaviors in classes that encourage students to use their laptops or phones. Of course, the computer allows us to do, with greater ease, the things as writers we were already doing, namely, drafting and revising. Neuroplasticity allows repeated habits to become deeply ingrained, replacing neural paths and rewiring us. That would be great if we always made improvements, or if it were easy to revert to the old paths when new ones proved bad for us. At first, I didn’t know enough about other digital possibilities to be convinced that they were all for the good. Aren’t poets supposed to be scuba divers in the sea of language? Aren’t poets supposed to read every word—and want to read and appreciate every word? When I thought about digital—the laptop or iPad, the software, the screen—I did not initially recognize how it might fit the creative writing pedagogy I find to be invigorating and personalized. I had to rethink my assumptions about the role of digital tools without undermining my values as a teacher and a poet. One of the texts that helped me think about going digital from the point of view of a teacher and a pedagogy scholar was N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines. There she writes, As the vibrant new field of electronic textuality flexes its muscle, it is becoming overwhelmingly clear that we can no longer afford to ignore the material basis of literary production. Materiality of the artifact can no longer be positioned as a subspecialty within literary studies.7 I know that digital modes cannot be ignored; I use them myself. More importantly, Hayles’s stance resonates with my sense that, though the rise of electronic texts may at least temporarily threaten the entrenched practices of

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mainstream publishing, the book in poetry has long been a material artifact— something handled and possessed, sometimes an art object—that presents a way to read poems that we do not want to lose. Moreover, the rise of online literary journals and digital publishing creates the likelihood that each mode will push the other. The medium for our words— spacing, fonts, visual shape, heard sounds—has long been important to poets; so poets can benefit from taking into account differences between print and digital modes when making formal choices. “To construct an environment,” Hayles says, “is, of course, to anticipate and structure the user’s interaction with it.”8 She’s talking about digital, but that’s true in print as well. Digital creates new opportunities for poets, especially in terms of form and creating a variety of reading experiences, and, as Hayles suggests, it makes us take print seriously anew as well. While initially unsure how I would adjust my own teaching, I began to see that poets could be the biggest winners in the digital world and the leaders in figuring out how to make digital projects part and parcel of the humanities.

Matching digital projects to the goals of creative writing pedagogy Books—at one time a new technology—haven’t ruined literature. I draft and revise on a laptop (as well as on paper), and I don’t store in my own memory every tidbit that ends up in my poems. As poet Dean Young writes in The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, “No doubt about it, since the dawn of creation, things have been getting worse. As long as I’ve been around, literature has been getting finished by television, itself, cheap gas, movies, itself, DVDs, the Internet, itself.”9 I had to try digital in my classes before I could dismiss it as not useful. After all, isn’t poetry too often dismissed because of misconceptions that it’s not useful or is beyond understanding? As with music or films, almost anyone finds a poem that moves them deeply or, at least, that is fun to read. Maybe, I figured, it was the same with digital. Maybe it was a great opportunity. Art is not a static thing, and Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein is a poet who doesn’t think technology is the next falling sky. In his book Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age, Stein writes, The advent of digital technology has given birth to video and new media poetries both created on and received via the computer. Each bristles with revolutionary fervor. These electronic progeny aspire to resuscitate

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poetry not only by expressing the moment’s dizzying array of word, image, and sound but also by thrusting verse culture into new potentialities of awareness.10 The culture and so-called literary marketplace have been changing, and the creative writing teacher should take into account shifts of the past few decades when orchestrating courses. Incorporating audio, in fact, might be a reclaiming of poetry’s origins prior to the book. In addition, Katharine Haake, in an essay called “Against Reading,” puts us on the spot pedagogically. “It’s not enough,” she writes, to assert that writers are readers first, or even to supply exhaustive models or extensive bibliographies. All such work serves to reinforce the choices of the teacher and hence the perpetuation of his or her aesthetic biases, and while it can be argued that this is exactly what teaching should consist of, it seems that we better serve our students when we teach, in addition, the dilemma itself, what it means to choose, and train them, as we trained ourselves, in developing their own reading strategies that work to enrich and challenge their writing proclivities and interests.11 Teaching students that they have choices—that in writing each line of a poem, they make large and small choices, whether or not they are thinking about those choices at the time—is central to my pedagogical approach. That’s why, when students do in-class exercises, they read results aloud to hear how each student’s choices panned out differently and to notice similarities that may be clichés. That’s part of why I require revision, so that students understand choices they made in drafting and consider options. A digital assignment can allow students to challenge their proclivities and become aware of choices, perhaps introducing options they would not otherwise consider. By the time I was considering whether to include digital projects in my courses, I had recently been published in an online journal12 and had provided an MP3 audio file of me reading the poem. The latter, though part of so-called new media, seems also a return to poetry as an oral and aural tradition. In addition, I had become editor of an online journal.13 I was a digital poet in some respects and felt a new responsibility to prepare my students for this milieu. As more literary journals move to or add online formats— both because it trades rising printing costs for more easily rationalized and sometimes less expensive software upgrade costs and because it offers new possibilities for design and audience—venues for poetry publication

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will likely be open to and even encourage poetic forms that take advantage of new media. In deciding how to incorporate digital projects into my poetry workshop, I faced important practical–theoretical questions. How can students be trained well enough with the software to become adept but maintain focus on—and spend their time—writing poems? How might students take advantage—in both positive and negative senses, both consciously and unconsciously—of digital iterations of their writing? What is the relationship among content, form, and formatting, especially when a seemingly new kind of formatting—in addition to images, audio, or video—might distract students from the language itself and make them think clichéd or thoughtless writing looks better than it is? What specific opportunities (e.g. video) and limitations (e.g. font choice) affect the poem in a new medium? These questions led me to think about which goals of my courses could be encouraged by digital projects. A high priority in my courses is for students to try various techniques and approaches, both in drafting and in revision. Young writes, “The sublime coincides with the ridiculous, babble with referent, the witnessed phenomena with the combustion of name in song of dazzling appeal, of play.”14 Play! Yes, that’s how I’ve written about creativity and pedagogy in a recent essay called “Let’s Begin in Delight”: Creativity depends upon improvisational thinking, which we tend to call originality, in which one thing leads to another in ways that often look or feel random or chaotic but are actually organized toward discovery. Improvisational thinking and the discovery that emerges depend upon curiosity and serendipity, which work hand in hand.15 Going digital, it seemed to me, had great potential for shaking up students’ expectations and encouraging improvisational—though informed and rigorous—thinking. After all, Young reminds us, “IT’S OKAY TO ENJOY WRITING!”16 Because I had a lot of questions, I turned to my university’s Office of Academic Technology17 for advice. The two experts there oriented me to Wordpress18 and to Prezi19 so that I could decide whether and how to incorporate such technology. More importantly, the director agreed to use two of my class periods—one for each technology—to train my students in ways that worked with the course assignments. This work can be done in isolation by the instructor, but the support I received made it much easier for me to try major assignments in my workshop and to do that sooner rather than later, even if that meant I wasn’t too far ahead of my students—who may be called digital natives, but who are almost entirely Internet users and not digital creators.20

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Blogging in creative writing courses Over the previous two years, I’d experimented with a class blog in an undergraduate course and with individual private blogs in a small graduate workshop. I’d ironed out a few problems, such as how to keep track of posts, in these pilots. By the Spring of 2013, I was ready for a major blogging assignment and determined that its primary goal was to establish a consistent writing habit and, thereby, plenty of material for revision and workshopping. I required each student to post a draft of a poem every day for a month on an individual blog started for this purpose and to become a commenter on several peer draft-a-day blogs.21 This assignment—I consciously called it a project —was worth 30 percent of the course grade. I weighted it heavily because I wanted students to take it seriously (spring break fell during this month) and because I needed a simple way to hold them accountable for the daily-ness of the project. Priscila Uppal, in “Both Sides of the Desk,” questions our assumptions about students’ assumptions about grading: All students expressed the belief that although subjectivity may be a problem, creative writing can be evaluated. At least in my experience, students want to be graded. However, these students also felt that there must be room for experiments not yielding immediate results. To benefit from the workshop environment, student writing has to be assessed in terms of progress rather than product. Grades matter to students as an indicator of potential and progress.22 That thinking guided my decisions to assign one percentage point to each post, an all-or-nothing point per day; to do a weekly evaluation in which I checked that each student had done a post each day, had not posted nonsense or skipped days; to comment myself on one or two posts for each student each week as I counted them; and, at the conclusion, to hand back scores with notes about any logistical problems but not about content. The blog project was a means toward the portfolio project, not an end in itself; first drafts are not the endgame for writers. The evaluation made these expectations for revision clear to students and simplified what could have been an unwieldy grading task for me. To say that this project worked—admittedly in one undergraduate poetry workshop and in a very small graduate workshop—is an understatement. Even students who missed a stretch because they just plain forgot realized the importance a writing habit could be to them. I’d told previous classes how important it was to develop a habit of regular writing, but until students

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actually do that for themselves, they don’t really believe what Richard Hugo champions in The Triggering Town: If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work.23 Knowing what’s good for you is one thing, but doing is what makes someone a writer. Even students who were somewhat frustrated that they couldn’t dwell immediately on an especially worthwhile draft, because they had to move on to another draft the next day, saw the benefit of having 30 drafts with which to play at the end of the month. They could afford to have clunkers, they knew which drafts had been rushed, and they had comments from peers and from me that pointed to something unusual or stunning, sometimes on drafts they would have otherwise dismissed before sharing them. These students were more prepared for workshopping and revising toward a final portfolio than any group I’d taught before.

The Prezi portfolio Poet Glyn Maxwell asserts, You master form, you master time. Well, you don’t, but you give it a run for its non-exchangeable money. Form has a direct effect on the silence beneath it, which is to say on the whiteness before and after it and where the lines end.24 Because poets attend to form and because form explores time, digital approaches offer new ways to attend differently to some of our fundamental concerns with language. A sheet of white 8½-by-11 paper contextualizes—for writer, for reader—a poem’s textuality in specific ways, as does the page of a printed book or a handwritten notebook. The computer screen and the software we choose offer additional ways that form and time can be shaped in the writing and in the reading. In redesigning the final portfolio as a digital project, I thought about how a digital format could make students more aware of poetic form, silence, and time. We tend to take for granted the visual presentation—shape and formatting—of any text on a page, whether in a book or in a Word document.

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A few of my colleagues have moved to paperless courses, but that often means using Word documents, PDFs, and Blackboard to mimic as closely as possible the written essay, the printed book, and other traditional print exchanges. Maxwell writes “that poetry is creaturely, that creatures move in space and time and collide with others gladly or sadly or avoid them altogether.”25 What if a digital format could take advantage of the creaturely nature of poems? Ideally, the altered format of a digital portfolio could serve my pedagogical approach, not merely substitute for what I was already doing well in my courses. Software like Wordpress or Prezi offers ways of seeing text differently. An erasure poem like those by Jen Bervin based on Shakespeare’s sonnets26 differs from a sonnet even while displaying a sonnet. Even that simple erasure, which also can be accomplished by lightening the font color of some words in Word, is shocking to students, and exciting. In fact, Bervin’s printed book led a recent MFA student27 to develop an erasure project based on George Washington’s letters, and he developed a digital component of his thesis (with this article’s co-author Douglas Dechow) in which words disappeared from a letter to create the poem as he read it aloud. Prezi—an online presentation software with nonlinear, layered options for organizing text and images—became my obvious choice for a new way to think of the final portfolio28 and to shake up notions of what poetry might be and might become. In many ways, this Prezi portfolio29 looks very much like the non-digital assignment I’d already honed over the years. The evaluation criteria, which represent my pedagogical priorities and the course goals, changed very little. I added that Prezi—the format of the portfolio contents— needed to matter, that at least one poem’s form had to take advantage of the medium. These criteria made it clear to students that Prezi was a tool, just as paper and ink are tools, by which they share their poems with others. This approach echoes Hayles’s stance that a text cannot really be fully understood without taking into account its medium. As we neared the portfolio deadline, I made one important adaptation. After the brief presentations—an excerpt from each portfolio—during the final exam period, I gave students an additional 24 hours to make changes. Given the variety of templates, organizational strategies, and uses of space and images that students showed me in their final individual conferences, the extra day following their presentations allowed students to learn from each other. Perhaps because students knew that they were not merely presenting their own work but gleaning last-minute ideas from the work of their peers, that presentation session turned out to be exceptionally lively, with many iterations of How did you do that? Students shared advice on how to make text fade, use odd line angles within a poem, make someone read a poem from bottom to top, upload a PDF, and much more. The next time I used the

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Prezi portfolio assignment, I devoted the last week of classes to this sort of peer exchange. The biggest change I perceived in the portfolios was an awareness of revision. In one Prezi portfolio, the student30 used a template with an image of a tree, which led her to organize her portfolio contents as a metaphorical tree in which she demonstrated growth, branching out, and going out on a limb. Students, including this one, incorporated quotes from course textbooks as screens interwoven with revisions to convey how their reading of poetry and about poetry helped them rethink their own drafts. Especially for struggling students or those who may be on the verge of great leaps just as the semester is ending, this new medium offers a way for them to show me their understanding of poetry techniques even if those techniques are not fully realized in the poems. In yet another Prezi portfolio, the student31 added notes to a draft—akin to the track-changes function in Word but revealed one at a time—that she’d taken during workshopping. That way, the viewer could see where readers had pointed her toward revision. The next draft (and the next) also used marginal notes, lines, and symbols to indicate what had been cut, added, or reworked. The ease with which I could see specific changes and understand the student’s reasoning for those changes fostered my evaluation process. I came away with a stronger sense of what these students had accomplished or thought they accomplished. Most exciting for me as a professor was the variety among the portfolios when students moved off the 8½-by-11 format. Each portfolio had a different look, pace, and feel—worked differently with form, space, and time—and students recognized and took advantage of developing a distinct project. One student,32 for instance, used a lot of white space around his poems, as well as different font colors for different parts of a draft, comments on the poem as a whole, and notes added to indicate revision choices. He also placed a draft side by side with its revision so that changes were clear to me. Sometimes, the revised version appeared line by line, one click at a time, forcing me to interact with the poem slowly; without seeing the whole poem to start, I didn’t know how long it would be until it ended. That poem demonstrated an altered relationship with time. Another important change I perceived was the use of Prezi to create versions of poems that could not be done on paper. Maxwell writes of poets who “shift a left-justified poem 90°” and asserts, “Indents or centre-justification really ought to have some rationale.”33 Prezi offers even more radical shifts. For instance, through a zooming in and a zooming out, one can create an effect of depth of field, of spatial depth in which the viewer can move closer and farther away from what’s viewed and in which texts and images can be embedded inside other text and images. Prezi also allows for rotation of the entire field of

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view. Prezi encouraged incredible play with form. In turn, students considered rationales more deeply than they had when working on a standard page. This digital project echoes what Loss Pequeño Glazier asserted in Digital Poetries: “Whether intentionally or not, such features [physical features of the page] indicate specific rhetorical and ideological strategies employed to realize the text. . . [M]aking the text happen is never an innocuous affair.”34 My students began to understand, If the poet thinks that unmooring from the margin or destabilizing the space is a reward of freedom—and not precisely the opposite, a submission to mortality and the perilous closeness of chaos—the poem not only won’t fly, it won’t walk, it won’t breathe.35 Prezi offered no stable margins, destabilized space even though it offered templates, and unmoored students’ assumptions. Some poems hobbled, as they would have on paper as well, but the portfolios demonstrated an overarching awareness of form and formal choices. And a few poems caught their breaths and soared because, as Maxwell notes, “When this works— and some contemporary poets achieve it—it works because the poet is so extremely alert to what the blackness and whiteness represent, what it means apparently to move freely.”36 The digital portfolio helped my students understand that poetic form hinges on apparently.

Creative writing: From course to curriculum in digital humanities Because I was able to develop digital projects for students that matched my existing pedagogical approaches and goals, I’m likely to continue including such tasks in future courses. This shift fits into a larger effort—spearheaded in part by my co-author, Science Librarian Douglas Dechow—in Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences, which also includes the visual arts. Seeing the opportunities for innovative courses and projects as well as relevant twenty-first-century skills, the dean37 emphasizes that digital humanities, or DH, should be part of this college’s future and that he wants the college to lead our university in this area. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in his article “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” traces the history of and attempts to define digital humanities. Ultimately, he decides that what he finds in the Wikipedia entry isn’t too bad:

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The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing. 38 Kirschenbaum’s article dates from 2010. A visit to the Wikipedia entry for digital humanities three years later reveals the character and contours of the earlier definition, but little direct evidence—only the phrase “concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities”—of the earlier definition remains. From that remaining phrase and its emphasis on the intersection of computing and the humanities, we have derived a local definition that guides our institution. At Chapman University, digital humanities is the use of computational tools, techniques, and processes to support traditional and innovative modes of humanistic and artistic inquiry and production. A simple example of this definition in action occurred locally when my thesis student mentioned earlier worked with Dechow to use the processing programming language to animate a digitized version of a poem, so that the student could visually demonstrate erasure as the poem was read aloud. On paper, the poem was good; in the digital form—with animated erasure and voiceover—it came alive. Despite academia’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity, most universities have disciplinary structures and expectations that make it difficult for DH, an inherently interdisciplinary field, to take hold and build momentum.39 In addition, Glazier admits, in his 2002 book, “Literature culture in general is still not far from the computer phobia that existed in the early days of word processing.”40 While our comfort as computer users and our dependence on the internet has increased in the last dozen years, academe changes slowly, and even I had serious doubts less than two years ago. Glazier asserts, “The digital condition is real and present; it is quite urgent that we address the fact of the vibrant digital literature before us and begin the difficult drive to embrace it.”41 He argues that English departments are a natural breeding ground for digital projects, and Dechow and I argue that creative writing programs are in an even better position to be leaders in this interdisciplinary work. At Chapman University, we have begun to encourage digital literary scholars and especially digital creative writers. Dechow worked with the dean, the English department’s chair,42 and the creative writing faculty to create a curriculum of DH courses within the English course listings that are open to all arts and humanities students. Using this strategy, a critical curricular mass, largely using existing resources, can be built within a few years. Some

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of the following DH courses already existed in the journalism program, and some new courses have already been taught (Dechow teaches Humanities Computing every other year). Others are approved and will be taught this year, and some are in development: ENG 211 Introduction to Digital Media Workshop ENG 319 Online Magazine Production ENG 328 Writing for Video Games ENG 375 Composing New Media ENG 411 Advanced Digital Media Workshop ENG 421/521: Humanities Computing ENG 484/584: Introduction to Digital Humanities ENG 4XX/5XX: Digitizing Our Cultural Heritage ENG 4XX/5XX: Ethics in the Digital Realm ENG 4XX/5XX: The Virtual Self & World (Theory) ENG 512 TAB: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics ENG 6XX: Digital Thesis While these curricular changes certainly respond to changes in the humanities at large, these courses also reflect institutional context. Some fields, such as journalism, have already become digitally oriented. In creative writing, students expressed interest in game design and worked with the faculty to build a case for courses like Writing for Video Games. The library expressed interest in working with academic units to make use of its archives, including The Center for American War Letters43 and its digitization project in which Dechow is involved. In other words, the DH curriculum emerged from the bottom, up—locally with individuals, courses, and projects—rather than by fiat of the administration or the Modern Language Association. But the administration—the dean, the department chair—recognized the potential early on and made foundational curricular work happen quickly. I changed my creative writing course, not because this shift serves a DH curriculum (it’s not even listed above because the catalog description doesn’t require a digital component be included in each iteration of the poetry workshop course) but because DH serves my course and my students. Stein suggests that poets expose themselves to “new media poetries,” claiming, “These forms may reasonably complement not eradicate traditional printbased forms.”44 Further, he suggests that we co-opt these technologies; what may look like a threat to poetry might be redefined and adapted for poetry’s gains.45 Poets in the academy, working with colleagues, can shape DH. Much has been made both within the DH community about the divide between those who make/build/code and those who do not. At Chapman University, though disciplinary traditions are sometimes strong, institutional

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goals and attitudes push us toward the mode of making/building/coding and of interdisciplinary thinking. Stephen Ramsay stands as a vigorous proponent of this end of the debate: As humanists, we are inclined to read maps (to pick one example) as texts, as instruments of cultural desire, as visualizations of imperial ideology, as records of the emergence of national identity, and so forth. This is all very good. . . . But making a map (with a GIS [geographical information system], say) is an entirely different experience. DH-ers insist—again and again— that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise.46 DH offers literary scholars the means to invent and build new ways to look at and investigate texts and offers creative writers the means to create new kinds of texts and new ways of forming, as well as formatting, those texts. As a result, our DH curriculum includes courses that involve making as well as using digital tools. That creative writing is already a field about making — making stories, poems, essays—puts creative writing programs in a great position to lead in DH. One of the perceived threats that DH poses is to individual authorship, in large part because DH projects often involve several individuals from different disciplines to do something extraordinary, to create a project that’s more than the sum of its parts: Concepts of authorship in Digital Humanities research are already trending toward fluid, iterative, and distributed models. Whatever the medium, authorship is increasingly understood as a collaborative process, with individuals creating materials within the setting of a team that merges their identities into a corporate [communal, not business] subject (the laboratory, the technology sandbox, the research group).47 The creative writing workshop is, of course, a collaborative space of individuals creating materials within the setting of a team. Moreover, the arts generally have long encouraged collaboration and are increasingly interdisciplinary.48 That creative writing has much in common with the pedagogy and professional practices of the visual arts, which are ahead of the curve on embracing digital modes, puts us in a position to draw from other disciplines as we renegotiate what authorship and collaboration have long meant. The goals and approaches of DH, then, are sympatico with the goals and approaches of creative writing pedagogy. Both DH and creative writing are practice-based disciplines. Our thinking shapes our practices, and vice versa. To my delight, digital projects encouraged a heightened state of awareness in

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my students, an immersion in and sustained focus on poetry, and attentiveness to poetic form. In fact, the creative writing curriculum is likely the most natural place for digital approaches to texts, interactions, and writing processes to flourish.

Notes 1 Leahy, Anna. “The Future of Literary Citizenship: A Review Essay.” Fiction Writers Review, September 5, 2011. Web. 2 Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates. New York: HarperCollins, 1997: 3. Print. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Glück, Louise. Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry. New York: Ecco, 1995: 92 (emphasis mine). Print. 5 Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010: 222. Print. 6 Ibid., 7. 7 Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002: 19. Print. 8 Ibid., 48. 9 Young, Dean. The Art of Recklessness. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010: 81. Print. 10 Stein, Kevin. Poetry ’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010: 114. Print. 11 Haake, Katharine. “Against Reading.” Can It Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007: 21 (emphasis mine). Print. 12 My poem “The Day of Fire and Light” can be found in Issue 17 (2013) of Drunken Boat, . Web. 13 TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics . Web. 14 Young, Art of Recklessness, 13. 15 Leahy, Anna. “Let’s Begin in Delight: Play, Resistance, Creativity (and Why the University Matters).” Time Alloy Play. Chapman University Press, 2013: 18. Print. 16 Young, Art of Recklessness, 63. 17 Office of Academic Technology, Chapman University. . Web. 18 Wordpress.com. Bloggers can sign up for free, though the free version allows Wordpress to include an ad at the bottom of public posts. Posts can be designated as private, in which case viewers must be invited by email. Note that in the assignment I required my students to keep their blogs private and invite all other class members as viewers; because the posts were defined as drafts, were course texts, and were being evaluated as part

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of the course grade, I did not want students to publish their work on a public blog during the course. 19 Prezi.com. Professors and students can use their institutional email addresses (.edu) to sign up for free educational versions. The presentations are stored by Prezi online and can be downloaded to one’s own computer. Each presentation can be kept private; because they were graded work, I encouraged students to keep their portfolios private. The author of a private Prezi can share a link to the presentation for viewing or for collaborating. 20 Only two of my fifteen students had ever blogged, and only one had used Prezi before. Almost all were Facebook users, but less than half used Twitter. None admitted to having taken a computer science course in college. 21 The description of this assignment, adapted from my Advanced Poetry Writing course syllabus, is available on this book’s website. 22 Uppal, Priscila. “Both Sides of the Desk: Experiencing Creative Writing Lore as a Student and as a Professor.” Can It Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007: 51. Print. 23 Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979: 17. Print. 24 Maxwell, Glynn. On Poetry. London: Oberon Books, 2012: 18. Print. 25 Ibid., 131. 26 Jen Bervin’s erasure sonnets can be found in Nets, Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004. Print. 27 A. Steven Young. 28 Because I don’t know of anyone else assigning Prezi portfolios and because I advocate sharing and adapting pedagogical approaches, the digital portfolio assignment from my Advanced Poetry Writing class in its entirety, with references to other course texts used that semester and formatted as it was on the handout distributed at roughly mid-term, is available on this book’s website. 29 I posted my intention on the Facebook group page for Creative Writing Pedagogy . The post about Prezi portfolios received comments indicating interest in the assignment but no indication that any other members had tried such a thing. 30 Sierra Evans. Note that the Prezi portfolios discussed in this essay were included because, after an email query to the class after grades were submitted, these three students agreed to let me share their portfolios with future classes and use them in my scholarly writing; they were not selected by me using any evaluative criteria and do not necessarily represent the full range of work achieved by students in the course. 31 Victoria Fragoso. 32 Joseph Naidoo. 33 Maxwell, On Poetry, 57. 34 Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscallosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002: 118. Print.

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35 Maxwell, On Poetry, 57. 36 Ibid. 37 Dr Patrick Fuery, Dean of Wilkinson College, Chapman University. Fuery has also instituted an interdisciplinary research program for faculty called CRASsH, or Chapman Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. ; Dechow and I are part of the Image Text Interface CRASsH group. 38 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin, 105 (2010): 55–61: 56. Print. 39 The Wikipedia definition dropped its earlier reference to interdisciplinary, perhaps in tacit response to obstacles that the interdisciplinary programs incur or perhaps because, like biochemistry or women’s studies, this so-called interdisciplinary field has solidified enough to be considered a discipline itself. The opening of the current entry is as follows: “The Digital Humanities are an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities Developing from the field of humanities computing, digital humanities embrace a variety of topics, from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets.” 40 Glazier, Digital Poetics, 178. 41 Ibid. 42 Dr Joanna Levin, Chair of the Department of English, Chapman University. 43 44 Stein, Poetry ’s Afterlife, 110. 45 Ibid., 112. 46 Ramsay, Stephen. “On Building.” November 11, 2011. Web. August 21, 2013. 47 Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012: 110. Print. 48 A conversation essay among myself and two colleagues in the Art Department, graphic designer Claudine Jaenichen and studio artist Lia Halloran, was published in Volume 11, Issue 1, of New Writing ; this article discusses the rise of interdisciplinarity across the arts, the relationship between a college education and a lifelong artistic practice, and also commonalities and differences in our fields’ pedagogical approaches.

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5 Game spaces: Videogames as story-generating systems for creative writers Trent Hergenrader

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t’s a lament that all creative writing instructors have heard if not uttered themselves: “our students don’t read enough.” As an instructor myself, I won’t argue the sentiment; increasing our students’ interest in reading and expanding their facility with language is undoubtedly a good thing and a goal worth pursuing. The 2009 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study “Reading on the Rise” brought good news, proudly reporting a reversal in the downward trend in literary reading among all adults including 18-to-24-year-olds,1 the age of the traditional college undergraduate. Literary reading among respondents with some college education jumped four percentage points to 56.2 percent, meaning that over half of the respondents had read at least one novel, short story, or poem in the 12 months prior to the study. “Cultural decline is not inevitable,” NEA Chairman Dana Gioia declared in the preface, concluding that the report provided inspiring news for educators at all levels, but also warned that we must remain vigilant against a “society full of videogames, cell phones, iPods, laptops, and other electronic devices” that contribute to declining rates of literacy.2 While I am heartened by this upward trend in literary reading, the tone of the report troubles me, especially the assumption that maintaining culture—however we might define that tricky term—is somehow the unique responsibility of print literature. The NEA report fails to take into account that today’s students do an arguably unprecedented amount of reading and

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writing, provided we expand the term “literacy” to include the visual and digital media they consume and produce in mass quantities on a daily basis. In addition to being connected to social media streams, college students engage with storytelling media that are worthy of critical attention, including films, television, comics, and even videogames. Recognizing this, Oxford’s Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature incorporates elements from other popular media to help teach students about literature, explicitly drawing connections between film, visual art, and print texts in a strategy “designed to help transition students from their pervasive visual cultures into literary analysis.”3 Teaching students to engage critically with texts across a variety of media accomplishes many goals: we foster an interest in a broad range of texts; we develop their ability to rhetorically assess the strengths and advantages of different media; and we show them how to use their newfound analytical skills to critique the world we live in. While print literature might be the preferred medium for most English instructors, we should respect the media preferences of our students. Our goal should be to deepen their appreciation for literature and literary writing as one of many modes of artistic expression rather than arguing for the cultural superiority of the printed text. From a disciplinary perspective, instructors also must recognize that many undergraduate students in our creative writing classes have no intention of seeking a career in literary publishing. They often want to develop a better understanding of narrative concepts that they can put to use in their medium of choice, which could be film, digital media, or game design. So while creative writing instructors can—and I would argue should —continue to encourage students to read literary texts, we should also consider ways our teaching can complement, rather than contest, these forms of artistic expression without abandoning our vested interest in the written word.

Games and leveraged learning While I often incorporate films and graphic novels in my creative writing classes, I also use videogames. Whereas the NEA study showed that just over half of college-aged respondents read at least one literary work in the past year, two Pew Research Center studies reported 21 percent of all adults play videogames daily4 and that 65 percent of college students put similar amounts of time into videogames as they do their schoolwork.5 There’s no doubt these games shape students’ perception of narrative, so I have designed courses that incorporate videogames as texts, as well as creating game-like writing exercises as ways to tap into this vast reservoir of student experience. A common misconception is that educators using games in the classroom are merely serving students chocolate-covered broccoli—just as the chocolate

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has no nutritional value, the game has no educational purpose. While “edutainment” products exist, they often represent a simplistic approach of combining games and education.6 The real power of game-based learning resides at a much deeper level. In What Video Games Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee argues good games have mass appeal and an addictive quality because they leverage good learning principles far better than textbooks and many other traditional approaches.7 Gee’s book is often mistaken for a manifesto for bringing videogames into the classroom, which it is not; instead, he argues that successful games of all types, but especially videogames, build into their designs good learning principles that should be replicated in other learning sites. Many of his principles8 can easily be applied to teaching fiction writing, such as follows: ●

Good videogames allow players to experience the virtual world through the actions of a distinctive character—either one provided by the game or one developed through a sophisticated charactercreation processes where players can customize the character’s appearance and attributes to fit their personal preferences and style of play.

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The open-endedness of many games encourages players become active producers, rather than passive consumers, of game-related content. This includes learning digital tools to create new levels and mods9 as well as inspiring other artistic output, such as drawing illustrations, recording videos, and writing fan fiction; players often share mods, artwork, and fiction in online communities and request feedback from their peers.

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Games lower the consequences of failure through small challenges that allow players to build competence, take risks, explore, try new things, and restart if things go badly.

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Players need to make decisions based on the context of the present game situation and understand that their actions in the game will often have far-reaching consequences for other characters and for their own characters’ story arcs.

Many of these goals resemble the kind of work instructors do in the creative writing classroom. We want our students to identify strongly with the characters they create, and we want those characters to face complex problems and make meaningful decisions. We use craft exercises to encourage experimentation, and we do our best to create an engaged writing community where the classmates freely trade ideas and advice to improve each other’s work.

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Yet despite these similarities, a traditional writing workshop rarely feels like a game for students. They frequently struggle either to find a story they want to tell or they fall back on clichéd plots. While they might understand concepts of characterization, their characters too often seem like marionettes being dragged through familiar plotlines. They also tend to put undue expectations on themselves to produce a work of genius, pressure that can carry over to critique sessions where they attempt to muster genuine interest in each other’s works-in-progress using the language of literary critique. Rather than encouraging their appreciation for literary writing, this approach can have the opposite effect, making writing a stodgy, stultifying affair. I began designing creative writing classes around games to increase engagement and build community among classmates, but more importantly, I wanted to reinforce specific craft concerns relating to characters and setting. I incorporated videogames to show my students that the best storytelling, regardless of the narrative medium, begins with exploring possibilities.

Possibility spaces: Games as story-generating systems Will Wright, the designer of popular games such as SimCity and The Sims, describes detailed game worlds as possibility spaces, landscapes dense with opportunities for player interaction.10 Wright refers to the topology—the mathematical study of geometric forms in space—of possibility spaces. He suggests that game designers need not control the narrative like a fiction writer or film director would, but rather simply provide options—lots and lots of options—for players to pursue. He argues that while fiction and film ask the audience to put themselves in the point of view of characters and become their “emotional surrogates,” games are different because they are based on agency as players assemble their own narrative based on their choices. In short, good games function as excellent story-generating systems. For teaching concepts about character and setting, the most useful games employ three distinct but interconnected components: emergent gameplay, environmental storytelling, and situated and embodied learning. This combination creates a rich possibility space that inspires players to explore and encourages them to respond with their own creative production.

Emergent gameplay Emergence, as Jesper Juul defines it, is “the primordial game structure” where a small number of rules can be combined to yield a large number of

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game variations that encourage players to adapt different strategies to reach the winning condition.11 A simple example of a game of emergence is chess. Each player has 16 pieces of six different types, where the type dictates how the pieces may move; for example, bishops must move diagonally, rooks in straight lines, and so on. The board is made up of 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid, and the players move their pieces in alternating turns attempting to outmaneuver the other in order to capture the opponent’s king. While the basic game rules are simple enough to be summed up in two sentences, the game has enjoyed centuries of popularity due to the various strategies players can employ within the given set of rules. Emergent games encourage repeated play because players can modify their approaches and compare their results with previous games. This recursive process teaches pattern recognition12 and builds toward task mastery, through which an accomplished player can quickly select and discard from a catalog of strategies they have internalized through repeated play.

Environmental storytelling The term environmental storytelling originates from theme park design.13 In theme parks, designers strive to infuse the story element into the physical space in an attempt to immerse the amusement-park goer in the fictional world(s), a strategy that employs sights, sounds, smells, and other tactile stimulus to draw them in deeper and maintain a state of suspended disbelief. Media theorist Henry Jenkins extends the idea further,14 calling these evocative spaces that draw upon visitor’s preexisting knowledge of narrative genres— for example, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride makes use of all our knowledge about pirate stories. Such spaces in games are rich with storytelling potential through enacted stories, or scene-based micronarratives, that deal with a character interacting with her environment in a loosely connected string of stories joined by broadly defined themes, conflicts, or goals. In summary, environment storytelling is a situation in which characters move freely across a richly detailed map, exploring and making new discoveries in small, scene-based encounters that forward an overarching plot coinciding with the character’s motivations and goals.

Situated and embodied learning Videogames are the medium par excellence for situated and embodied learning.15 Situated learning is learning a task within a relevant context or specific situation; embodied learning means that the learning includes a physical, embodied component. For example, a driver’s education has two

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components: learning the rules of the road in a classroom and accumulating hours behind the wheel accompanied by an instructor. Both contribute to driving competency. The classroom portion puts the rules of the road in the context of a driving situation—for example, teaching not only what a yield sign looks like but also where drivers can expect to encounter them and how to respond. We cement the classroom learning by giving students experience behind the wheel with a trained instructor who can test their understanding and correct errors. While the classroom is an essential component of driver’s education, we would feel far less comfortable giving teenagers licenses to drive without the embodied experience. This type of learning differs from most textbook learning, where students are expected to memorize and learn through mental exercises with little context for the knowledge beyond passing a test. In the case of videogames, exploration happens through an avatar, a virtual embodiment and contact point between the player and the fictional world. Exploration and discovery is encouraged through situated tasks, where the game compels players to achieve any variety of goals—to accumulate wealth, collect experience points, or complete quests, just to name a few. In well-designed videogames, players always know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, which in turn leads to a greater engagement and a deeper sense of immersion in the fictional world.

Videogames in the creative writing classroom In summary, good narrative-driven videogames allow players to control a customized character who acts as their virtual embodiment in a fictional world, which is richly detailed and full of interactive possibilities. The character has a set of clearly defined goals that can be accomplished in a seemingly infinite number of ways. Traversing the world requires the player to make decisions, and each decision helps develop the character’s personality, increases their knowledge about the world, and shapes how the future narrative will unfold. Good games are highly replayable as they encourage players to start anew and try different options, and they also inspire players to share their experiences with other players of the game through artwork, stories, and networked play.16 Thus, there are many advantages to incorporating narrative-driven videogames into our creative writing classrooms. In a linear storytelling medium, such as traditional print fiction and film, the outcome of a story can seem fixed and inevitable for many of today’s students. In creative writing classrooms, we tend to focus on issues of craft rather than discussing all the possible options characters had at each juncture in the story, but such discussions can be quite useful since we often judge characters based on

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the decisions they make. Games model this unfolding of narrative better than any other medium precisely because the player experiences decision making, not as an emotional surrogate but as an embodied character facing specific problems with uncertain outcomes. Playing and discussing games in class also allows the instructor to point out moments of subpar storytelling, such as the reliance on clichéd plots, weak dialogue, and stereotypical characters—all areas where print fiction excels. Though I have used games in a number of ways in my courses, I will briefly discuss two strategies I’ve used with success in the creative writing classroom: examining a videogame as a primary text and the collaborative construction of a fictional world.

Videogames as primary texts Game-based learning requires instructors to choose games that best match the course’s learning objectives. For creative writing classes, I have chosen digital role-playing games (DRPGs) because of this genre’s emphasis on character creation, exploration, and the nonlinear storyline. Though there are plenty of worthy options in this popular genre, I will use the post-apocalyptic game Fallout 317 as my example. As the name suggests, it is the third installment of a series that began in the late 1990s and became popular for its dark humor and pop culture references. Fallout 3 is set in the Capital Wasteland on the outskirts of Washington, DC, years after a nuclear holocaust. The game begins in a subterranean delivery room as the player’s character is literally born into the world. The introductory levels cleverly portray the character as an infant, adolescent, and teen growing up in Vault 101, a society cut off from the surface world. These levels situate the player within the game’s wider history while also providing tutorials on how to use the game’s main features such as navigating dialog trees, picking up and dropping items, and targeting weapons. A series of tests establish the character’s personality traits and aptitudes. Once the player completes the tutorial levels, the game begins in earnest when the character’s previously doting father breaks Vault security protocol and flees without so much as a goodbye, leaving the character with little choice but to follow him into the perilous wastelands. For use in the creative writing classroom, the game’s central story matters much less than the player/student’s approach to playing it. The opening character-building sequence determines the character’s physical attributes— strength, agility, endurance, and so on—and skills that range from weapons proficiency, to bartering, to medicine. There are also dozens of perks that round out the character further by granting bonuses for diverse activities like passing speech challenges to computer hacking.18 While some options dictate the success or failure of certain challenges—for example, whether

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the character has the skill level to successfully crack a safe—the game offers plenty of decision-making opportunities that are more ambiguous. For example, early in the game, players discover a squatter named Silver living in a ruined town not far from the vault. Being a drug addict, Silver lives in constant fear of reprisal from her drug pusher and asks the character for help. Do you help her and perhaps make a powerful enemy? Or do you refuse to get involved and leave her to her fate? So begins the first of many moral tests the character will face. In my class, I used Fallout 3 in a two-part assignment: in part one, students completed the tutorial by creating a character and escaping from Vault 101; in part two, students needed to find at least five new locations in the game. Once the character emerges into the wasteland the player has the option of striking out in whatever direction she wishes. The most obvious path is the road leading downhill from the vault, but the player is in no way encouraged or compelled to go this route. In this assignment, I had suspected that most students would find their way to Megaton, the closest inhabited town and a hub for multiple quests. To my surprise, however, less than half made it there; the others bypassed it or explored in other directions. We spent time discussing how and why students built their characters, and how their characters’ skills and abilities led them to adopt different kinds of survival strategies as they scavenged for food and supplies and encountered the game’s other characters, all of whom have unique personalities and motives of their own. We also talked at length about what options the game does not provide in terms of character creation and customization. For example, a player cannot invest in any kind of artistic talent for their character—those options simply don’t exist. While players can choose from four preset races and adjust facial features for their characters, all characters have the same slim, athletic body type. Thus, while games like Fallout 3 feature a wealth of character creation options that impact how players interact with the world, we discussed how these choices do not come close to the variables that make actual human beings unique. The options available in games often steer players to create archetypal characters such as a thief, scientist, or brawler rather than providing options for more nuanced depictions of fictional characters. What I found more interesting—and unexpected—was how these students used their imaginations to develop personalities for their characters to help explain why their character had certain skills and attributes. When asked about the choices they made in the game, students naturally provided detailed rationales for the decisions the character made—as if the players were beholden to the kinds of personalities they’d imagined. For example, one student described his character as a self-interested loner who would only complete missions to help other characters if the pay they offered matched

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the riskiness of the assignment; another student imagined her character as someone who vowed to fight evil and injustice in a world without law. This impulse to create a more well-rounded identity and motivation for the character explains in part why so many writers turn to fan fiction as a creative outlet.19 Players’ imaginations naturally filled the narrative vacuum left by the game. Because they experienced the fictional world as an embodied character, the game compelled them to consider the complex relationship between characterization and decision making, even if the players didn’t consciously recognize it on their own. This understanding improved our discussion of the post-apocalyptic fiction we read, where the print texts focused our attention on how vivid imagery, developing metaphors, and the representation of complex emotions require deliberate and precise use of language. The improved quality of their writing later in the semester strongly suggested to me that they had benefitted from learning about characters and narrative from both print fiction and videogame.

Using wikis to collaboratively construct fictional worlds The DRPG genre has a well-deserved reputation for providing players with a vast fictional world complete with a detailed history that extends far beyond the margins of the actual game.20 The Fallout universe is nearing its twentieth anniversary and boasts one of the largest fan-built wikis21 on the Web.22 The site faithfully chronicles all the facts, fictions, and rumors pertaining to each game in the series as well as provides a comprehensive metanarrative that describes the common setting and the bewildering array of political factions at play in different regions of this post-apocalyptic United States. Despite the sprawling size and depth of detail of each game, the wiki reveals the remarkable continuity across the series. Every person, place, and thing that appears in the games is cataloged on the wiki, resulting in hundreds of interlinked entries that draw connections between that game’s individual storylines as well as allude to the series metanarrative. For example, the wiki entry for the player’s optional canine companion Dogmeat23 not only lists the animal’s statistics in terms of strength, agility, and so on but also includes a brief narrative that details his history—he is a descendent of a dog of the same name from the original Fallout game— and that he can be found in the Scrapyard24 fighting a band of Raiders,25 both of which have complete wiki entries themselves. Thus, Dogmeat’s entry does not exist as an isolated character profile but is contextually situated, through links and references to other pages, in a specific moment and time in Fallout 3. The page not only gives numerical statistics for what he can do, but it also provides relevant information for how and why he reacts the way he

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does when the player’s character encounters him. It’s staggering to think the same is true for every one of the other 319 (!) Fallout 3 characters the player might encounter; added to this are 161 locations and hundreds of unique items scattered across the map (see Figure 5.1). With so many pieces with which to play, it’s no wonder players find games like Fallout 3 engrossing and addictive. While it takes teams of developers years to create such vast and dense game worlds, students in a creative writing class can build a wiki26 of comparable scope in a matter of weeks.27 For example, in a class of 25 students, each student only needs to create wiki entries for five characters similar to those

FIGURE 5.1 Section of a fan-made map marking named Fallout 3 locations in downtown Washington, DC.28 This section represents roughly only one-quarter of the explorable map in Fallout 3.

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found on the Fallout wiki for 125 unique characters to spring to life; if they each create wiki entries for three locations, they have 75 detailed locations to explore. Add a collaboratively written metanarrative and pin the locations to a Google map, and the class project suddenly resembles a sprawling possibility space teeming with storytelling potential (see Figure 5.2). Unlike game developers who must work within the confines of code, creative writing students working on a collaborative project have free reign to decide how their fictional world operates including the rules, both written and unwritten, by which their characters must live. Borrowing from Tim Mayer’s

FIGURE 5.2 Student-made Google map marking locations in their collaboratively created world.29 Each marker links to its corresponding wiki entry.30

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concept of craft criticism31 that situates creative writing within broad social, political, and institutional contexts, I lead the students through a process I call critical world building.32 Through a series of online polls and classroom discussions, the students collaboratively flesh out the details of their fictional world with details including the geography and region for the setting; the level of equality or discrimination along lines of gender, race, and sexual orientation; the fictional world’s economic strength and wealth distribution; the population size and density; the political and social infrastructure, including government, health care, and education; and the varieties and levels of religious influence on the culture. Rarely does a creative writing workshop delve into such critical questions, yet the collaborative world-building project demands it because any story set in the world will derive, at least in part, from characters interacting with their environment. In a span of a few weeks, a fiction writing class can produce enough material to create a vast fictional world. The links that connect the wiki entries, as well as the links to the Google map, invite readers to explore the world and its narratives in a nonlinear way. The possibility space lends itself to any number of activities: an instructor might randomly select two characters and a location and assign a student to write a short story about their situation that reflects the characters’ attitudes, motivations, and personal histories, or students could choose to delve even deeper into aspects of the world they find most interesting, writing micronarratives that illuminate crucial moments in the world’s history from a character’s personal perspective. In my classes, I have had students create characters and explore the world via tabletop roleplaying games and write about their characters’ experiences.33 The instructor may also simply allow the world building to become a project in and of itself, encouraging students to add images, video, and audio to further flesh out the fictional space. The collaborative project itself becomes a meta-possibility space, where students and instructors explore the boundaries of what kind of work can be accomplished in the institutional space of a creative writing class.

Brave new worlds in creative writing? Rather than assuming an oppositional stance to other forms of storytelling media, creative writing instructors have an opportunity to incorporate concepts from these media in our creative writing classes. We must appreciate that our students come to us with their interests dispersed among many narrative media, both as consumers and producers. While I do not argue that approaches such as using videogames should become a core practice in the teaching of creative writing, I believe we have an obligation to provide avenues for creative exploration which translate across narrative media. By adopting this approach,

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we will not only develop our students’ critical sensibilities as media consumers but also hone their skills with digital tools and give them experience working on collaborative projects—all very useful twenty-first-century skills not usually addressed in a creative writing class. While videogames and other forms of new media may not yet hold the same kind of cultural cache as print literature, exploring the possibility space afforded by digital approaches might be the first step increasing the sophistication of narrative in those media. Rather than wringing our hands over an imaginary cultural decline, creative writing instructors can lead the way to the future.

Notes 1 National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy. NEA, 2009. PDF file. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 6th edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print. xvi. 4 Lenhart, Amanda, et. al. Adults and Video Games. Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2008. PDF file. 5 Jones, Steve. Let the Games Begin: Gaming Technology and Entertainment Among College Students. Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2003. 6 Edutainment is of course a portmanteau of education and entertainment often, though not always, used pejoratively to describe a product that incorporates gameplay in a trivial way; for example, Math Blaster has players complete math exercises similar to those found in workbooks as part of a space adventure story. The game serves as incentive to complete the problems but there is no other connection between the game and the educational content. This is in contrast to gamebased learning , also called playful learning , where gameplay is a necessary and essential part of the educational experience matched to specific learning outcomes. 7 Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. 2nd edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. 8 These observations come from the appendix of Gee’s 36 learning principles, pp. 221–7. 9 A mod is an alteration of the code to add details or features not present in the originally shipped product. 10 “Will Wright: Sculpting Possibility Space.” IT Conversations. July 11, 2004. Web and audio file. 11 Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Print. 73. 12 For more on the appeal of pattern recognition in games see: Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly Media. 2004. Print.

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13 Carson, Don. “Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park Industry.” Gamasutra. March 1, 2000. Web. 14 Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Henry Jenkins, Publications. MIT, n.d. Web. 15 For more on situated and embodied learning, see Gee. 16 Fanfic is incredibly popular online. Fanfic.net is one of the largest online repositories for shared fan fiction for books, television shows, games, and many other media. To use one example, the site hosts 4,100 fanfic stories set in the Fallout game series universe alone. Other sites such as DeviantART.com feature thousands of fan-created images dedicated to comics, books, films, games, and so on. 17 Fallout 3. 2008. Bethesda Softworks. Videogame. 18 For a more complete discussion on the analysis of videogame characters in creative writing classes, see Hergenrader, Trent. “From Meaning to Experience: Teaching Fiction Writing with Digital RPGs.” Dungeons, Dragons and Digital Denizens: Digital Role-playing Games, eds. Gerald Voorhees, Joshua Call, and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum. February 2012. Print. 19 While a full discussion of writing and fanfic is beyond the scope of this chapter, for a solid foundation in the topic, see Black, Rebecca. Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction. New York: Peter Lang Academic, 2008. Print. 20 For more on videogames and mapping in creative writing classes, see Hergenrader, Trent. “Exploring Imaginary Maps: Collaborative World Building in Fiction Writing Classes.” Building Literate Connections through Videogames and Virtual Worlds, eds. Hannah Gerber and Sandra Houston. Boston: Sense. In press. 21 A wiki is a website that allows collaborative editing of page contents by its users. 22 23 24 25 26 There are many free wiki sites, such as Wikia, PB Wiki, and Wikispaces, that offer free services. Wikispaces is the site I have used as they provide a free upgrade for educators. 27 For more on role-playing games and world building, see Hergenrader, Trent. “The Narrative Potential of Tabletop Role-Playing Games.” Proceedings of the Games+Learning+Society 9.0. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. 2014., and Hergenrader, Trent. “Dense Worlds, Deep Characters: RolePlaying Games, World Building, and Creative Writing.” Proceedings of the Games+Learning+Society 10.0. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. In press. 28 29 The full Web address for this Google map is or 30 For examples of the student-produced websites, see and 31 Mayers, Timothy. (Re)writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies. Pittsburgh University Press, 2005. Print. 32 For more on critical world building, see resources in note 27. 33 For an overview of the course that incorporated a media analysis, world building, and tabletop role-playing, see Hergenrader, Trent. “Gaming, World Building, and Narrative: Using Role-Playing Games to Teach Fiction Writing.” Proceedings of the Games+Learning+Society 7.0. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. 2011.

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6 The marketable creative: Using technology and broader notions of skill in the fiction course Michael Dean Clark

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reative writing instruction needs to change. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but this is such an obvious truism from where I sit at the head of fiction classrooms filled with students who’ve never really known life outside the digital space; students more likely to read a book if they can carry it on their phone; students who can’t write in cursive but can in code; students who have been their own publishers almost as long as they’ve been able to use the language. These students need instructors to teach writing that speaks more directly to them while also equipping them to communicate how important the discipline still is to the broader culture. As future evangelists and practitioners of the written word, they must innovate rather than merely acculturate, and our classes must help them see how powerfully positioned they are to do so. To accomplish that kind of learning, creative writing instructors must reshape the discipline through technology and the best practices of other fields. We must, in many ways, leverage more out of the classroom than older methods of instruction and delivery allow to address the world young writers now enter, a world where the power of their ideas is almost always dependent

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on their ability to work productively in increasingly connected and collaborative environments. Our classes must do more than teach craft-based skills; they must provide experiences that allow students to develop a vocabulary for their skill sets. This is a stretch for many writing instructors who did not learn the art of writing in this way, and even for some who did. But stretch we must. The following, then, is a description of how I’m attempting to do just that. Before I do, however, it is important at this point to shift some terms used when referring to creative writing pedagogy, which, in the context of this essay, break down to the application of two different prefixes: traditional and digital. This binary notion, however, is troubling. It implies, among other problematic notions, that these two bodies of practice operate in opposition to each other. Or, at the very least, that they serve to divide practitioners along lines of comfort and experience with one approach or the other. This resistance may be seen as part of the larger issue within the field of the lack of long-ranging studies regarding creative writing pedagogies. This is clear in Anna Leahy’s gloss of the historical development of the discipline in which she asserts that, “[w]ith few exceptions, creative writers have not studied, documented, and analyzed their teaching. The danger for the larger field, then, is the presumption that writers can learn to be good teachers merely through their participation in workshops as students” (xii).1 To further this assertion, Leahy points to the continued influence of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop model which in may ways perpetuates the notion that writing is unteachable. This notion of past and present creates an uneasy and ill-defined space wrapped in the connotations of the terms we use. Traditional becomes the older, and still more prevalent modes of pedagogy that the digital is perceived as seeking to unseat and replace wholesale. I would assert that this perceived dichotomy is both a figment and a major reason the conversation is stilted. To avoid it, I have chosen to employ the term legacy pedagogies when referring to what has been called “traditional” because it is a more honest term acknowledging the contributions—current and past—these pedagogical approaches have made. A move like this is a necessity if we are to push forward and grow as a discipline in the digital context. It is from that perspective that I worked to create my hybrid fiction course. In short form, it is a departure from a number of comfortable academic traditions surrounding fiction while maintaining contact with those legacy approaches that are just as important now as they were 50 years ago. The course operates in a hybrid format with students—all of whom are enrolled fulltime and living on or near campus—spending more of the semester working on their own via an array of technologies than in a face-to-face setting. The instructional design is rooted as much in business and creative media studies as it is in creative writing. Almost all of the course work is completed through a replication of the types of the collaborative, team-based work environments

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most students will encounter in the professional world rather than individual exercises and projects. The final product of the class is a publicly available work of e-fiction generated by the class. The course is an ambitious undertaking, and only possible if I engage a host of technology and strategies that are not the slightest bit native to my experiences in the creative writing classroom. However, in the 18 months I spent developing the course before its piloting, working through these approaches to teaching fiction proved critical not only in developing a highly complex course but also in helping me identify how and why our pedagogy must change.

From there to here Before launching into a specific description of the class, a brief description of my motivations and the scaffolding I employed during construction seems in order. My desire to change my approach began with the questions asked by my students and their parents alike: “But what can I do with a writing degree?” To me, this question makes no sense and complete sense at the same time. My answer puts together terms that are anathema in creative writing circles, but are more important than we give them credit for: creativity and marketability. It’s clear that creative people who are skilled communicators—something writing majors should be by the time they graduate—are highly valuable in the professional world, as evidenced by Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell’s 2013 assertion that he makes a point to hire English majors: The older I get, the more I realize the power of words and the power of words in making you think . . . The best CEOs and leaders are extremely good writers and have this ability to articulate and verbalize what they’re thinking. You don’t have to be an English major to learn how to do this, but the classes do help you express yourself and build communication skills. 2 This notion is underscored, as Darrell points out, in Steve Jobs’ oft-quoted line, “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”3 Yet, this is not the understanding writing students tend to carry into or out of the fiction classroom when considering career prospects. There are surely many explanations for the fact that writing instructors are more likely to end up addressing students’ undeveloped craft-based skills rather than how they are using those skills to gain entry into various professional markets in which their contributions would be valued. Most likely assume

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that the notion of marketability—a concept that I believe is often generally mistaken for employability, which is primarily the student’s concern—is the purview of other disciplines such as professional writing or even business. Or, to be blunt, we don’t view anything beyond craft as something with which we must be concerned. But I would argue that perspective is not in the best interest of students or the discipline in that it limits the potential power and reach of what we do in the classroom. In truth, fiction classes designed to engage technology philosophically and materially are uniquely positioned to teach the fundamentals of compelling storytelling and, at the same time, help students see themselves as professionally viable. The primary difficulty, then, is how few places exist for creative writing instructors to go within creative writing scholarship if they want to engage in a line of course planning that marries collaborative work, digital learning, and creation platforms, and an emphasis on helping students better articulate the marketability of their skill set. When I set out to redesign my fiction class, I first discovered the lack of discussion regarding digital pedagogy in the field in even the broadest of terms.4 Broadly, most books on teaching creative writing are focused on craft-based skills or deal with issues commonly encountered in the legacy, face-to-face format. As for encouraging an eye to cross-training in a fiction class that will broaden a writer’s production-based skill set, something Darrell describes as critical for writers to capitalize on their communicative prowess, that was even less present. Most creative writing texts on the subject of technology, like N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, focus on the theoretical potential for storytelling, which is a return to craft-based skills. While such texts are necessary, they do little directly to aid in the delivery of multilayered instruction in a digital format focused on more than just the development of skills that have been the focus of legacy pedagogies for decades. This hole in discipline’s literature forced me to look outside the discipline for models. Drawing on work in fields as diverse as organizational communication,5 engineering, and business, I found various strands of research all pointing back to the same idea I’d started with: the world is increasingly connected, making every aspect of navigating it that much more collaborative. And in all of that collaboration, clarity of communication, the heart and head of creative writing, is as important as it has ever been. Through the lens created by all these sources, the new class came together in ways I could not have predicted.

The hybrid platform in specific In basic form, this course is designed to operate in three phases loosely based on the creative process, each making use of a different basic set of

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technologies. Phase One is four weeks of intensive face-to-face preparation for the larger course project and depends heavily on the organizational structure of a learning management system (LMS) like Blackboard or Canvas. During this time, students are introduced to and practice using the rest of technologies they will utilize for the course. Phase Two runs nine weeks and is completed outside the classroom in small groups, save a few meetings to touch base. It utilizes almost all the required student-side technology to facilitate the creative and collaborative processes, shifting to the Google suite of apps—Mail, Docs, Drive, Maps, Hangouts—to accomplish most tasks. It also employs digital photography to capture images for later use and uses the LMS to stay on task. Phase Three returns students to the classroom for the final two weeks of class to prepare their work for final submission. This time also allows for directed reflection on the various skill sets the class required students to employ and the ways those skills make them marketable. An article6 in the Journal of Learning Design encapsulates the theory at work. The article, from James Cook University’s School of Creative Arts, outlines a programmatic move toward a team-based, multidisciplinary approach to educating students across a range of creative industries. The rationale: industries the authors’ students would be pursuing careers in after graduation operate in a collaborative, cross-disciplinary fashion that their school did not. [N]ew participants in these multidisciplinary teamwork-based models, especially those direct from tertiary education, are often unprepared for the rigours and challenges of managing these relationships, their educational experience having supplied them with little empathy for, or understanding of, these other professionals with whom they will now need to work so closely.7 Their program’s response, drawing on a raft of research in the creative media studies field, was to shift to a project-based curriculum that put students in teams from the various disciplines to replicate the diversity of a workplace team. Given that the composition of my fiction class is generally a blend of writing majors and students from across the other disciplines,8 this is exactly the experience I was hoping to tap into with my redesign. Accommodating a team-based environment made a hybrid course structure the clear choice for the new class. As I conceive it, the class would not work in a face-to-face model because it would not accentuate students’ need for self-reliance enough, nor would it adequately approximate the challenges of a team-based project that requires aligning the work of several different groups to one larger, unified project. I also believe the course would not work in an

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online platform, given the need for each student to grasp the demands of the collaborative writing system and for class members to develop relationships with each other before the remote process of the second phase.

Phase One—Plan The first phase of the hybrid fiction class focuses on the three major strands of the course: working in this particular collaborative and hybrid system, developing an understanding of the connection between students’ skills and their potential marketability, and exploring the best practices of fiction writing. This focus on craft should serve as a response to the primary preemptive criticism I’ve heard that a course like this trades commerce for art. This hybrid course is not oppositional to my legacy fiction class, which is workshop and discussion based, with regard to teaching the elements of fiction. If anything, I was looking for a more impactful way to teach concepts like character, setting, and dialogue. In fact, the new course was designated by my program as one of the sites of program assessment with regard to how effectively we are addressing those elements of craft. During Phase One, students begin with two weeks of fiction theory 9 and instruction paired with an examination of the class itself. In many ways, the course design is the primary course text, as it is a dense and complex learning environment housed on the LMS and the internet. The primary work of this first portion of the class is getting students to understand the duties of the four different roles they will perform during the collaborative process and the various deadlines they will be responsible for meeting. This schedule, which will be discussed more fully in the next section, is an array of moving parts that must be attended to by all four members. As such, part of Phase One is a laboratory in which students form temporary groups and run through a typical week they will be responsible for on their own in the coming hybrid section of the course. Doing this exploration face-to-face allows any frustrations or confusion with the collaborative process to be addressed directly before students are on their own. Toward the end of the first phase of the course, permanent groups are created for the rest of the term, the narrative rules of the collaborative project are established, main characters are created via roleplaying game methods, and any final systemic clarifications are made.

Phase Two—Produce During the second phase of the class, students will do the majority of the work on the final product of the class, a novella or novel in stories depending

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on how many students are enrolled.10 Each week, groups are responsible for 1,500 new words toward their story, leading to one narrative of roughly 13,000 words per group at the end of the nine-week period. Each weekly cycle begins with a self-run planning session organized by the designated Group Lead during which the team plans the direction their story will go in the next 1,500 words and addresses any concerns from the previous sections. During this meeting, the Communication Specialist reports on what happened in the other groups’ stories the week before and any connections he or she believes the group must make in their story. At the end of the meeting, the group lead and communication specialist generate a narrative plan and post it for the writer and the editor to follow as they work on the next section of the story. As the week progresses, there are a number of steps for each group member to follow and evaluative forms to complete, all of which generate a sense of frustration or friction by design. One of the primary ideas underpinning this system is the concept of creative disruption. A large body of research indicates that there is a beneficial effect of creating a less efficient creative system in a collaborative environment because it forces members of the network to undertake more of their own exploration and push toward more novel, self-generated solutions to problems rather than landing on the “easier” first solution they come to.11 One recent study indicates that a network finds solutions more effectively than individuals,12 which is an interesting paradigm shift for many fiction students. As a result, each week of the hybrid section of the course I include a mini-lecture on an aspect of storytelling craft, such as scene, dialogue, characterization, and so on, and add a challenging story twist that imposes a demand on their stories from outside of their own story design. Both these elements are delivered via short videos housed on YouTube, and groups must address both the craft focus and the story twist in the next section of their story. The mini-lecture provides a practical focus for both the work of the week and the ongoing revision of previous passages. The story twist, which is the same for all groups, pushes each to generate creative solutions to external requirements within their own narratives and shows them their stories from different vantage points than they might otherwise have. It also creates some subtle connections across the stories in the book. However, the same study on networked problem solving13 found that a balance must be struck between the efficiency of the network a creative team gets its information and instructions from (read: the class apparatus) and the autonomy that allows for the useful inefficiency of the creative process (read: the space and need to wrestle independently as a group with finding the best story). This balance between reliable expectations and creative frustration, when well-struck, can further improve performance. It also highlights a vast pedagogical difference between the group work most students have

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experienced in the classroom and a team-based, collaborative enterprise. This need is even more pronounced as the instructor is not “in the room” with groups to help negotiate issues and is precisely the type of challenge that necessitates the first four weeks of face-to-face instruction and a very visible presence of the instructor as a manager of the hybrid portion of the class.14 Once the groups are formed, sending them out on their own is critical for their taking ownership of the process. During Phase Two, students wrestle with a wide variety of skills ranging from editing, to scheduling, to meeting planning, to negotiation, to storytelling, to quality assurance, to professional communication with members of their own group and with those in the others. For the most part, they wrestle with these challenges on their own. By the end of the process they will have produced not only quality fiction but also a better understanding of who they are as creatives in a variety of capacities, and all while working with the pressure of knowing their stories will eventually be available to a public audience.

Phase Three—Prepare Phase Three returns students to the classroom and performs two distinct course purposes. The first allows students to crowd-source an edit of the full novel or novella text by exchanging stories with each other and following a revision guide provided them on the LMS. Having another group give their completed story an “eyes-on” review and offer suggestions shifts the focus from the small group work to that of the long-form, corporate document. It also allows for some helpful distance from which to make last minute changes before submitting the final document. During this time, members of the entire class select cover art and a title for the work as a whole, further pushing their thinking toward the full text. The second and equally important function of Phase Three is a period of directed reflection on the other aims of the course. During this part of the class, I lead student discussions regarding the lessons they learned in the four group positions, and they complete a marketability inventory consisting of four very short descriptions of what they offer potential employers based on the work they did during the project. They also write a brief reflection on what they learned about themselves as artists individually based on their work in a collaborative environment, complete surveys about the learning experience of the class, and put the finishing touches on a separate short story they wrote during the semester. This separate story was an important addition to the class in that it allowed students an outlet for writing a story that was “all theirs” when everything else had to be negotiated among the

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group. It also allowed me to assess each individual writer’s progress with craft-based skills. With so many moving pieces, this reflective period also works best face to face because it makes information exchange and consultation from student to student and class to instructor as efficient as possible. Being together at the end of the process also enables the group to experience a sense of closure together after being divided in smaller groups for most of the class, much as they might at the completion of a large project in the professional world. This is critical as the product of their semester’s work won’t be available until after the term is over and I have had a chance to edit and package it using a program like Apple’s iBook Author.

Final note—Why approach fiction instruction this way? When colleagues and educators from other schools ask me about this course, they often assume it was a sly way for me to get out of the classroom for the majority of the term. I imagine they picture me, in front of my computer, feet up on the desk while my students teach themselves. They’re only partially correct. I am deeply interested in helping young creatives own their educational experience, but this class is by no means low-maintenance. I found myself not working more than I do when teaching a legacy fiction format, but rather differently. The more experienced I get with the legacy, face-to-face model, the more I can limit the unexpected, at least on the pedagogical side because it is familiar. In the hybrid model, I feel a bit like I’m more of a manager than an instructor and that shift carries new and exciting challenges on my part, challenges that greatly benefitted me and my students. I am, however, by no means advocating that writing programs divorce themselves from more traditional models of instruction. My legacy-oriented course is well respected, students consistently report that they learn a great deal in it, and my professional reviews are almost always positive. I plan to continue teaching it in a rotation with the hybrid model to offer writers a variety of experiences with fiction. But the more I work on this new method, the more I am aware this is bigger than just a course redesign. This is tapping into the potentials of technology as they pertain to storytelling and professionalization, something that has become part and parcel with the liberal arts experience of the twenty-first century. Rather than merely shifting to a heavier emphasis on business-oriented pursuits, I’m using the available technology to help students explore how digital collaboration offers new ways to author fiction. By confronting students with the process of storytelling in this fashion, I am opening the door to more authentic conversations on the subjects that

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matter to writers. We discuss contracts with earnestness because they each must sign one and give me rights to their work in the class. E-publishing is not merely an abstract case study because they know that, as part of the course, their work will be e-published, and the idea that their skills can make them an asset to a company or organization is fleshed out in both practice and articulation. However, possibly the most important transition I can offer is the shift from student writer to published author. Unlike my legacy class, which relies on outside entities to help with this validation, I can provide it for them myself while holding them to a higher standard of accountability in terms of the quality of their work product. The course also puts students in the position to teach themselves the power and challenges inherent in the collaborative creative spaces in which they will find themselves after graduation. In that way, the conversation they have with themselves that generally leads to that dreaded question “What am I qualified to do?” shifts from employability to marketability, from a degree as certification to one of skill attainment. And that’s a move the humanities in general need to make. This process has also improved my grasp of working with my students where they are coming from. My research opened my eyes to the complex entrepreneurial writing culture young writers now must negotiate and the technological skills they need to be successful. It also illustrated several new and potentially powerful collaborations with other departments and disciplines that using technology in this format can facilitate. Writers in my program may soon be working with those in the sciences, social work, business, design, and other departments. And that cross-pollination can only serve to push creatives toward the types of additional training that will give them the secondary skills to get in the door in a number of industries. Potentially more important than that, it can help students in other fields who would normally miss the ways improving their understanding of story improve their research and their ability to communicate in the workplace and in the broader world. This is not an initiative creative writing programs have traditionally taken on as a role in the academy, but it is one we are built to play.

Notes 1 Leahy, Anna. “Foreword.” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters LTD, 2005: ix–xvi. 2 Giang, Vivian. “Logitech CEO: ‘I Love Hiring English Majors.’” Business Insider. June 20, 2013: n. pag. Web. 3 Johnson, Steven. “Marrying Tech and Art.” The Wall Street Journal. Life & Culture. August 27, 2011: n. pag. Web.

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4 My class owes a major debt to my coeditor Trent Hergenrader who taught a fiction course built on RPG theory and a hybrid format at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2011 and presented on it at a conference we both attended. While our courses have different underlying aims, it was his articulation of the possibilities that come with using technology to delink fiction courses from the classroom that really helped me crystallize my own swirling collections of thoughts on the issue. 5 For a fantastic introductory exploration of group dynamics, see the fourth edition of Daniel Levi’s Group Dynamics for Teams, which works from the notion of teams in the workplace to the psychology of team members to the optimization of team performance. What I found most useful while building my course came in terms of establishing the fl ow and architecture of the class. One of the most important principles highlighted in the book is that team members must understand the purpose of the teams as clearly as they do all the roles to be played on those teams. This clarity must be built into the structure within which they work (company, collaboration, class) as well as the instructions they receive at the outset of the project. 6 Fleischman, Katja and Clive Hutchison. “Creative Exchange: An Evolving Model of Multidisciplinary Collaboration.” Journal of Learning Design, 5.1 (2012): 23–31. 7 Fleischmann and Hutchison, 24. 8 For example, out of the 20 students in the pilot, 8 were writing majors and the other 12 were from fields as diverse as accounting, history, Biblical studies, graphic design, and organizational communication. 9 The two primary texts they read from are Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. 10 The e-book novel-in-stories generated by the pilot, On This Sand, runs over 230 pages and is available for download via the website for this book. 11 For a good starting point on this concept, see: Page, Scott E. The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Print. See also: Woolley, Anita Williams, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science. 330.6004 (2010): 686–8. Online. 12 Mason, Winter and Duncan J. Watts. “Collaborative Learning in Networks” PNAS: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109.3 (January 17, 2012): n.pag. Web. 13 Ibid., n.pag. 14 Studies on collaborative teams in the business world make a clear case for balancing autonomy and the clear presence of managerial expectations as the strategy for leveraging optimum creativity and productivity from those teams. Diversity of team members is important, but that diversity must be backed with structure, managerial oversight, and an attention to the social cohesion of the group. Too much cohesion can lead to team members trying to manage the feelings of others rather than presenting their opinions

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directly, and that can stifle innovation. Management must encourage innovation and maintain a consistent presence in order for the team to produce optimally. See: Rajesh Sethi, Daniel C. Srriith, and C. Whan Park. “How to Kill a Team’s Creativity.” The Innovative Enterprise, August 2002: n. pag. Online.

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7 Two creative writers look askance at digital composition (crayon on paper) Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher

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f what follows is likely to be met with knowing smiles by most of those creative writers willing to give it a go, it’s also the case that, as a matter both of form and content, it’s likely to please few composition scholars. For us this is cause for concern.

One Writing in College Composition and Communication on “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies,”1 Douglas Hesse attempts to bridge the famously contentious divide between the emphasis on poiesis, with its investment in craft, that so often animates the creative writing workshop, and the less aesthetically driven concerns of composition studies, in which “the ends of poiesis pale against the serious cultural and political work that needs doing.”2 The linchpin of Hesse’s astute, historically grounded argument turns out to be multimodality, and to judge by the growing volume of essays in print and online in which this term looms large, it would seem that composition studies is presently enjoying something of a multimodal second coming. 3 As Hesse argues, the rise of

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multifarious digital fora means “writing will be made public” in myriad new ways: Once upon a time, composition teachers could treat students as ultimately making practice texts to build skills for future writing, mainly in other courses and in jobs, because only the scantest few would ever actually “publish” beyond those sites, beyond the venerable “letter to the editor.” First desktop publishing, then Web 1.0, and now social networking have changed all that.4 The essay reaches a climax of sorts when, having been invited by a colleague to attend a screening of videos produced by students for a first-year (piloted) writing course, Hesse asks, “Is this creative writing or composition?”5 In fact, Hesse makes it clear that he’d find “derelict” any instructor who “exclusively assigned projects like this one”6 —projects, that is, where writing is not the main attraction. But he concludes that to have students “make videos and subject them to the same reflective (and rhetorical) analyses” as written texts indeed qualifies such work as “enhanc[ing] their understanding of the spectrum of writing and composing.”7 Hesse’s final paragraph is worth quoting in full: It remains to be seen whether “creative writing” will soon explore multimodality to the extent composition studies has, or whether many of its practitioners and apologists would see student videos as manifestations of “creative writing.” I hope it might because the new media offer a complex (if not altogether neutral) turf to which we might bring our different traditions, exploring more commonalities even as we respect our dissimilar orientations and aspirations. Failing that, though, I suggest that composition studies unilaterally explore the place of creative writing—of creative composing —in teaching, in scholarship, and in our expanded sense of ourselves as text makers.8 If these few sentences (and Hesse’s stature in the composition community) are any indication, we might be witnessing a pivotal reconfiguration in composition studies in which the field at long last embraces fully its namesake, “compose”—etymologically, “to put, place”—in an effort to capture a broader range of textual putting and placing.9 And this it will do “failing” the participation of “creative writers” (our scare quotes now). Doubtless some writing classrooms and creative writing workshops already explore and construct multimodality, but Hesse is correct in suggesting that those that encourage the submission of video essays and the like are in the minority, just as creative writers who work in electronic literature are (still) in the minority.

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What we’d like to focus on, in any case, is why multimodality, as the new buzzword for new media, should become the “turf” to which creative writers are to migrate, traditions in hand, to see what composition studies has to offer them by way of “commonalities.” Let us state the matter even more bluntly: why is it that the multimodal, understood largely in terms of distributed textuality—texts that can be distributed, that is, via information processing systems, with (at most) negligent material losses (apologies to you diehard print loyalists), including texts designed specifically for such environments—should serve as our new commons? Such texts include books, magazines, electronic literature, and now videos—the stuff produced, by and large, by aspiring knowledge workers (and their corresponding university departments).10 Wait —we think we’ve answered this question in posing it, right? Why multimodality? Well, first and foremost, because it’s convenient. As hell. Distribution is a cinch. And since just about every knowledge worker today has built-in QWERTY know-how, and since most are at least casually versed in shooting video clips, it’s fair to say that not only is it convenient, but it’s generally easier—for the knowledge-working student, for the knowledgeworking classroom, for the knowledge-working discipline—to accommodate distributed textuality of this sort than it is to contend with other kinds of expressive . . . texts.11 What other kinds of texts? Well, the texts whose makers, if we must confess, we find ourselves gravitating toward more and more in recent years because their discourse, not to say lifeways, not to say accompanying rituals, speaks to us with more immediacy and implied kinship than does the discourse of composition theorists. It must be remarked here that most of these makers suffer from a species of hallucination to which many writers too are prone: we believe that our work, while supported to varying degrees by academic institutions, is not as institutionally overdetermined as the work of scholars, largely because it’s not . . . scholarship. Given the decades-long drift in the arts toward the conceptual, and the improbability of a mass audience for most of our— books? texts? products? artifacts?—to claim that our writing is less moored to academe is . . . well, we’ve said it was a hallucination, right? At any rate, misery loves company, and so we bond over our shared sense that we don’t quite belong. Never mind that Mark McGurl has done such a stellar job of illustrating the extent to which, misgivings or no, creative writers have managed to distinguish their respective writing programs.12 It might seem that we’re about to launch into a Matthew Crawford-inspired paean to the wonders of skilled manual labor, of crafted beauty13 —we take Crawford’s phenomenological point, by the way, if not his macroeconomic one—but let us hastily add that the artists we so obliquely survey in the

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paragraph prior include those who work with multimodal text. At any rate, it’s the fine arts and the performing arts, and their permutations and combinations, we’re busy dancing around: painting, sculpture, music, theater, film, photography, architecture, textiles, and . . . dance. And what we want to know is, since most campuses boast some kind of fine arts presence, and since lack of ease or convenience is an insufficient educational ground on which to build a case against the more difficult and possibly necessary, why should English departments jump on the multimodal bandwagon, when they could just as well, if not just as easily, jump on the choral singing bandwagon, or the learn-how-to-draw bandwagon, all supplemented of course by a healthy dose of ABCs? For that matter, if we’re trying to avoid the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none stigma—are we?—then going multimodal hardly seems the best curricular bet. Moreover, why should creative writers opt to trade in their mantle of writer for that of (compositional) composer when a somewhat more upmarket appellation awaits, that of—and we offer this with what we trust will appear renewed salience—literary artist?

Two Let’s back up the truck: from an educational standpoint, developing expert expertise is well and good, but the best way to cultivate it may be to rethink entirely the individualistic, deep-focus approach to learning, replacing it with a collaboration-based model that would foster a more inquisitive approach to knowledge making and encourage students to acquire a range of skills and aptitudes in completing their (eventually to be renamed) studies.14 The multimodal can certainly serve as a nexus for bringing together alphabetic, visual, and aural textuality, so it could at the very least represent a step in properly divergent directions. But there’s still the little matter of how these convergences are to be facilitated, especially in the midst of a once-andfuture, overcrowded, underfunded public university system where traveling from an Ivy to a third-tier school can feel like a trip from the Earth to the Moon. (The dark side. Rather, the side we don’t see.) We’ve commented elsewhere as to the often anemic grasp of (alphabetic) textuality that haunts composition studies as a discipline; we’ve also written at length as to the mutual benefits of bringing composition studies and creative writing into closer align.15 We will now observe, starchily, that to label a student who splices together video clips a “composer” might signal an equally anemic grasp of (let us just say) cinematic realities, and we conjecture thus despite the prevalence in our contemporary ferment of any number of amateur provocations—YouTube mashups, blogs, tweets, Facebook pokes, and what not.16 (Hesse too expresses skepticism initially when he learns

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that first-year writing students who produce videos will be referred to as “filmmakers.”17) We say this might signal some variant of anemia because the only way to ascertain the value of such work would be to evaluate it, or at least, with due respect to Nietzsche, establish the basis of value as such.18 And here is where matters become particularly muddy, because Hesse would seem to lean his piece toward the advantages of engaging with “writing that does not ‘respond’ to a rhetorical situation.”19 He’s also attentive to those putative differences in mindset between the academic and nonacademic writer articulated years ago in David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow’s now classic exchange.20 And yet, he would seem to endorse a highly domesticated view of creative writing, apropos, evidently, of higher educational imperatives. It might be untoward for the professoriate to gesture in the direction of the undomesticated, of course, given the fundamentally conservative nature of preserving knowledge and the increasingly corporatized contours of life across all curricula, and quintiles, but is capitulation our only option? “There are dimensions of entertainment, engagement, or simply how to pass time,” Hesse writes, “and within these are realms of self-sponsored writing and reading.” “Now, it might be that these are not the concerns of composition,” he continues, “that developing individuals or human potential or the life of the pen and pixel as well as the mind are aspirations of a more naive field.”21 A “more naive field”? This formulation of creative writing habitus, which presumably accounts for the “ludic or aesthetic enterprise”22 to which creative writers are committed, seems a long, long way from the “aspirations” of so many radical modernists, whose work, however naively, was often underwritten, as Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris so aptly put it, “by a drive toward social—even spiritual—transformation.”23 It seems a long, long way from a fully sensuous encounter with the object. And it seems a long, long way even from the modest ambitions of more conventional scribes, who busy themselves crafting highly stylized literary work with the aim, simply, of delighting their readers. While such ambitions might speak to “the life of the pen and pixel as well as the mind,” they certainly exceed the casual competence implicit in “self-sponsored writing.” Further, all but the most generic of genre writers might have second thoughts about Hesse’s smooth rhetorical slide over “entertainment,” that fraught catch-all of art and commerce; the soothing vibe of “engagement,” which is fine as far as it goes—we fall back on the word too as a catch-all for expressive aims—but only in its military sense invokes confrontation, transgression, or subversion; and the broadly therapeutic connotation of “developing individuals.” With due regard for the benefits of community building and therapy and without wishing to wax masculinist, this all sounds a mite nurturing, don’t it? And for Hesse to assign, however genially, “justice, sustainability, and care,” along with “work, school, and political

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action,”24 primarily to the domain of composition—to be fair, he would seem to be at some pains in situating these two triads—doesn’t leave creative writers, frankly, with all that much to do, at least as far as a bracing, socially responsible educational experience goes. Also, there is little attention given here to creative writing as either an alienated or an unalienated form of academic labor, and at least one of us writing this sentence is currently experiencing no small degree of alienation as a contingent faculty member with no upward mobility in sight. (In our anecdotal opinion, creative writers are overrepresented among the contingent faculty ranks in literary studies. Not that we know what to make of this, exactly.) And finally, somebody will surely want to ask: Has talent really become a dirty word in English departments? Talent may be “cheap,” as both Robert Smithson and John Baldessari allege, but these days it is as dear as ever. 25 Faced with this attitude on the part of their colleagues in composition, then, many creative writers might justifiably demur, their resistance taking the form of that shared hallucination, as above, as they go about arguing their twice-told tale: that aesthetic value is hardly exhausted by such carefully pedigreed valuations. Not, mind you, that all would wish to see major trade successes— any marketplace aesthetic, assuming we could identify same— driving a discussion of aesthetic value. 26 And not that some wouldn’t wish to return creative writing to the cozy confines of typewriter technology. But most would want to know—we would want to know—whether someone with expertise in English studies, whatever we mean by English studies, really does have the expertise to evaluate/value/revalue video as other than, say, visual rhetoric. Are English profs really qualified to lead a workshop on, let’s see, (visual) collage? (Johanna Drucker? OK. But she doesn’t work in an English department.) Or, to take a more topical and seemingly innocuous example, a workshop on graphic narrative? (Hillary Chute? OK. And she does work in an English department.) It should go without saying (and without alluding to Ayn Rand) that writing about modernist architecture, or incorporating a reflection on modernist architecture into one’s short fiction, is hardly tantamount to doing architectural design (and no need to privilege one activity over the other). Now we’re the ones sounding like Jakobson when confronted with the prospect of Nabokov being granted a chair in literature at Harvard, right? If creative writers do what they know and do it expertly—are expert at their craft, that is—it isn’t necessarily the case that they need know what they do, is it? This is complicated by the simple fact that writers are, in many ways, autodidacts when it comes to their subject matter, and in that sense very much generalists. At the same time and with due respect for the mysteries of creativity and all that—there is mounting evidence that it can be taught, or at least, learned27—knowing what one does is assuredly one of the more

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instrumental requirements of teaching something, yes? So isn’t it at least possible that someone whose professional background has little to do with creating video, who isn’t especially expert at creating video, might have a knack for teaching students how to create outstanding video? Isn’t a good teacher, first and foremost, a good teacher? Or is the latter yet another instance of creeping privatization, here via transmutation of the corporate adage, “a good manager can manage anything”? (A notion which has, to be fair, come in for some critique in recent years.)28 And while we’re at it: is teaching/learning how to write well an inherently more difficult endeavor than teaching/learning how to compose video well? Emphasis on well. And if you answer in the affirmative, we suspect there are many elephants—Jean-Luc, Haskell, Werner, Errol, and Agnès among them—who might disagree. 29 Even if we allow, then, that teachers, rather like coaches, need not themselves be expert at making what they ask their students to make, in any case, we’d have sidestepped the little matter, again, of why video has become the go-to medium. Why not ceramics? Or gouache? Why not violin? Or wood? Wait, we’ve got it: origami. Any takers?30 Or how about a poem? A poem: it might irritate creative writers—as it would irritate us—to witness their colleagues in English studies, smartphones in hand, leapfrogging over the massive body of theory and practice that informs this genre of least constraint. You want to construct a multimodal text? OK. But first we’d like you to prove that you know what’s at stake in a line break. We too would like to crank open scholarly discourse to include the multimodal, to dislodge the research paper and the conventionally defined essay as the chief modes of scholarly production. But we would argue that this is best accomplished side by side with a renewed understanding of, and appreciation for, writing genres generally. These are, after all, the focus of our English studies expertise. Otherwise, student video essays are likely to reproduce in images the kinds of thought processes (speaking loosely) that guide conventionally defined essays. Either that or we’ll find the formal attributes of conventional Hollywood cinema or network television unwittingly transposed into video format.31 Simply put, critical reflection requires more, even if one begins with mimicry.32 We grant that the prospect of making video essays tends to excite today’s students, much as Glenn Ford found, at the dawn of the rock era, that cartoons excited his street kids in Blackboard Jungle. But let’s not kid ourselves as to what is actually being made. And even if the selection of genre or medium or cultural form is made a matter of (manual) ease and (distributed) convenience, who is to evaluate the degree to which such artifacts are successful, and how is evaluation to proceed? If we’re not evaluating writing, then on what do we predicate our evaluative expertise? The fact that we all watch a lot of movies, that we all spend a lot of time in front of multiple screens? Or is critical evaluation of

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the sort we have in mind—in essence, judgment rooted in valuations of the aesthetic—not simply provisional and contingent, but beside the point?

Three We submit that we find all of this deeply troubling, and while it may yet be the case that neuroscience research, for example, will reveal that reading and writing have all to do with how our brains function33 —hence, one would hope, providing further evidence that literary work can be vital both culturally and cognitively—at present, we see a rapprochement between (creative) writers and, we take it, (creative) composers less than likely. So perhaps we need to start talking about biparti—oops, inter- and intradisciplinary incentives. We might want, for instance, to take issue with the late Wendy Bishop’s claim that it is owing to an “elitist literary aesthetics” that “the creative writer’s version of creative nonfiction is undertheorized.”34 For one, that word, elitist, has been used far too often as a wedge in our exchanges, and now might be a good time to recuperate the “best or most skilled” from those other, less flattering uses of elite that denote “superior intellectual, social, or economic status.”35 Of course, there’s no free lunch in doing so, as “the best” opens the door to those thorny issues of judgment and taste. Perhaps Philippe de Montebello’s notion of “democratic elitism” might come in handy, or might come in for a beating à la Bourdieu? Either way, he did an estimable job, by most accounts, during his three-decade-long tenure at the Met.36 And why is it, anyway, that “undertheorized” invariably points to a particular domain of theory (literature, composition) and away from the sort of theorizing one finds in fine arts departments? Most contemporary artists have been attentive to that “drift . . . toward the conceptual” referred to above, and hence are already predisposed to theoretical critique. Compositionists might want to take a closer look at what goes on in the galleries across the quad. For that matter, those aforementioned “conventional scribes” would do well to recognize that literary art is not immune to theory; too often what passes for insight among such writers is a kind of watered-down craftspeak. The arts generally would seem to be more responsive than English studies to the formal demands of making as such, and to process in all of its manifestations, and somewhat less fascinated with the sort of attenuating critical abstraction that treats all artwork as merely symptom.37 There is so much here to consider. What about beauty, for instance? It’s simply not clear to us that critical pedagogues—or any instructors, for that matter—ought to dispense entirely with the concept. Whatever its problems, beauty provides conceptual entrée for interrogating the affective qualities of

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art, and students, like most people, would do well to examine the pragmatic consequences of the beautiful without shying away from the spirited exchanges that often ensue when we assert what we find beautiful, and why. That beauty has achieved endangered species status in many if not most undergraduate English classrooms, Dave Hickey’s popularity notwithstanding, is already a sign, in our view, that something has gone seriously awry.38 We only wish the disciplinary times could accommodate regular exchange among disciplinary cohorts. And we only wish we could be more resolute here, at essay’s end. Our sense is that composition practitioners may need to take a little more care in dismissing out of hand those aspects of art that are difficult to recuperate either under the sign of technique or reception, while literary artists may need to get down a bit with the theory mavens and take more responsibility for their effusions. Still, it’s a bit late in the postsecondary day to be positing such attitudinal changes, especially given the job market, the rise of contingent labor, casualization, and on and on.39 With both parties time and again having gotten off on the wrong foot, it’s difficult to say which foot the shoe is now on, as faculty seem more than willing to go their separate ways, if only to conserve precious resources of time, attention, and capital. In fact, it might prove necessary for creative writing and composition to go their separate ways—along with the literature wing of English departments (which wing has less and less to do, as we see it, with the making of literature, multimodal or otherwise)40 —for reasons of time, attention, and capital, and in light of the retrenchment and ideological gridlock we see in most directions we turn.41 To be fair, the parlous political and economic circumstances here in the United States and abroad—despite the renewed sense of hope many of us feel in the wake of the recent election—might be altering our view in unhelpful ways. At any rate we’re not sure what’s to be done about these— here is our less sanguine appraisal—depredations upon the creative, in or out of the classroom, even while we remain hopeful that what we’re dealing with, ultimately, is an endlessly renewable resource.42

Notes 1 Douglas Hesse. “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication, 62.1 (2010): 31–52. Print. 2 Let us acknowledge at the outset that our essay is rooted in a perennially contentious US ferment in which English departments are customarily divided up into (generally three but often more) wings, if you will: literary studies (which typically includes theory and criticism), composition (rhetoric, professional and technical writing, writing studies), and creative writing. (Fields like linguistics, TESOL, and publishing, if present, enjoy varying degrees of autonomy within this tripartite arrangement. Note that for our

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purposes, we’ll treat composition and rhetoric as a conjoined enterprise; such is not always the case, and it’s not unusual to find working differences between these two fields insofar as the status of aesthetic inquiry and, in particular, the relative value of rhetoric and poetics.) Paul Dawson has attempted to show how these divides, or at least creative writing and literary studies, might be better navigated—whether here in the United States, in England, or in Australia—by a dialogic turn toward what he calls “sociological poetics,” the better to energize public intellectual practice. We feel that this emphasis on social (in addition to aesthetic) discourse, apropos of any institutional agenda, does not adequately address the stubborn realities of the classroom, for one, and in particular, the issue of classroom authority (which is another way of saying that Dawson is weak on pedagogy), and more to the point, Dawson pays little attention to composition studies here in the United States and to the vast amount of research stemming therefrom that has been directed toward the teaching of creative writing. Full disclosure: we believe this is one reason why Dawson finds our earlier piece on creative writing pedagogy a “shambolic and meandering analysis” (172), albeit we grant that it is meandering. See Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher, “Reforming Creative Writing Pedagogy: History as Knowledge, Knowledge as Activism.” Electronic Book Review, 12 (Summer 2001), http://www.altx.com/ebr/riposte/rip2/ rip2ped/amato.htm. Web. For a nice survey of the profession of English studies in the United States—along with a more positive appraisal, by Katharine Haake, of our prior shambolic and meandering effort—see Bruce McComiskey, ed., English Studies: An Introduction the the Discipline(s). Urbana, IL: NCTE P, 2006. Print. And for a helpful compendium of essays on creative writing with contributions both from composition theorists and writers, see Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrum, eds., Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana, IL: NCTE Press, 1994. Print. 3 Cynthia L. Selfe and Pamela Takayoshi, “Thinking about Multimodality.” Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers, ed. Cynthia L. Selfe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007: 1–16. Print. Selfe and Takayoshi define multimodal writing as texts that “exceed the alphabetic and may include still and moving images, animations, color, words, music and sound” (1). The term has been popular in comp circles for the better part of a decade, even if those writing technologies and literacies now grouped under it have been around much longer, especially under the aegis of artistic artifact (think Beats). 4 Hesse, op. cit., 45. 5 Ibid., 49. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 49–50 (author’s emphasis). 9 Even during the early days of the Web, some theorists of electronic lit were comfortable using “composers” instead of writers. See, for example, Espen J. Aarseth, “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory.” Hyper/Text/Theory,

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ed. George Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994: 51–86. And then of course there’s the question of how writing as an art form might be reconceived in the light of things digital. For an expansive— perhaps too expansive—anthology of what its editors call “conceptual writing,” a term that has provoked some controversy as to the proper approach to poetic making, see Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston, IL: Northeastern University Press, 2010. Print. 10 The descriptor has become something of a buzzword. As Robert Austin writes, “So casually is the expression ‘knowledge work’ used that its meaning has become vague. In management research, we’ve tended to define it as work in which value is created primarily through manipulation of ideas or symbols, and which occurs primarily in intellectual domains. By this definition, there’s nothing new about knowledge work. It’s been the main activity of academic institutions for hundreds (maybe thousands) of years. What’s new is the degree to which it has ventured outside academia, into industry and other major institutions.” See “Managing Knowledge Workers.” Science July 21, 2006, http://sciencecareers. sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2006_07_21/ nodoi.17380138774649799586. Web. 11 See D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2006. Print. Myers has shown how divergence of the “constructive, developmental, and professional aspects” of college-level writing instruction prefaced creative writing’s emergence as a professional, and not simply expressive, pursuit (61). And apropos of the digital, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum details the many reasons why digital humanities has found a comfy home in English departments, beginning with the fact that “text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate” (60), from which follow the history of computers and composition, digital archiving and editing, new platforms for critical synthesis, data mining, and so much more. See “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin, 150 (2010): 55–61. Print. 12 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print. McGurl details how the past six decades of academic creative writing in the United States have contributed to what he calls “systematic creativity”; in particular, the production and dissemination of a wide range of influential works of fiction. It is in understanding the creative writing curriculum as shaping the very contours of such fiction that McGurl’s work yields startling insights both into the literature itself, its generative loci and effects, and into the writing workshops out of which it arises. 13 Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. 14 We have in mind here Ken Robinson’s (now animated) crib, “Changing Education Paradigms” (Cognitive Media, 2010), http://www.ted.com/talks/ ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html. Web. 15 Amato and Fleisher, op. cit.

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16 As of this writing, discourse surrounding the exponential growth of the online world, and social media in particular, is positively bipolar. Is it an E pluribus unum melting pot, or a site for global Balkanization, and in either case, should this be cause for celebration or alarm? As we’ve experienced goods and bads emerging both from wholeness and from fragmentation, we’ll refrain from citing the spate of recent texts whose authors seem compelled to take sides. 17 Hesse, op. cit., 49. 18 There’s a related history at stake here too, as detailed by Howard Singerman: “The origin of creative writing as a humanist practice—as both a critique and a continuation of the academic English department— situates the program in English and in the general college. In contrast, film history and theory, commonly housed in English or comparative literature departments, remain separate from filmmaking in schools of art or communication or film. A similar division takes place in theater studies, where the practice of theater and its history belong to the school of drama and its scripts to English or comp lit. The separate MFAs in acting, lighting, set design, screenwriting, and costume design offered in theater and film are specifically craft-based and professionally oriented, repeating the skilled divisions of production established by guild organizations and professional practices” (195–6). See Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Print. We would add only that local (institutional) histories don’t always align with national trends. 19 Hesse, op. cit., 43. 20 David Bartholomae, “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” College Composition and Communication, 46.1 (1995): 62–71. Print. 21 Hesse, op. cit., 47. 22 Ibid. 23 Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds, “From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude,” Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 9. Print. 24 Hesse, op. cit., 47. 25 Baldessari is quoted in Howard Singerman, “The Myth of Criticism in the 1980s.” X-TRA 8.1 (Fall 2005), http://x-traonline.org/issues/volume-8/ number-1/the-myth-of-criticism-in-the-1980s/ Web; Smithson is quoted in Jed Rasula, “Heeding the Heedless Sublime.” OmniVerse 33 (2013), http://omniverse.us/jed-rasula-heeding-the-heedless-sublime/. Web. It’s doubtless the case that the proclamations and manifestoes associated with what Thomas McEvilley identifies as the “anti-art” movements of the twentieth century, with which our own creative efforts are easily aligned, have brought us to where we are today. Whatever one makes of the status today of aesthetic discrimination or expertise, McEvilley’s concluding provocation is helpful: “Has anti-art triumphed in that it produced major social changes? The answer seems to be no. Second, has anti-art worked effectively through the superstructure to produce some shift toward

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greater sanity in the bourgeois mind that might someday with good luck contribute to significant social improvements? The jury’s out.” See The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 2005: 351–2. Print. Finally, Peter Plagens helpfully explains how an emphasis on talent in an art school setting might be viewed as undesirable because, among other things, it threatens to lower enrollment levels. See “Remember Talent? Does It Still Matter in Art Education?” The Chronicle of Higher Education July 8, 2013. Web. http://chronicle.com/article/Remember-Talent-Does-ItStill/140115/?cid=cr&utm_source= cr&utm_medium=en 26 Sianne Ngai’s inquiry into the zany, cute, and interesting rather undercuts such an agenda anyway. See Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Print. 27 Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, “The Creativity Crisis.” Newsweek July 10, 2010, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/10/thecreativity-crisis.html. Web. Granted, all such accounts ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as so many factors are entailed in simply establishing what we mean by “creativity.” 28 See, for example, Robert Finn, “MBA Programs Expand Career Prospects For Cross-Trained Scientists.” The Scientist, 9.13 (June 26, 1995), 14. Print. By the by, Donna Strickland has published a book that unpacks the managerial imperatives underwriting the history of composition studies. See The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Print. We can’t wait to read it. 29 Naturally we wouldn’t want our remarks here to be seen as an attempt to curtail narrative possibility, and in particular, to foreclose on the blurring of fact and fiction so prevalent in today’s (pseudo-, crypto-, mock-) documentary films, as problematized, for instance, by A. O. Scott. See “How Real Does It Feel?” The New York Times Magazine, December 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/magazine/12Reality-t. html?pagewanted=all. Web. Let a million flowers bloom, or seven-goingon-ten billion; learn what you have to learn to do what you want to do. But the public’s seemingly frenzied appetite for everything-goes cinema still raises the specter, at the very least, of student filmmakers who mistake an apparent freedom from (technical, improvisational, or content-specific) constraint for the inherent superiority of anything-goes expression. 30 In terms of developing drawing skills, for instance, and in our more fanciful moments, we rather like the PDF that The Andy Warhol Museum distributes free of charge. “Grades: 4 to 12.” See http://edu.warhol.org/pdf/ act_bld.pdf. 31 As Manohla Dargis has observed in a related vein, “Hollywood fed off the avant-garde while Hollywood, in the memorable phrase of the theorist Paul Arthur, became ‘the animating skeleton in the avant-garde film closet.’” See “Laboring in the Shadow of Hollywood.” The New York Times November 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/movies/avant-garde-cinema-ranparallel-to-hollywood.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Web. 32 See Nicholas Delbanco, The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Print.

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33 Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books.” The New Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2012, 134–9. Print. We are aware of course that mind and brain are not synonymous. 34 See Wendy Bishop, “Suddenly Sexy: Creative Nonfiction Rear-Ends Composition.” College English 65.3 (January 2003): 272. Print. 35 For a brilliant and historically astute analysis of how leftist aversion to expert knowledge has inadvertently served populist and anti-intellectual educational and social agenda, see Catherine Liu’s American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. Print. 36 For one such account, see Heather Mac Donald, “The Met’s Triumphant Democratic Elitism.” City Journal (Winter 2001), http://www.city-journal. org/html/11_1_urbanities-the_mets.html. Web. 37 Of course, from one perspective, art is symptomatic. One can detect here perhaps the inklings of a screed on the social function of aesthetic/literary work, a function that ought to be understood as moving beyond knowledge production and ideologically induced “structures of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s apt term) to cope squarely with ethical and even civil quandaries, in particular the role of agency in the midst of competing notions of contemporary authorship (solitary, collaborative, collective, anonymous, etc.). For us the aesthetic cuts far deeper than issues of style might suggest. For corresponding “demo tracks,” see Amato. 38 See, for example, Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997. Print. For a nice compendium of essays that critique and elaborate on beauty and its discontents, see if you can get your hands on a copy of Andrew Levy and Robert Harrison, eds., Crayon 5 (2008; distributed by Small Press Distribution). Print. 39 Of the many (polemical) books and articles addressing various facets of our once and future academic trauma here in the United States, Mark Bousquet’s is one of the best for getting a handle on the labor issues and how these can be understood as symptoms of the US service economy. While we don’t agree with all of Bousquet’s urgings, his heart and head are surely in the right place. 40 Beginning with The Rise and Fall of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, Print), Robert Scholes has pinpointed the disciplinary problems associated with positioning literature as the central preoccupation of (US) English departments. In Scholes’s more recent English after the Fall : From Literature to Textuality (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011, Print), he argues that English departments should divest themselves of their preoccupation with literature per se and focus on the rhetorical study of textuality generally to embrace a broader and presumably more relevant range of cultural artifacts. It’s worth noting that Scholes pays scant attention to creative writing as a disciplinary practice, and in particular, to its departure from the expository norms of scholarship. He would include the pleasurable powers of opera, for instance, in his renewed English department configuration. Very well then. Does this represent a substantive departure from English studies SOP? English scholars can bring anything they wish under their scholarly gaze, and in the past three or four decades, especially

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with the advent of cultural studies, just about everything has been up for grabs. For that matter, they’ve proved themselves awfully fickle when it comes to those things they have brought under their gaze. Just spend a little time talking with poets, who have looked on helplessly as poetry has waned to coterie status in most English departments, a development that Jed Rasula detailed in The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940 –1990 (Urbana, IL: NCTE P, 1996. Print). On the fiction side, and in light of the presumably “slow death of bookstores and the publishing industry,” Curtis White is far from sanguine about literature’s digital future, “damned” as it is in any case. See “The Latest Word,” Electronic Book Review, April 14, 2012, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/ fictionspresent/latest. Web. But a further desacralization of literary art troubles us not in the least, and a further decentering is a problem only to the extent that someone might get the idea literature is therefore of little social, human value. And while Toby Miller’s championing of a renewed media and publishing-savvy humanities curriculum as against an old hermeneutic guard may be on point, as far as it goes, it remains decidedly unclear how a curricular turn to multimodality or poiesis can, in themselves, revitalize our troubled profession, and we say this despite the fact that we’ve been busy here making the case against the former to the extent that it comprises a facile apprehension of the latter. See Toby Miller, Blow Up the Humanities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Print. One thing is certain: the world has gone, and will continue to go, digital, and whatever we do, we need to start where we find ourselves. 41 Hesse too suggests as much when he writes, with justifiable ambivalence, that “[f]rom a disciplinary perspective, it might seem best to have composition and creative writing continue to fork their separate paths.” See Hesse, op. cit., 42. 42 A special note of thanks to Douglas Hesse, our former colleague at Illinois State University, for his gracious response to our concerns. See Hesse, “Response to Clyde Moneyhun.” College Composition and Communication 63.3 (February 2012): 524–7. Print. And grateful acknowledgment is made to Something on Paper, where an earlier version of this essay appeared in November 2013; see http://www.somethingonpaper.org/amato-fleisher/. Web.

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8 Lost in digital translation: Navigating the online creative writing classroom Joseph Rein

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y first online teaching assignment was an introductory creative writing course offered over one of a former institution’s many summer sessions. My department hastily added this second section because the first section, taught by the incumbent online creative writing instructor, had accumulated a waitlist nearly double the enrollment capacity. With less than a month to prepare, I felt in many ways thrown into the fire. I had taught the course face to face before, but other than the aforementioned instructor’s syllabus as a guide, I received no preparatory material specific to online instruction. Still, I reveled in this challenge of building the course from the ground up, of navigating the online sphere as I went. I felt like a digital trailblazer of sorts. Years removed, I can now smile at my naïve optimism. The course had its peaks, as any course will, but the pitfalls were especially steep. I started with informal introductions among our newfound community and, from there, seemed to subsequently make mistake after mistake.1 Online discussions lacked the vivacity of my face-to-face courses; my lectures needed multiple clarifications, revisions, additions or subtractions; and though students produced good work, they seemed to grow little from beginning to end. I also felt shackled by the impersonal feel of the online setting; from behind my keyboard, I could almost feel the geographical distance between myself and

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my students. I felt, like Heather Beck, that our interactions never “achieved the intensity of debate that’s possible face to face with a lively group of students.”2 Not halfway through the course, I realized that my meager preparation for online teaching—which consisted mostly of experience in face-to-face creative writing classrooms and a basic knowledge of online course management systems—simply was not enough. I have since taught many subsequent online sections, which have benefited from a good deal of reflection and modification. Still, I do not consider myself an online teaching expert by any means. As such, what follows is not intended as an entire map for designing an online course. Rather, I have attempted to combine scholarship in creative writing studies and digital pedagogy to focus on those areas that presented particular challenges to me as a creative writing instructor. As Yelizaveta Renfro states, the “three common bedrocks of a creative writing classroom are (1) examining outside texts by published writers; (2) completing in-class or take-home writing exercises; and, of course, (3) discussing work written by the students.”3 In my experience, the first two translate rather easily: my assigned readings and required books have not changed, and aside from minor tweaks and rewording, neither have my assignments. However, the third and, I would argue, most important part of the triad—discussing student work, both in student–student and instructor–student interactions—alters drastically in the online sphere. On top of this, creative writing instructors often occupy multiple roles in the classroom, including, as Carl Vandermeulen notes, “model writer, listener and responder to students [. . .] as well as guide and encourager for their journey of becoming as artists.”4 Wearing these and other hats becomes challenging when the computer screen is our only means of building a presence. Creative writing instructors face a multitude of issues when attempting to recreate the human elements, the personal connections so prevalent, so necessary, to the traditional creative writing classroom.

On collaboration and the workshop Since its inception, creative writing as a discipline has utilized the workshop model as its primary pedagogical strategy.5 Recent scholarship in the field has both questioned and championed this method in its many forms.6 Whatever an instructor’s feelings toward the workshop model, she will likely find that the atmosphere created by the best—or worst—workshop cannot be simply recreated online. The online classroom often cannot deliver, among other things, the immediacy of face-to-face peer interaction; the joy and discomfort of each individual student when his work becomes the center of a pointed, live discussion; the vocal tones and facial expressions so often necessary in

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deciphering said discussion; the improvised but necessary tangents; and for instructors, those teachable moments where an issue in one student’s work highlights a larger course concept. Workshop as a face-to-face endeavor feels vital to creative writing because it is, as Graeme Harper states, “itself an event, a significant site of human action.”7 Taken online, this “event” often exists on an asynchronous discussion board or its equivalent and nowhere else. The “site of human action” becomes relegated to written responses, to words on a (web)page.8 Though the online sphere can necessitate such sacrifices, it can also cause instructors to revise the workshop model in useful ways. The first and most immediate benefit is that asynchronous discussions democratize the workshop. In nearly all of my face-to-face workshops, no matter what measures I take to prevent it, hierarchies eventually form. As Cathy Day states, workshop “suffers when its stars begin to shine too brightly.”9 I would go one step further: workshop “suffers when its stars” overrun the classroom, thus monopolizing or too heavily influencing the conversation. The predominant—and sometimes, simply the loudest—voices can convince their classmates that what “works” and what “needs improvement” align with their own specific aesthetics. On the other side of the coin, however, as professor of learning technologies Charalambos Vrasidas points out, “students can always reach a higher level of development when they collaborate with others that are already at a higher level of development.”10 Viewed in this light, the “stars” should not be discouraged, as their “shining” becomes a vital component to the success of all students. The difficulty for instructors, of course, lies in finding the middle ground. But the immediacy of the face-toface workshop, and its inclination toward the extroverted, can challenge even the most democratic of instructors. The asynchronous nature of online feedback, however, levels the playing field. For one, students can consider and articulate their responses in writing as opposed to discussing on the fly. Thus, students often feel as though they give—and receive—higher quality feedback. More importantly, everyone in class has a voice. No matter how many workshops I run, and no matter what methods I take to involve every student, inevitably a handful lower their eyes and shy away, acting more as bystanders than participants. I have a hard time penalizing these students, particularly if they provide thorough written feedback. The asynchronous online sphere still privileges the outspoken, based on the same principles of verbal communication: timeliness, verbosity, tone. However, discussion boards minimize the chance that these “stars” will overrun the course, because, although stronger personalities may still prevail, as Heather Beck states, “during online seminars, it’s . . . not possible for a single student to dominate without interruption.”11 Online students receive feedback from all peers, regardless of personality types.

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This does not solve, however, the problem of the asynchronous atmosphere creating a more limited, monologic form of communication. Requiring that students respond only to the work, and not each other, loses those impromptu moments when students must defend their position, revisit their initial reactions, or persuade—and even teach—one another in the process. An instructor can hope to foster an online atmosphere that encourages dialogic interaction, by suggesting students read each others’ responses, or even assigning a specific “participation” grade for such posts. Ambitious students will do so with little extra incentive, resulting in animated discussion boards. But rarely does the online instructor know what creates this engagement or when these lively discussion boards will happen. Often they just emerge naturally, irrespective of any change in instructional methods. One board will be active with detailed posts, while another will fizzle immediately after requirements are met. To counteract this, many scholars in digital pedagogy point to the necessity of putting the impetus on the students themselves, to “share the responsibility for facilitation with the participants . . . by assigning students responsibility for leading a portion of the discussion.”12 By stepping out of the role of discussion leader, an instructor can create an online atmosphere in which students feel more authority, and thus, more inclination to contribute. Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt call these students “process managers”13 or “facilitators of the discussion”;14 Jim Waters refers to them as “thought-leaders.”15 I prefer the term “advocates,”16 and assign one for each exercise. These advocates hold a slightly larger responsibility in the feedback process. As leaders of the discussion, advocates must present an overview of the work at hand—not a plot summary, but instead a broader look at the mechanisms within which the work operates—and begin discussion with initial impressions, both positive and constructive. Advocates post these responses early, often one day before all other responses are due. Thus, each student’s subsequent response must react to the work itself and to the conversation begun by the advocate. The students need not follow the advocate’s lead completely—I encourage them to pursue avenues the advocate may not have taken—but they must at least acknowledge her response in some way. This encourages students to respond not just to the advocate, but to other previous responses as well,17 thus closely replicating the improvisational and conversational aspects of the face-to-face workshop. Of course, as with any discussion-based pedagogy, this method’s success relies on class size. Online discussion boards for a course with 20-plus students can become cumbersome and counterproductive, thus discouraging participation. As such, I usually break the class into small groups of five to six students. As Palloff and Pratt state, “Incorporating small groups into an online course . . . helps to reduce possible information overload by minimizing the

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number of other students with whom one student communicates.”18 In even the most congenial face-to-face classrooms, students rarely learn everyone’s name; without faces, this becomes nearly impossible. The anonymity of online feedback would be fine if students relied only on the feedback itself. However, most creative writers tend to value certain peers’ opinions over others, and come to trust particular readers who understand and engage their work more fully.19 Narrowing down the names—giving each student four to remember instead of 20—can help students establish and better recognize those relationships. Whether the groups stay the same throughout the course or switch at a given point,20 the organizational structure of groups helps students familiarize themselves with each other, and thus build stronger feedback relationships. Of course, the small group structure has inevitable downfalls. Some groups will perform better than others. Online courses can also be susceptible to attrition, and shuffling groups is more complicated than a quick “musical chairs” in a traditional classroom. The benefits, however, far outweigh these challenges when an instructor views the immense, visually intimidating—the downright unwieldy—discussion board page for even one student’s full-class workshop.

On feedback The concept of “human action” becomes equally important when an instructor considers his own feedback to students. In their study on online instruction, Cassandra C. Lewis and Husein Abdul-Hamid revealed that exceptional online instructors “resoundingly reported that providing quick, quality, and in-depth comments is critical in maintaining a presence in the online classroom.”21 Most often, individual feedback on exercises, writing prompts, or other assignments provides the only consistent source of oneon-one interaction between instructor and student. And in creative writing, along with workshopping, this one-on-one instruction is perhaps the most critical of components. Students often enter a creative writing classroom with a heavy investment in their work, with high expectations for their evaluation and subsequent development as writers. If instructors consistently delay or, worse, fail to offer meaningful feedback, students may feel their investment has not been properly honored. As with class collaboration, instructor feedback can be surprisingly enhanced by the online sphere. In my face-to-face classrooms, I mark marginalia with blue pen—often in quick, quasi-legible handwriting—on the manuscripts themselves. I supplement this with a typed cover page that more thoroughly analyzes the larger issues. When confronted with stacks of

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exercises, I use this two-pronged method to balance efficiency and quality. Overall, my students seem—pardon the pun—marginally pleased. I feared that providing feedback online might be even more challenging. In a study of graduate students in an online setting, Beverley Getzlaf and others noted that students wanted “personalized messages that demonstrated to the learner that the students’ works had been read and evaluated” and instructors who “use [the student’s] name and use examples which reflected the learner’s situation or contributions.”22 It seemed that, without the benefit of a face-to-face relationship with students, as instructor I needed to do even more to personalize the feedback I provided. Thankfully, I discovered quickly that, with an online course, the options for feedback increase. Word processing programs offer multiple places and tools to incorporate typed feedback. In Microsoft Word, I have used the “Comments” tool for marginalia, “Track Changes”23 for any in-text commentary, and bold/ italic type for a summation paragraph at the end. I saw an immediate positive reaction to this form of feedback; in addition to a few anecdotal thank yous and emails, the metric for the feedback portion of my student evaluations improved. I attribute this not only to the legibility of the comments, but also to a newfound efficiency. Like many, I type significantly faster than I handwrite, and I was thus able to devote more time to each exercise. For example, on a student’s poem, instead of simply underlining a particularly strong metaphor and writing “nice image,” I instead detailed how the “image of the speaker’s eye as a camera reflects strongly on your final stanza, which evokes a similar image of ‘seeing the world in sepia tones.’” I found I could provide faster, and perhaps slightly better, feedback that I knew students could always read. During my most recent online course, a colleague introduced me to the idea of making audio or video recordings addressed directly to individual students. At first I shied away from doing so—providing timely feedback took enough time, and the thought of creating 20 audio or video files for just one assignment seemed daunting. Once I braved it, however, I found that making these short clips was often easier than providing typed material, and the amount of time I spent on each was comparable. Many classroom management systems now incorporate audio capture software, which easily attaches an instructor’s voice to individual student submissions. Even without, programs like Camtasia allow for easy screen capture with audio overlay. With these videos, an instructor can record student documents on her screen and discuss areas of the work as though she were sitting side by side with the student in her office. This audio/video recording simulates individual conferences, which I require once a semester in my face-to-face sessions, but which becomes logistically problematic24 in online-only courses. Though online conferencing tools such as Skype or Facetime offer good alternatives, I have found my students

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reticent, perhaps intimidated by the technology, by conflicts in scheduling, even by having their face or voice transmitted through their computers. As an instructor, then, I knew I need to bridge the gap; as Anna Leahy points out, “creative writing students expect a high level of interpersonal interaction” and “seem to appreciate the ah-ha moments of conferences in which [she creates] an opportunity for them to learn something specific and important about their own writing and even about themselves.”25 Although providing feedback through audio/video is not a dialogic conference, it can serve a similar function to what Leahy describes. Through simple inflection and tone of voice, an instructor can display her investment in her students’ work much better than typed language can. Also, unlike textual feedback, most students simply have never received feedback in this way and find the novelty of it engaging and empowering. The experience, on the whole, reaches closer to “interpersonal interaction” than comment boxes and even the most congenial of written commentary. In my course evaluations for my most recent online section of creative writing, students overwhelmingly preferred this type of feedback to any other, most likely because it accomplishes these interpersonal goals. For them, I became not only the fingers behind the keys of their feedback, an Oz frantically twisting knobs behind a curtain; I was now an active voice speaking directly to each of them, a personal connection between the general course concepts and the work in which they feel so invested.

On the digital persona One of the most difficult and yet critical aspects of online teaching involves creating and fostering a presence as an instructor. Palloff and Pratt emphasize this idea of developing a strong “social presence.”26 They note that “online there is a greater possibility for a sense of loss among learners—loss of contact, loss of connection, and a resultant sense of isolation” and that instructors thus must pay attention “to the intentional development of presence.”27 The physical distance between instructor and student can be felt even more acutely when an instructor does little to present herself as not only the teacher, or even a teacher, but a person as well. Add to this that, as a group, creative writing instructors tend to be an eclectic, eccentric bunch. Students and colleagues alike often employ the wonderfully ambiguous term “colorful.” I accept this label and choose to use it to my advantage in the classroom. Often I rely on my personality as much as my knowledge of the subject matter to hammer home an idea. Tangential asides, short personal anecdotes, brief discussions on current news, popular culture examples: I capitalize on those humanizing moments that display my

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position not just as professor, or writer, but as day-to-day person as well. And though pertinent for any discipline, these humanizing moments are particularly indispensable to creative writing, where we ask students not only to report on the world, but to artfully and articulately create it as well. Understandably, the online sphere diminishes the opportunities for these humanizing moments. Face-to-face interaction is limited, if not eliminated entirely. Many instructors find their entire persona limited to the language of lecture notes and assignment sheets—to, again, words on a page—where too many asides or personal quips feel forced instead of fluid, extraneous instead of supplementary. Add to this the fact that directions and basic course information must also be clearer. Whereas in a face-to-face classroom, instructors can hand out written assignment sheets and clarify with brief in-class discussion, in the online setting assignments must perform both tasks simultaneously. The written word not only prevails but necessitates a more straightforward, bare-bones—and often blander—delivery. In my trial-and-error efforts to create a strong digital persona, I have found two methods useful. The first required a leap of faith, as it involved something I’d never done in a face-to-face atmosphere: sharing my own work. Creative writing instructors in any setting confront this question: At what point should I share my writing? How much is appropriate? Is it appropriate at all? Audrey Petty states that “being a creative writing professor demands, for me, that I remain immersed in my own writing and share that experience as a teacher.”28 Similarly, Rachel Hall has performed writing exercises with her students, which “were workshopped when time permitted. In addition to making myself write, this sharing of my writing was valuable in establishing both the rigor of creative writing and my authority as a writer.”29 Both Petty and Hall find the incorporation of their own writing processes useful to their pedagogical aims. Hall even allows the students to critique her work, which simultaneously places her as instructor and peer, as teacher and learner. The risks of this approach can, however, outweigh the rewards. For one, students may use the instructor’s work to justify their predetermined impressions. In other words, those who like the instructor will often find reason to praise her work, while those skeptical of her or her course find enough flaws to justify their doubts. Students may also form opinions of the instructor separate from her ability to instruct them. Students invest too much into the “writer” aspect of her life, which can eschew the fact that, after all, the best writers are not necessarily the best instructors, the most effective people to guide the students’ own writing processes. However, in the online setting, sharing work can help instructors replace some of the repertoire-building moments that get lost in digital translation. This works particularly well as a counterbalance to the other language of

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the course. For example, if in one semester I find my assignment sheets and lectures too formal, I share my farcical story on local 4-H competitions. Conversely, if I have been particularly casual, I will share a somber story on the violent political situation in Mexico. This allows students to see another side of me, one that they likely cannot perceive from classroom correspondence. By sharing works-in-progress, or writings based on my own assignment prompts (as Hall does),30 I also display my vulnerability, my ability to err—in other words, my humanity. As “together” as I may seem (or may want to seem) as an instructor, as a writer I too struggle, a lesson which—for undergraduates who should struggle but feel that “being a writer” means never struggling—can be a refreshing eye-opener. Of course, in the digital age, the “choice” of revealing our works to students is a fallacy in itself. Often, students need only Google an instructor’s name to discover links to her work. But students in a face-to-face course also have the benefit of quick after-class chats, of spontaneous questions that put an instructor on her heels, of family photos or framed artwork on her office walls. The less personality an online instructor provides, the more students may feel inclined to unearth it, through venues such as campus or personal websites, other students’ opinions, or social media. Offering work saves students this unearthing process, while allowing instructors to tailor the work suitable to each particular class atmosphere. For my courses, though, I knew this wouldn’t be enough. I had to expand my personality beyond sharing work: indeed, beyond words on a page. For all the advantages of the online sphere, text remains the most basic—and for instructors and students alike, usually the most comfortable—method of information delivery. And aside from the individual audio/video recordings, everything else in my course was text. I tried putting my personality into this text as much as possible. However, filling my assignments and lectures with quirky or bubbly comments felt intolerable even to me after a short while: suddenly, I was trying too hard to be myself. As such, I have expanded the idea of audio/video feedback into what I’ve termed “Video Craft Lectures.” These lectures include—among other media— brief clips of me discussing the topic at hand. They allow me to show, model, or otherwise present concepts instead of simply describing or discussing them in print. Lewis and Abdul-Hamid describe an exemplary instructor who found that using tools such as videos “offers students another method of understanding and interacting with the course content while capitalizing on the web-based environment of the course.”31 This capitalization on web tools seems important, even necessary, to successful online classrooms. Students in online courses become accustomed to the multimodal functionality of computer screens, to multitasking while learning. They may have open, at any given time, a news website, Facebook, a video game, a Youtube clip,

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and a music player. Asking students to sit and read lecture after lecture on a course management homepage simply didn’t utilize technology in the ways that make online instruction interesting or exciting. Unlike the feedback videos, however, these videos require a few more bells and whistles. Instructors who choose to make such videos for lectures or any other course content32 have a variety of programs from which to choose. In my short time, I’ve used iMovie, Windows Media Maker, and Camtasia.33 Each program presents up and downsides, but each makes the video-making process relatively simple. This simplicity is crucial; if it takes too long for me to make a video, I am far less inclined to do more. The videos have diminishing returns as well, as students’ attention to online videos only holds for so long. When creating a video, I adhere to three basic rules: stick to one concept (or one work); speak loudly and quickly; and finally, cap each video length at five minutes. Of course, starting out with these videos, I made some common mistakes. First and foremost is what I now refer to as the “long-take syndrome.” In film, a long take refers to one continuous shot with little to no camera movement.34 When recording videos, I found that the seconds add up in a hurry. What feels like five seconds of talking into a camera is often closer to 25. The speed and influx of media today have conditioned students—all of us—to faster takes, rapid shifts in focus, more movement. Watching most contemporary TV shows or movies for the speed of each “take” highlights this surprisingly fast pace and also how adapted we have become to it as consumers. I’m not suggesting that videos need be edited like a Michael Bay film, but I did find a correlation between the length of my takes and the attrition rate of views for my videos. In other words, the longer my takes, the less inclined students became to watch subsequent videos. Watching these first attempts again, I can sympathize. A minute of my face talking into the camera felt like a lifetime. With that in mind, I now limit my takes when possible, interweaving my own face/voice with images, Powerpoint slides or Prezis, PDF scans of the work under discussion, graphics, even short online clips. Creating videos with variety—videos closer to the contemporary media to which students are conditioned—can help students better register concepts and stay engaged. Dynamic videos also increase the chance that students will watch more than once, or come back later in the semester, to revisit concepts that they didn’t quite understand on their first pass. With these videos, I feel I am “capitalizing on the web-based environment of the course”35 in ways written lectures fail to do. To my surprise, and delight, I also found that these videos had more success when they were not technically perfect. In my feedback, students often preferred those “human” moments when I tripped over words, laughed at myself, or had to change rooms because of a crying child in the background.

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In other words, the effectiveness of these videos—the ability of students to take away important information and remain engaged—did not rely on production value.36 These minor slip-ups became the happy accident that furthered my mission toward fostering a digital persona. As I prepare for another online introductory creative writing course, I find myself tempted to reuse videos wholesale from past offerings. Uploading the same videos to different courses is a cinch, and after all, I will for the most part present the same information. This temptation wanes, however, when I remember that the information presented is only partly the point.37 Every time I include these video craft lectures, my students’ feedback includes comments not just on the content delivered but on contemporary references that seem (more or less) relevant: recently published popular novels, student events held on campus, new releases at the box office, the wax and wane of another Packers season. Creating new videos also allows me to discuss comments or concerns specific to that course, to highlight a student’s particularly astute observations, or even to discuss strengths in student work, which personalizes the experience. Thus, I often reuse portions that speak more broadly, but tweak the particulars to address a given course’s needs. The time I invest in doing so is often no more than the time necessary to make subtle adjustments to lesson plans in my face-to-face courses. I have found both indispensible to my success and growth as an instructor. Creating and maintaining a persona presents one of the greatest challenges to an online instructor. However, the one who tackles this problem head-on, by providing students her personality in a variety of forms, will often be rewarded with a more dynamic classroom atmosphere. In the literary world, we are judged primarily by our language use, by those words on a page. In the online classroom, this shouldn’t have to be the case.

Conclusion Higher education has pursued online instruction for many reasons, most of which are increasingly valid: accessibility, affordability, and job market demands for online literacy, just to name a few. As a result, universities are offering more courses in more disciplines in the online sphere. The question now confronting creative writing studies is not when, but how ; how can we alter, enhance, or personalize the online experience to best achieve our institutional and disciplinary aims? What features of, or supplements to, online managing systems will help our students achieve results similar to—or even beyond— those in face-to-face settings? As Ritter and Vanderslice suggest, one of the largest questions facing creative writing instruction up to this point has been: Can it really be taught?38 This question, though complex, can be—and in many

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ways has been—answered with a resounding yes. The question has now become: How can it best be taught? The answers, of course, are numerous and multifaceted. When compounded with the expanding definition of such traditional terms as “classroom” or even “campus,” the question becomes even more challenging, more nebulous, and will entail constant study and critique, constant reassessment and practice. It is a question that mirrors the online sphere itself, and the ever-changing technological world in which we now live.

Notes 1 Two that come immediately to mind: (1) assuming, instead of rewarding, participation in discussions, and (2) not providing a workshop “Plan B” for the (unfortunately all-too common) situation where students fail to hand in exercises on time. 2 Beck, Heather. “Teaching Creative Writing Online.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing , 1.1 (2004): 32. Print. 3 Renfro, Yelizaveta. “Making the Pieces Come Together: A Practical Example.” Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy, eds. Chris Drew, Joseph Rein, and David Yost. New York: Continuum, 2012: 44. Print. 4 Vandermeulen, Carl. “The Double Bind and Stumbling Blocks: A Case Study as an Argument for Authority-Conscious Pedagogy.” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, ed. Anna Leahy. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005: 49. Print. 5 The seminal work on the workshop’s history is D. G. Myers’ The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print. 6 For a comprehensive study of the contemporary discussions on the workshop model, see Dianne Donnelly’s Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2010. Print. 7 “Foreword: On Experience,” Does the Writing Workshop Still Work, xvi. 8 For a synchronous experience, an instructor may utilize online classrooms (such as Collaborate) for audio or even video chats between students. This requires a time commitment, however, if the instructor wishes to facilitate these discussions. (And if not, a good deal of faith in students to participate.) Scheduling can also pose problems, as online students often take such courses because of busy or irregular work/life circumstances. 9 Day, Cathy. “Where Do You Want Me To Sit? Defining Authority through Metaphor.” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, ed. Anna Leahy. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005: 159. Print. 10 Vrasidas, Charalambos. “Constructivism Versus Objectivism: Implications for Interaction, Course Design, and Evaluation in Distance Education.”

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International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 6.4 (2000): 352. Print. 11 Beck, “Teaching Creative Writing Online,” 35. 12 Palloff, Rena and Keith Pratt. Building Online Learning Communities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007: 173. Print. 13 Ibid., 121. 14 Ibid., 173. 15 Waters, Jim. “Thought-Leaders in Asynchronous Online Learning Environments.” Journal of Asynchronous Learning Environments, 16.1 (2012): 19–33. Print. 16 I have borrowed the term “advocate” from a former professor, Liam Callanan, who in his face-to-face workshops used this term in a similar way that I describe here. 17 I say may because, again, this doesn’t always happen. 18 Palloff, Rena and Keith Pratt. Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005: 77. Print. 19 A sentiment I wholly endorse. Often students wonder how to continue their writing beyond the classroom, and I offer this advice first: find those readers who understand your work and intentions (and vice versa), and create a writing group. These relationships often start in the creative writing classroom and can form just as easily online. 20 In previous sections, I have let my students decide this via majority (and, of course, anonymous) vote. Another option is random group-selection for different assignments, a feature of many current course management systems. 21 Lewis, Cassandra C. and Husein Abdul-Hamid. “Implementing Effective Online Teaching Practices: Voices of Exemplary Faculty.” Innovative Higher Education 31.2 (2006): 91. Print. 22 Beverly Getzlaff, et al. “Effective Instructor Feedback: Perceptions of Online Graduate Students.” The Journal of Educators Online, 6.2 (2009): 10. Print. 23 Though useful, this was the first tool I dropped. It seems more suited for editing than instruction. 24 If not unethical, many students take online courses because they cannot come to campus on a regular basis. For example, in one summer session, I had online students learning from the United States, Brazil, Ecuador, and Ireland all at once. 25 Leahy, Anna. “The Value and Cost of Nurturing.” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, ed. Anna Leahy. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005: 22. Print. 26 Palloff and Pratt, Building Online Learning Communities, 31. 27 Ibid. 28 Petty, Audrey. “Who’s the Teacher? From Student to Mentor.” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, ed. Anna Leahy. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005: 84. Print. 29 Hall, Rachel. “The Pregnant Muse: Assumptions, Authority, and Accessibility,” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The

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Authority Project, ed. Anna Leahy. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005: 96. Print. 30 Unlike Hall, however, I do not ask my students to workshop my writing as part of the class structure. I offer them the opportunity to comment if they so choose, but do not require it. 31 Lewis and Abdul-Hamid, “Implementing,” 94. 32 I also make short “technical help” videos to demonstrate basic course navigation. 33 Learning these new programs can be cumbersome. However, the learning curve is shallow, and after only a few weeks, I substantially cut the amount of time necessary to make a video (often less than 15 minutes). 34 A technique with which Hitchcock most famously experimented in his film Rope. 35 Lewis and Abdul-Hamid, “Implementing,” 94. 36 Aside from, of course, avoiding the “long take syndrome.” 37 I also fear my videos looking (and feeling) quickly outdated. 38 Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice. Can It Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2007. Print.

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9 Giving an account of oneself: Teaching identity construction and authorship in creative nonfiction and social media Janelle Adsit

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hen we begin a creative writing course, we do not begin from a blank page. No student is a tabula rasa; each comes to the writing class having years of experience with writing and communicating, with telling stories and persuading others. What’s more, many of our students are already publishing with tweets, status updates, and posts. The digital age challenges the lore that our students are far from being able to publish anything. In fact, some of our students’ Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts have a larger audience than some small-press, “literary and little” journals will ever see. Douglas Hesse, in a 2010 article, cites Kathleen Yancey’s comment that the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a “writing culture.” Hesse references a Seed magazine piece that claims we are on the verge of “nearly universal authorship”—with nearly everyone publishing work read by at least 100 people.1 In this constant stream of newly produced text—appearing online and in print—there is much writing about the self. “We live in an era surfeited with memoirs,” Tracy Kidder writes.2 These memoirs come not just in book form, but also appear on social networking platforms and websites. As writers document their lives through various media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,

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Pinterest, Storify), our students are already memoirists of a kind. If “the essay is the closest thing we have . . . to a record of the individual mind at work and play,”3 as Scott Russell Sanders says, the digital age has offered us more versions of the essay—more records of the mind at work. In the digital age, “more and more, we think in public.”4 Of course, there are important differences between posting online and formally publishing creative nonfiction.5 Nonetheless, one can place socialnetwork updates in a lineage that is shared with memoirs—as Kenneth Goldsmith does when he writes, “Social networking updates . . . like so many shards . . . accumulate into a grand narrative of life.”6 For some, the motivation to post a status update comes from an impulse to document life—an impulse that can also give rise to memoir. One cannot fully catalog the manifold reasons a writer might have for composing a tweet or personal essay,7 but among them is the compulsion to both record and to tell: I think of the student who said in my class, “There are things that happen that I just have to post on Twitter.” Putting creative nonfiction alongside online discourse is a way of reframing the teaching of this genre and an opportunity to revisit the status of art—the criteria by which we separate literary personal narrative8 from the mundane status-update anecdote. Below, I offer an outline of a creative nonfiction course that raises such aesthetic questions while teaching students to analyze the selves they put forward as narrators.9 I present the following sketch of an undergraduate creative writing course to illustrate a larger claim: that there is much to be gained from complicating our students’ familiarity with presenting themselves online in the context of a creative nonfiction classroom. Students can learn to be self-reflexive about their performances of self in online writing as they consider the craft of turning oneself into a character called “I” in creative nonfiction. From the perspective of a literary practitioner, the course takes up the question posed by Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself : of what does my “I” consist?10 In my own courses, I’ve used versions of some of the following assignments, along with the suggested readings. The course asks students to perform what Tim Mayers calls “craft-criticism.”11 The course is intended to help students not only gain practice with creative writing but also gain new language to speak about their work. Fostering this metadiscursive talk—including the ability to reflect on issues of process, authorship, genre, craft choices, etc., in writing—should be part of the work of academic creative writing.12

Find your voices The requirement for an “authentic voice” continues to appear on the pages of creative writing textbooks. Indeed, Goldsmith generalizes that creative

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writing “is still mostly wedded to promoting an authentic and stable identity at all costs.”13 It is this tendency in creative writing—and in memoir, more specifically—that puts contemporary literature “in a rut, tending to hit the same note again and again,” in Goldsmith’s view.14 If Goldsmith is right, instruction in memoir writing has yet to fully disrupt its assumptions about the selfhood of the narrator-writer—a set of assumptions that have been, as Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh note, discredited by postmodern critical theory. Morton and Zavarzadeh list the following problematic assumptions, many of which are still present in creative writing’s instructional discourse: “the integrity of ‘experience,’ . . . the individual ‘voice,’ the ‘authority’ of the author, uniqueness of ‘style,’ . . . ‘originality,’ and ‘intuition’.”15 The lexicon that Morton and Zavarzadeh quote here is rooted in a conception of the author-self—a stable, integrated, unique, original self who must have freedom to express his or her own genuine voice. Creative writing has not fully departed from this lexicon, in part because it has not yet found an adequate alternative discourse. Instead, discourses of creative writing continue to circulate ideas about the uniqueness of the authorial voice that date from centuries ago in the aesthetic tradition. In the first century BC, Philodemus claimed that the goodness of a poem consists of a “unity of form and content, and a consequent individuality contributed by the poet.”16 These ideas of the individual author-self, who discovers his or her own, one-of-a-kind voice, are also often associated with the Romantic tradition.17 As we seek new aesthetic vocabularies after the so-called postmodern turn, we should remember that essayists have for centuries denied the stability of the self. Indeed, as Thomas Newkirk notes, essayists dated as far back as Montaigne have rejected this notion.18 And creative nonfiction textbooks—in particular, those written or edited by scholars in composition and rhetoric like Robert Root and Sondra Perl—explicitly call into question notions of authenticity or a “genuine voice.”19 Poets of several schools, including those associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics, have also found resources for questioning this lore of the “lyric self.” Nonetheless, the mantra “find your voice” (with “voice” here in the singular form) still remains present in academic creative writing discourse. The unique and coherent individuality of the writer remains part of the lore of creative writing—lore that our students probably believe before signing up for a creative writing course, given its presence in popular culture and the preponderance of films, TV shows, and books about writers. We need to give our students a different understanding of the writer’s relationship to voice—to challenge the tendency to see personal writing as a “natural, ‘free’ representation of self.”20 I am most interested in how this reinvestigation can be conducted through the teaching of creative nonfiction in relation to online writing. If we help our students to recognize that all writing, including personal writing, “is a performance of self,”21 the conventions of selfhood that a

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writer invokes become visible for scrutiny. We can raise the question for our students: How do we constitute the subjecthood of the “I” on the page in personal writing? Posing a question like this in the classroom is an opportunity to introduce terms like “code-switching”22 through an in-class exercise. To approach this concept, I like to ask my students to imagine writing a query letter for the following freelance writer positions: a comedy writer for the Onion, a contributor to Science magazine, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, a greeting card writer for Hallmark, and a contributor to elitedaily. com. After familiarizing the class with these organizations and publications, I ask: Why and how would the writing need to be tailored for each publication venue? What distinguishes the voice, style, emphases, and assumptions of each of these publications? What kinds of writers are these publications looking for? Do the writers of each publication have different identities, different voices?23 After posing these questions, I introduce students to the creative nonfiction writer Gerald Callahan. Callahan’s personal essay “Chimera” is often anthologized in creative nonfiction texts. I ask the students to read “Chimera” and we discuss how Callahan’s background in immunology contributes to his creative writing. After a discussion of “Chimera,” I ask the students to engage with two other texts written by Callahan: an article titled “Eating Dirt,” which was published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and a science paper titled “Fibrosarcoma Cells Expressing Allogeneic MHC Class II Antigens Induce Protective Antitumor Immunity.” From the titles alone, the students can readily identify markers of different “codes” that Callahan switches into as he writes for different audiences and in different contexts. Callahan provides a clear example of how a writer’s identity may shift as he moves from one discourse community to the next. Students readily see that Callahan, as an authorial self, transforms each time he makes use of a different set of conventions, associated with each different genre and audience. Engaging with Callahan’s texts can prepare students to look more closely at the tonal and performative shifts that take place within creative nonfiction. I like to follow the Callahan exercise with a close reading of a set of creative nonfiction essays written by a single author. For instance, a discussion could compare the persona that is created in Terry Tempest Williams’s “Prayer Dogs” in comparison with the voices that are utilized in Williams’s book-length study in voice, When Women Were Birds. These texts provide an opportunity to test William James’s suggestion that “we may have as many social selves as the number of social situations we face”24 or, I would add, the number of literary texts we try to write. The analytical exercises I describe instruct students that code-switching is a powerful tool for creative writers.25 Creative writers have many voices in their repertoire. We are, as William Matthews says, “an anthology of selves.”26

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Aesthetic requirements of the author-self Creative writers code-switch to adapt to the different expectations and values of different audiences. A writer is always conditioned by the aesthetic demands of audiences. For example, Thomas Newkirk observes that, when evaluating students’ personal essay writing, teachers tend to require that “The self ‘presented’ in the [personal] essay is one open to the transformative potential of even ‘minor’ experiences.”27 In other words, Newkirk finds a common aesthetic requirement of the student-writer’s ethos: that the “I” on the page must be open to new discoveries, must be able to change in some way over the course of the essay. Similar to what Newkirk identifies, Phillip Lopate’s aesthetic requirements of the writer’s ethos are stated in the following terms: in instructing personal essay writers to “highlight just those features in your personality that lead to the most intense contradictions or ambivalences,” Lopate encourages the “I” on the page to be a complex explorer, with contradicting valences. 28 In offering instruction on issues of craft, as Lopate does, we implicitly or explicitly teach the forms of self-performance that we find aesthetically preferable. We may enjoy the idea of the rogue writer who bucks against social constraint, saying, as Lopate does, that “Literature is not a place for conformists.”29 But even the expectation of non-conformity is a demand of the writer’s ethos: In warning against “try[ing] so hard to be likable and nice, to fit in,” Lopate asks writers to construct an ethos that doesn’t entirely “fit in” to bland social convention.30 Whether or not we share the aesthetic expectations that Newkirk and Lopate describe, we should raise the topic of our own expectations of the writer’s ethos, and we should prompt our students to examine the expectations of the authorial self they find in other craft essays. What expectations are placed on the persona that is produced in personal writing? In a semester-length course, one would only be able to begin to point to the complexities of the construction of ethos. The aesthetic requirements placed on an author-self are always context dependent and contingent. Different readerships have different aesthetics, different preferences, as well as different demands of the authors they read. Because it’s impossible to make adequate generalizations regarding such a complex issue, it’s best to look at specific case studies. Ander Monson’s online and in-print writing can prompt analysis of how authorial ethos is constructed in different media forms. This exercise can provide students a larger lexicon for describing how ethos is constructed. The assignment can be followed by an in-class discussion of the way readers respond to authorial identities. How does Monson create, meet, and challenge our expectations of him? The conversation can prompt students to think about

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the social existence of authorial selves: How are authors shaped by the social networks in which they participate? How is Monson responding to the values, interests, proclivities, and assumptions of certain literary communities? The discussion helps to complicate students’ understanding of the way ethos is produced.

The interplay of online and print texts in constructing an author-self There are many creative nonfiction writers, like Monson, who have online presences: Sherman Alexie, Mary Karr, Stephen Elliott, among others. It is useful to compare and contrast how authors’ online presences support or complicate the ethos they’ve constructed on the page. The class could examine, for instance, the authorial identity of Alain de Botton, whom Thomas Beller calls “a modern-day Heraclitus,” in characterizing de Botton’s Twitter feed.31 De Botton’s Heraclitean tweets are an extension of his book projects, as he sometimes quotes from his books and most of his tweets are relevant to the subject matter of his oeuvre. For de Botton and others, Twitter becomes a means not only of publicity but also of developing and extending an authorial identity.32 In the digital age, discussions of authorship in the classroom should include the marketing and consumption of the author’s identity online. There’s a tendency to dismiss marketing as a bow to commercialism; accept publicity as a necessary evil but don’t look too closely, the ethos of literary creative writing leads us to say. But we would do well to make marketing a subject of our analysis in the creative writing classroom, to see it as a discursive extension of an authorial self.33 It’s the author function at work. Terry Tempest Williams’s Twitter account, for instance, is a continuation of the activist project that guides much of her creative nonfiction writing. Williams’s attention to the marginalized and silenced, in ecology and the Western landscape, are interests she takes from the page to the online space. As we find continuity between her formally published writing and the informal publishing she does on Twitter, she becomes a type of author. Her typified authorial identity corresponds with and creates a consumer identity, a readership. We come to expect a certain type of writing from Terry Tempest Williams because she has constructed an authorial identity on and off the page.34 After students study these authors’ works, in class discussion I ask them to consider what motivates writers—themselves and other creative writers like Alexie, Karr, Elliott, Alain de Botton and Williams—to post online. What

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content doesn’t get posted? Thinking about these authors’ contexts, by what criteria are Facebook status updates and Twitter posts judged as “good”? Following a discussion of these questions, I ask students to examine their own online presence with an essay prompt that, following Monson’s Vanishing Point, will have them compose an intertextual essay that repeatedly refers to content that they have posted online (e.g. on their website, blog, YouTube videos, Facebook profile, Twitter feed, Pinterest account, etc.). I ask students to run a Google search of their names and reflect on the identity they perform online. I require students to attempt something unanticipated with the assignment—to make surprising connections or strange comparisons. The essay becomes an opportunity for students’ to begin to complicate their own ideas of authorship. I encourage students to use second-person point of view for this exercise because it can help them to distance themselves from their own construction of themselves as an “I.” Think about how you decide what to post, I ask them. What motivates you to post what you do? When you write, do you think about the people who will read your content (e.g. your friends on Facebook or your followers on Twitter)? Are there certain subjects that you discuss on Twitter but not on Facebook? I also encourage students to do something unexpected with this assignment. For instance, they could experiment with including photos or graphics in their essay. They also can be encouraged to write about more than one subject at once: for instance, an essay might explore surprising connections between whale communication, the marketing of Doritos (à la Monson), and the student’s online presence. Some students will readily assent to the idea, presented in Phillip Lopate’s craft essay “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” that every time I say “I” that “‘I’ is not me, entirely, but a character drawn from aspects of myself.”35 This essay prompt asks students how they go about choosing those aspects of the self they present in public, online forums. Students could also be given the option to complete this assignment with a partner, examining a peer’s online identity rather than their own. I follow this writing exercise with further discussion of their emerging texts and exploration of their online presences. I ask, how does what you post, along with what you choose to publically “like” with the click of a star on a social networking interface, contribute to your online identity? What would a stranger think of you if they read/watched everything you posted online? How has the content you’ve posted changed over time? What motivates you to post what you do? When you write, do you think about the people who will read your content, such as your friends on Facebook or your followers on Twitter? Are all of the subjects you write about on Twitter and Facebook also subjects you would write about in a personal creative nonfiction essay? Are there certain subjects that you would discuss in creative nonfiction, but not elsewhere?

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Heteroglossic self I also use a “pastiche essay” assignment, which serves to problematize common notions of an original, autonomous self and emphasizes that we are, in Judith Harris’s terms, “socially circumscribed by the language and the culture [the self] represents.”36 This pastiche essay writing assignment works to reveal the ways we are constituted by language that is beyond our control and asks students to play with the hybridization and conflation of multiple discourses. While Scott Russell Sanders, following Emerson, calls on essayists to “cast off the hand-me-down rhetoric of the day,”37 the following pastiche essay exercise encourages students to make use of the language of the day in complex ways in order to highlight the heteroglossia that forms the writing subject—the way that we are always in relation to multiple, intermixing codes.38 To begin, I ask students to record some of the words and phrases that they type or speak in a day. I remind the students that the word “memoir” has been defined as a written record of what a person experiences, so it is appropriate that this personal essay assignment requires them to do some self-recording. I encourage the students to take a multimodal approach to their self-recording: they can take photos and screenshots, make photocopies, and transcribe by hand. To encourage more surprising and creative thinking, I recommend that the students do not record any information about the contexts that gave rise to their words. The students need not list the replies they receive from others, the circumstances that prompt them to speak or write, the forums in which they communicate, or the media that shaped their texts.39 I then ask the students to bring their initial self-recording to class for a discussion of code-switching, ambiguity, how context informs meaning, heteroglossia, and so on. Part of the goal of this exercise is to get students to pay attention to the language they use. Would some of the phrases on the list be considered a “strange thing to say” in certain contexts? To what extent is communication a repetition of what the communicator has heard before? What would it mean to write or speak in a “truly original” way? When, if ever, are the students being “truly themselves”? What would it mean to be “truly oneself”? And is language ever “our own”? What does it mean to have a claim to your “own language”?40 The class discussion can also consider whether the recorded list of mundane voicings is itself an interesting work of literature. Goldsmith argues that an inventory of the mundane can be aesthetically interesting because it allows “the reader to connect the dots and construct narratives in a plethora of ways.”41 I ask the class: Is Goldsmith right? Does an “inventory of the mundane” engage a reader literarily, or would it be narcissistic to think that an inventory like this has inherent interest?

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I then assign students to rework their list of self-recording. I have them select, perhaps through randomized means, ten phrases from the list that they recorded in the initial part of the assignment. I then help them to link their ten phrases to associations through mental recall or through Google searches. I require that students amass at least five pages of content through these associative means. Following Goldsmith, I encourage the students to copy and paste from other sources language that they find memorable or compelling. They then are responsible for reframing and remaking the language into a creative nonfiction essay, following Goldsmith’s suggestion that “she who reframes words in the most charged and convincing way will be judged best” in literature.42 I remind students that creative nonfiction is a capacious genre, one that allows you to be double-voiced and exploratory. The discussion following this assignment focuses on the writing that students bring to class.43 To start the conversation, I put the following sentence from Goldsmith up on the board: “If my identity is really up for grabs and changeable by the minute—as I believe it is—it’s important that my writing reflect this state of ever-shifting identity and subjectivity.”44 Goldsmith’s sentence can produce a conversation about the risks and possibilities of highlighting the changeability and opacity of the self in writing. We can emphasize that intertextuality does not mean that “anything goes” in writing. I find convincing Judith Butler’s claim that “the citationality of discourse can work to enhance and intensify our sense of responsibility for it.”45 Recognizing the competing codes that form us can increase our attention to—and accountability for—the language we use and the ways we perform the self.

Conclusion Personal essay writing seems to be perpetually near accusations of solipsism and self-indulgence, but the course described here aims to keep the social in full view. These discussions can help us to, in Lopate’s terms, begin to see ourselves “in the round: a necessary precondition to transcending the ego—or at least writing personal essays that can touch other people.”46 Personal writing, online and in print, does more than document a life: it may be a means of sustaining and renewing our relation to social spheres.47 This capacity can be realized if we put the essay, as a genre, up for critical examination to better understand the intermediated relationship between self and text in a multimedia world. The discussions and assignments outlined above, which explore codeswitching, the aesthetics of heteroglossia, intertextuality, and intersubjectivity, work to question the relationship between the self and others. How are we

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formed by socially produced discourses that come from outside ourselves? The course serves to prompt self-questioning, or what Judith Butler describes as moments where “I come into question for myself,”48 which is key to personal creative nonfiction. The personal essay can be understood as testing an unknown (or not fully known) self that is formed by complex, conflicting discourses. We can situate personal creative nonfiction writing in a lineage of “giving an account of oneself,” a lineage John Rajchman describes as including “the Socratic activity of providing an account of one’s living”:49 Christian confession, Cartesian meditation, and modern psychotherapy, testimony, along with versions of a writer’s examined life. Analytical discussions about the crafting of an “I” on the page, such as those prompted by the assignments outlined above, can, in a Foucauldian way, call into question our motivations and ability to tell the truth about ourselves. Having students examine the stories they already tell can allow them to more fully account for their performances of self—even as the self necessarily remains opaque and conditioned by circumstances beyond its control.50 At the same time, as we think of the personal essay as a form of self-study, we can also think of it as a form of transformative self-experimentation. The French verb essayer means to attempt, to experiment—which is to seek and test the unknown. The assignments described above are meant to make the most of the experimental capacities of creative nonfiction as they also build from what students’ already know about writing through their participation in online communities. The discussions that this course prompts help draw out students’ assumptions about identity construction in writing, while putting up for examination the “aesthetics of the self” forwarded by craft essays and literary texts. This course is also meant to illustrate how poststructuralist theories of subjectivity can have bearing on the creative nonfiction writer’s craft. The course I describe adopts the view that the creative nonfiction essay is a “site for the operation of contesting discourses”51 and an opportunity to explore how these contesting discourses shape textual and extratextual selves.

Notes 1

See Douglas Hesse. “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication, 62.1 (2010): 45. Print. In this article, Hesse cites Kathleen Blake Yancey, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College Composition and Communication, 56.2 (2004). Print, and Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow. “A Writing Revolution.” Seed Magazine (2009), January 17, 2013. Print.

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2 Tracy Kidder. “Courting the Approval of the Dead.” The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers on/of Creative Nonfiction, eds. Robert L. Root and Michael Steinberg, 2nd edn. New York: Longman, 2002: 277. Print. 3 Scott Russell Sanders. “The Singular First Person.” I & Eye: Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, eds. B. Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005: 74. Print. 4 Thomas Beller. “The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing.” The New Yorker, June 18, 2013. Print. 5 For instance, one is perhaps more likely to post anonymously or pseudonymously online—which in turn allows for more selfexperimentation and fictionalized representation than is sometimes accepted in the ethics of creative nonfiction. 6 Kenneth Goldsmith. Uncreative Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011: 176. Print. Confirming that these online media do document real lives in the vein of memoir, Belk finds that “blogs, forums, and social media normally involve real-life issues and real-life representations of self.” See Russell W. Belk. “Extended Self in a Digital World.” Journal of Consumer Research, 40 (2013). Print. 7 James Porter notes some of the motivations that people have for posting online, which may come in addition to or in substitution for economic motives: “people write because they want to interact, to share, to learn, to play, to feel valued, and to help others.” James E. Porter, “Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric.” Computers and Composition, 26 (2009): 219. Print. 8 The creative nonfiction course I describe focuses on personal essay writing and memoir. In conceptualizing these modes, I don’t make sharp distinctions between the genres of the personal essay, memoir, autobiography, and so on, as others, such as Scott Russell Sanders, do. See Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” 77. 9 The course I describe can be tailored for a variety of formats. It can be incorporated as a unit of a course, or it can fill an entire semester. And it can be altered to be appropriate for the introductory, intermediate, or advanced levels of undergraduate instruction in creative nonfiction. 10 Judith Butler. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005: 7. Print. 11 See Tim Mayers. (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Print. Also see Adam Koehler’s description of digital craft criticism: Adam Koehler, “Digitizing Craft: Creative Writing Studies and New Media: A Proposal.” College English, 75.4 (2013). Print. 12 This is a point that Mayers, among other creative writing theorists, has developed. 13 Goldsmith. Uncreative Writing , 7. 14 Ibid. Insofar as academic creative writing has retained this belief in an authentic self, it has ignored the large body of scholarship coming from its neighbor discipline composition and rhetoric, which has rigorously called

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into question the belief that students can learn to write “authentically” or represent their “true selves” on the page. 15 Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop.” Cultural Critique, 11 (1988–9): 155. Print. 16 Emphasis mine. Summarized in Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: From Classical Greece to the Present. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1966: 75. Print. I do not mean to imply that the aesthetic tradition represents a homogeneous theory of art making. Creative writing has preserved certain ideas from the aesthetic tradition, but there are significant shifts and discontinuities in the aesthetic tradition. 17 While Romanticism is sometimes cited as the “birth of the individual” with its “wild and eccentric” literary personages and emphasis on expression, Romantic aesthetic theory also deemphasizes the individual personality. Romantic aesthetic thinkers like Wordsworth posit that the poet loses himself in the delusional moment of creation; so closely does he “identify his own feelings with” and “bring his feelings near” to others. The poet transcends himself to bring about the pleasure of the text, a pleasure that is communal and communicated. Wordsworth’s preface indicates that the pleasure one takes in an aesthetic object is universal—shared among men speaking to men. This pleasure is not about one’s unique voice, personality, or identity. Moreover, the impersonalization of Romantic aesthetic thinking is also to be found in Keats’s idea of negative capability: as Seán Burke explains, negative capability is “an empathetic act which requires the emptying-out of all personal concern in poetic composition—as well as in Coleridge’s insistence that ‘to have a genius is to live in the universal, to know no self . . . ’” See Seán Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995: xxii. Print. 18 Thomas Newkirk. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 1997. Print. 19 See Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz. Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006: 76–7. Print. 20 Newkirk. The Performance of Self, xii. 21 Ibid., xiii. 22 In my courses, I like to use the definition of “code-switching” that the NPR segment by the same name offers on their homepage: “So you’re at work one day and you’re talking to your colleagues in that professional, polite, kind of buttoned-up voice that people use when they’re doing professional work stuff. Your mom or your friend or your partner calls on the phone and you answer. And without thinking, you start talking to them in an entirely different voice—still distinctly your voice, but a certain kind of your voice less suited for the office. You drop the g’s at the end of your verbs. Your previously undetectable accent—your easy Southern drawl or your sing-songy Caribbean lilt or your Spanish-inflected vowels or your New Yawker—is suddenly turned way, way up. You rush your mom or whomever off the phone in some less formal syntax (Yo, I’mma holler at you later), hang up, and get back to work. Then you look up and you see your coworkers looking at you and wondering who the hell you’d morphed

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into for the past few minutes. That right there? That’s what it means to code-switch.” 23 All of the assignments outlined in this essay are appropriate for the use of online tools. Students can upload their writing on a course management system like Blackboard or can post their essay publically, sharing the URL with the class. Heather Beck notes several benefits of moving the creative writing class online; among these is that students gain more practice in written communication, since class discussions take place in writing. See Heather Beck, “Teaching Creative Writing Online.” New Writing: International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing , 1 (2004). Print. 24 Quoted in Belk, “Extended Self in a Digital World.” Journal of Consumer Research, May 21, 2013, n. p. Print. 25 These discussions of code-switching can be accompanied by assigned readings such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and the chapter from Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory titled “Aria,” which highlight issues of code-switching. The discussion of code-switching may also be complemented by the following homework assignment, “A FourPart Essay That Employs Code-Switching”: Experiment with the idea of code-switching that we’ve discussed in class. Remember that “code-switching” is the act of moving between different discourses, languages, and conventions. This exercise should help you to reconsider the ways that you adapt your writing to different contexts. Write an essay in which you tell the same story at least four different ways, to four different audiences. For example, you could write a fourpart essay in which you tell the story of your sister’s first birthday four times—once to your best friend, once to your followers on Twitter, once to your sociology professor, and once to Jon Stewart (pretend your story will be presented on the Daily Show). Select any four addressees. (You don’t have to actually send your story to your four addressees, but you can if you’d like to.) Tailor each version of the story to your audience, and be sure that each version of the story is radically different from the others. Try on different voices. Some voices may feel more “false” than others, but recognize that, no matter the voice, personal writing always entails creating a persona and transforming the self. Feel free to exaggerate or include elements of fiction in this nonfiction exercise, but be sure to indicate to your readers what is fiction and what is not (insofar as you are able—the line between fiction and nonfiction can be quite blurry, as we’ll continue to see from our readings this semester). You may decide to publish your entire four-part essay on a blog or on Storify. 26 William Matthews. “Personal and Impersonal.” After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, eds. Kate Sontag and David Graham. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2001: 12–13. Print.

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27 Newkirk. The Performance of Self in Student Writing , 18. 28 Phillip Lopate. “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” I & Eye: Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, eds. B. Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005: 70. Print. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Beller. “The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing.” 32 Of course, we can’t reduce de Botton’s Twitter feed to any singular intention. We can’t account for all the motivations an author like de Botton may have for writing any given tweet, and his feed likely serves multiple rhetorical purposes at once. 33 Doug Hesse reminds us, “To note their capitalist motivation is not to strip them of value.” Hesse, “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies,” 46. 34 As Foucault notes, the author becomes a cultural image of him/herself, an identity that readers superimpose on future books. See Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: (Interviews, 1961 –1984) trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996: 453–4. Print. A case study of David Sedaris’ writing and radio presence, as another example, could focus on how this author simultaneously meets and creates readers’ demands. Do David Sedaris’s readers require him to perform a particular sensibility (e.g. a droll, humorous voice)? Does David Sedaris’s work sometimes resist the expectations that readers place on his authorial sensibility? A Pajiba reviewer (March 18, 2010: Web) wonders whether her readerly expectations of David Sedaris’s authorial persona might negatively affect her reading of When You Are Engulfed in Flames. She writes, “It’s possible . . . that I need to rethink my own image of him [Sedaris]. I need to remind myself that Sedaris is still an incredible humorist and an amazing writer, I’m just not used to him being a serious essayist. I may need to give this book another shot eventually, this time with different expectations.” 35 Lopate. “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” 72. 36 Judith Harris, “Re-Writing the Subject: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Creative Writing and Composition Pedagogy.” College English, 63.2 (2001): 179. Print. 37 Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” 75. 38 Defining heteroglossia and its relationship to the “I,” Bakhtin says, “Concrete socio-ideological language consciousness, as it becomes creative—that is, as it becomes active as literature—discovers itself already surrounded by heteroglossia and not at all a single, unitary language, inviolable and indisputable. The actively literary linguistic consciousness at all times and everywhere (i.e., in all epochs of literature historically available to us) comes upon ‘languages,’ and not language. [ . . . ] With each literaryverbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a place for itself with it . . .” See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print.

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39 Indicate whether students will be sharing their lists with you or their peers so that they can determine whether there is a need to omit some of the voicings. 40 In a similar line of argumentation, Elisabeth Anne Leonard encourages composition teachers to teach experimental writing because it “is about reading, about examining how one’s voice is constructed by other’s voices, about making meaning of and owning other texts.” See Elisabeth Anne Leonard, “Assignment #9. A Text Which Engages the Socially Constructed Identity of Its Writer,” College Composition and Communication, 48.2 (1997): 225. Print. 41 Goldsmith. Uncreative Writing , 188–9. 42 Ibid. Such aesthetic criteria should be put up for discussion in a creative writing class by surveying aesthetics and poetics including the work of Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, M. M. Bakhtin, Lyn Hejinian, Langston Hughes, and so on. A useful text is Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900 –2000, ed. Jon Cook. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print. 43 This assignment prompts a discussion of—and perhaps an entire course unit on—issues of originality, plagiarism, and so on, which can be supported by texts such as Perloff’s Unoriginal Discourse, Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence,” and James Porter’s essay “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Depending on the level of the course, these texts may need some framing, but I’ve had success teaching these readings to first-year students. These texts usefully provoke a discussion of the intersubjective, intertextual, and institutional forces at work in composing a writer-self. 44 Goldsmith. Uncreative Writing , 84. 45 Judith Butler. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997: 27. Print. 46 Lopate. “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” 70. 47 As Judith Harris claims, “personal writing and socially engaged writing are not mutually incompatible or in competition with each other . . .” See Harris. “Re-Writing the Subject: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Creative Writing and Composition Pedagogy.” College English, 64.2 (2001): 201. Print. 48 Butler. Account, 23. 49 John Rajchman. Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1991: 131. Print. 50 Butler writes in Giving an Account of Oneself that “the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself” (19). 51 Rebecca Blevins Faery. “On the Possibilities of the Essay: A Meditation.” The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers on/of Creative Nonfiction, eds. Robert L. Root and Michael Steinberg, 2nd edn. New York: Longman, 2002: 249. Print.

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10 Reconsidering the online writing workshop with #25wordstory Abigail G. Scheg

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he writing workshop holds a significant place in the creative writing classroom because it is a unique microcosm that requires a tremendous amount of trust and investment in a writing community. Learning the appropriate behaviors of sharing writing with one’s peers, as well as soliciting and providing feedback on writing, can take a group of students an entire semester (or longer, if possible) to gain confidence. As a more familiar learning environment, the face-to-face (F2F) classroom has some advantages for this type of collaboration because students are able to respond quickly, to discuss immediately. However, creative writing courses and their assignments are not limited to an F2F environment. With the advent of technology and online classes, the concept of the creative writing workshop has grown to incorporate technology in innovative and helpful ways. Cathy Day, Anna Leahy, and Stephanie Vanderslice participated in an essay dialogue regarding the movement of the field and noted, in particular, the writing workshop as “an adaptable model” that is being reimagined and moved into more technologically savvy environments.1 There are many ways to shift a creative writing workshop to the online environment, such as synchronous chats through a learning management system such as Blackboard, Moodle, eCollege, or asynchronous discussion

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boards. Videoconferencing through a variety of programs is also a possibility depending on the technological capabilities and accessibility of the instructor, students, and institution. Or students could attend an F2F workshopping session as a required portion of an online course. Thus, creative writing workshops are adaptable to any type of learning environment: F2F, hybrid, or entirely online. Though these are arguably the most common ways to represent the creative writing workshop online, there are numerous additional approaches to opening up the workshop with technology, such as presenting and discussing writing through a social media site such as Twitter. Twitter, when used as an educational tool, provides a platform for discussion that is open to more than just the collaboration of the designated class. Capitalizing on the social media site’s popularity, instructors can prepare a workshop with other instructors, writing classes, scholars, and authors, planning ahead of time for the students and outside participants to engage in a synchronous Twitter chat. And, the fact that Twitter is an open community allows for the invitation of prominent scholars and well-known authors to participate as well. One of the challenges of communicating on Twitter is the 140-character limit. All characters, including punctuation, spaces, hashtags (indicated by a #), and communication with another user (indicated by @ followed by someone’s user name) are counted toward the allotted 140 characters. Hashtags organize responses in a stream, or conversation, which is a subset of the general Twitter stream, so assignments or classes should have their own designated hashtag. When my classes participate in Twitter chats, I typically have them use the institutional hashtag and/or course hashtag, along with anything else that may be appropriate. That way, students’ tweets do not get lost amongst their many profiles and are saved in a course-specific hashtag stream that can be accessed by simply searching Twitter for it. For the purposes of a fiction or creative non-fiction course, it may seem impossible for students to share their writing in this capacity when a multiple page assignment may be the goal. However, one of the positive developments of new technologies is the reinvention of traditional thoughts. In an environment such as Twitter, where all correspondence is minimized, writing assignments can also be minimized. In this capacity, there is a hashtag, developed by Brian G. Fay (@brianfay) and popularized by Kevin Hodgson (@dogtrax) on Twitter which is #25wordstory.2 Any Twitter user is free to post a 140-character, 25-limit word story followed by the hashtag #25wordstory to share with the Twittersphere. Sharing a story in this manner not only dramatically condenses an author’s actual writing, but also provides a much greater audience for response and feedback. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to discuss the reinvention of the creative writing fiction or creative nonfiction classroom to align with #25wordstory for assignments and peer review including the challenges and potentials of workshopping with the world.

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Twitter represents a unique opportunity for writing, especially in terms of creative writing. Because the character/word limit of a tweet is so short, users are required to think very carefully about words, spaces, and punctuation, weighing the importance of each character in much the same way one is limited to 17 syllables in a haiku. A 25-word story requires students to engage in all aspects of the writing process: brainstorming, drafting, writing, editing, proofreading, and workshopping. As such, Twitter stories provide students an opportunity to explore the necessity of words and concise language in much the same way poetry and short stories do. Instructors can use these genres to help students develop the conciseness of their voice and bridge this skill to longer forms of writing. As the examples of stories will later demonstrate, choosing to use text-lingo, or “2” instead of too, to, or two, is one of the ways to negotiate the extremely shortened writing length. Also, playing with, or opting to remove, punctuation from the story is a viable option, so long as the content of the story is still understandable. Trying to implement elements of storytelling in such a limited capacity requires students to put a significant amount of thought into their message and presentation. Many students are familiar with various social media sites, regardless of whether or not they themselves have an account. Students may use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Pinterest in their personal lives, yet be unaware of the educational opportunities any of these sites present. Tamara Girardi’s chapter “Working Toward Expert Status: Love to Hear Students Go Tweet, Tweet, Tweet” explains, Twitter represents a virtual, global classroom of collective intelligence and an epistemological shift in which the “experts” in the exchange are not necessarily the traditional teachers. The experts on Twitter are those who share information of value and do so often, a definition that could and should include students engaging the medium for academic purposes.3 Therefore, not only does Twitter informally offer students who use it unique and dynamic writing and learning experiences, but also the use of this social media platform should also be encouraged in conjunction with classroom activity. Girardi continues, “As an academic tool, Twitter offers students opportunity to engage in a wider discourse than the classroom environment and to gain confidence in their knowledge and potential ‘expert’ status”4 (259). Within the parameters of Twitter, “the emphasis is not placed on who you are but on what you say,” representing a unique opportunity for students and professionals to mingle, correspond, engage, and challenge each other in a neutral environment.5 Returning to the concept of the creative writing workshop, in such environments students gain agency and assist others in becoming strong,

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developed writers and audiences capable of providing meaningful feedback. Although the other students in the course may not necessarily have published or even be confident writers, their role in the writing course and workshop provides them with a similar expert status and elevates the value of their opinions among the other participants of the workshop. As with anything, there will be some participants who provide deep, challenging critiques and others who are more comfortable providing only surface-level feedback on writing. It becomes part of the learning experience for students to accept, negotiate, or politely disregard the feedback they receive on their writing in the workshop environment. Moving a creative writing workshop to Twitter would be no different; the audience would, potentially, be significantly larger, but the parameters, expectations, and executions of feedback would be generally similar. Therefore, students and an instructor could expect some positive, negative, or challenging feedback on students’ 25-word stories.

#25wordstory assignment Stephanie Vanderslice argues that the ability to convey information via a compelling sense of narrative and story will be a critical skill for all college students. Examples of this phenomenon are everywhere; from digital storytelling to blogging, narrative is at the core of information in the 21st century.6 Storytelling, especially in the capacity of social media, has become an everyday norm for users; Facebook statuses chronicle our days, witty tweets punctuate our events, checking in on FourSquare tells a story of our travels though our voices remain silent. Social media users have adapted creative writing, specifically the creation of narrative (whether fiction or creative nonfiction) as a practice of necessity engaged in multiple times every day. In many respects, social media communications are so inextricably linked to our everyday lives that, as instructors, we should link it overtly to our pedagogical goals. Our creative writing students are already participating in a creative writing workshop if they engage in social media; it just requires a paradigm shift to understand it in that way. Likewise, participating in a writing workshop on social media also requires a pedagogical shift for instructors and students to better understand the educational opportunities associated with social media. On social media sites, there are a number of ways for users to post their stories. On Facebook, there are statuses; on Twitter, tweets. Further, the wording of personal profiles, replies to other posts, “likes,” groups or lists, and much more offer ways to demonstrate and respond to creative

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writing. There are also specific areas that social media users can go within these platforms to intentionally share their creative writing with others. On Twitter, one such area would be the concept of 25-word stories mentioned earlier. These stories can be found simply by searching for “#25wordstory.” Before attempting to write this genre, students and the instructor should familiarize themselves with the capabilities of Twitter, individual tweets, and learn about the unique genre of the 25-word story. As a means of introduction, here are a few samples of stories that can be found by searching the hashtag #25wordstory: @dogtrax: “He picked up the pencil, ready with words. But a momentary memory flash distracted him, & what he meant to say was lost. #25wordstory”7 and @saraallen91: “She looked arnd the classrm; 22 young ppl stared at her. 22 lives. 22 dreams. 22 futures. How could she not give them her best? #25wordstory.”8 Although these texts are very short, they provide a reader with vast potential for analysis and deeper understanding. In the 25-word story by @ dogtrax, the author couches the reader’s experience in the perspective of the writer; this story is about a writer who is getting ready to write. But then he remembers something, and there is no description of that something, which means that it could be anything. As a result, the flow of his writing is lost and he forgets what he was going to say. A great deal of analysis can come from this piece: Who is the writer? What is he writing? What did he remember? Was it related to the writing? Does this flashback happen often and distract his writing? Where is he in the writing process? Has the writer now given up for the day or will he strain to remember the direction of his thought process? The writer indicated in this story was using a pencil to write, but the word “pen” is shorter than “pencil,” so why would @dogtrax choose to use extra letters on pencil instead of pen? These are all questions for consideration when learning about the genre of #25wordstories and negotiating proper stylistic choices for writing within this genre. The story by @saraallen91 seems to be about a new teacher. Perhaps she is standing at the front of the classroom for the first day of her teaching career feeling . . . What? Lost? Challenged? Confused? Confident? Afraid she isn’t ready? Afraid she is going to do something wrong? Ready for the school year to begin? Just as in the first story, we can recognize a lot of emotion and several questions after reading these very short stories. Although these stories are severely limited in their capacity, they have provided a number of questions for discussion that can be incorporated into a writing workshop. These stories are not hollow. They are dynamic, representing strong descriptions and unique perspectives. Some 25-word stories accomplish more depth and quality in their brief lines than what other writers accomplish in pages of manuscripts. Using 25-word stories as texts in a creative writing class is undoubtedly a pedagogical shift from the longer texts often used in such courses. Employing

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such stories as an assignment indicates that the instructor is placing the value of writing on concision, clarity, and design, rather than on following a guide established by literary fiction. Thus, in such a class, anything would be viewed as a text and of value for exploration rather than focusing students’ reading or writing on a set of traditionally published stories. This pedagogy makes creative writing more tangible to students, especially those who may be taking a creative writing class as an elective and are not fully engaged with the subject area.

#25wordstory workshopping Once a #25wordstory is posted to Twitter under that hashtag, it is subject to the critique, praise, criticism, or workshopping of any other Twitter user. Any new tweet from a Twitter user is displayed to other users who “follow” the author. Therefore, a #25wordstory being posted on my Twitter feed would be reflected to all of my Twitter followers as well as to anyone who specifically monitors the hashtag. Once read by various Twitter users, a #25wordstory is subject to any and all the critique methods available within Twitter including replies, favorites, and retweets. A retweet is typically an indication of interest, agreement, or possibly, with an additional message, disagreement. A tweet that has been favorited by a Twitter user means that it was of sincere interest or enjoyment. A reply is just that: a written response to the tweet that is connected in a threaded manner. At the very least, having a writing workshop take place on Twitter in the capacity of feedback for a #25wordstory can provide a similar opportunity for communication among classmates that can be used in writing classes of any delivery model: online, hybrid, or F2F. Requiring participation in a Twitter workshop for students is a small movement. They may have to tweet multiple messages in order to share their feedback with the authors, which can be time consuming. Barring any other challenges related to accessibility or unfamiliarity with Twitter, the lines of communication for sharing writing ideas are remarkably open in this capacity. Opening a writing workshop up to a significantly larger audience (i.e. all of Twitter) can be a daunting prospect for student writers or those unfamiliar with Twitter. But doing so offers several positive possibilities: the ability to immediately share and network with authors and other participants in the creative writing field, such as editors and publishers; the opportunity to solicit feedback from a broader pool of readers; and the chance to develop discreet ideas related to a larger test audience. Several well-known and successful authors are actively engaged on Twitter, including Joyce Carol Oates, Jodi Picoult, and J. K. Rowling. Numerous publishing houses and editors also have Twitter accounts for both personal

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and professional purposes, including networking. Posting a #25wordstory on Twitter does not guarantee that any of these large names will read or participate in commentary about a story, but as compared to just sharing drafts of a story in a classroom environment, it does offer that possibility. More important than the remote chance of being discovered, however, working with a live, public audience amplifies the sense of expectation as students work on their stories. To increase the likelihood that an audience will interact directly with these works, instructors and students can also work to build a network of writers—published, unpublished, instructors of writing, writing students at another institution—who can collaborate on Twitter workshopping, thus opening up the readership to a larger audience purposefully without relying on outsiders to just happen upon a 25-word story. The presentation of one’s profile or solicitation of readership can also add to the conversation. For instance, if a Twitter user’s profile does not indicate an interest in writing or publication, then readers of a #25wordstory may just think that a student writer is writing for fun. Conversely, if one’s profile indicates that they are looking to move toward professional writing, the writer is then actively soliciting editors or publishers who may be looking to find new authors. If a Twitter profile is only used for a class, it could indicate that feedback on creative writing is always welcomed and appreciated. One could also preface their #25wordstory with tweets soliciting feedback or engagement about the writing process. This further invites commentary from outside participants, more so than just a set of classmates who are required to participate in a Twitter workshop discussion. In the traditional F2F writing workshop, students are limited to the opinions, tastes, and views of the readers in the classroom. While student workshop participants would certainly be encouraged to consider texts from multiple perspectives, sometimes an individual’s feedback develops a certain pattern over the course of a term when involved in the same group of workshop participants. On Twitter, opening up the conversation to many other voices provides the opportunity for a significantly larger body of feedback. In this way, students have an opportunity to learn about the varied nature of opinions; even the famous authors listed above have critics who challenge the nuances of their writing. Soliciting feedback from such a large environment requires a large amount of both confidence and humility and can help developing writers grow more comfortable with having others respond to their work publicly, particularly with the ability to discuss such responses with their instructor after the fact. Finally, publishing a #25wordstory in this capacity allows a student author to share a brief piece of writing with a test audience to determine if this story idea is of interest. Perhaps a student posts two or three 25-word stories, asking for feedback, but does not really receive many comments, positive or

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negative. Then for the fourth story, she receives a few retweets and a few replies asking for additional information, praising, or indicating that the reader was in some way engaged with the text. Such feedback provides the author an opportunity to consider the story as a potential for a longer text. Should the questions asked or the challenges presented be hashed out in a full-length story? Did the author really connect with this text and have more to say about the characters or plot? If so, she now has the groundwork and outline for a full-length piece of fiction that could be written for enjoyment, classwork, or publication unrelated to the creative writing course. Transitioning the traditional creative writing workshop to the online environment, specifically to Twitter, provides students with tremendous opportunities for networking, further workshopping, and building their writing portfolio. Although the translation of writing assignments and workshopping does not directly equate to authoring tweets, the opportunity for negotiation and renegotiation of writing standards and classroom activities is feasible and does represent some positive developments. Moving or encouraging movement of the creative writing classroom into the digital age does not have to be a daunting or confusing transition. Small changes can be made to incorporate new and valuable technologies while maintaining connections to the traditional pedagogies that have proven successful in the past.

Notes 1 See Cathy Day, Anna Leahy, and Stephanie Vanderslice. “Where Are We Going Next? A Conversation about Creative Writing Pedagogy (Pt. 1).” Fiction Writers Review. National Writing Project. February 2, 2011. Web. July 18, 2013: 2. 2 Brian G. Fay (brianfay). “@dogtrax @Gaetnp @PAWLPnews Kevi’s too modest. He turned it into something. Me, I came up with a hashtag. (That should be my epitaph!)” July 12, 2013, 12:36 p.m. Tweet. 3 Tamara Girardi. “Working Toward Expert Status: Love to Hear Students Go Tweet, Tweet, Tweet.” Social Software and the Evolution of User Expertise: Future Trends in Knowledge Creation and Dissemination, ed. Tatjana Takseva. Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2013: 259. Print. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 260. 6 Vanderslice, “Where Are We Going . . .” 3. 7 Kevin Hodgson, (dogtrax). “He picked up the pencil, ready with words.” July 3, 2013, 8:20 a.m. Tweet. 8 Sara Allen, (saraallen91). “She looked arnd the classrm.” September 15, 2010, 10:15 p.m. Tweet.

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11 Writing with machines: Data and process in Taroko Gorge James J. Brown, Jr

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ick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” is a poetry generator that presents one example of how computer programming might help us expand what counts as creative writing. Montfort composed the generator while visiting Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan, and its compositions attempt to evoke the feelings, sights, and sounds of this space.1 The generator’s output might look something like what we see in Figure 11.1, though each performance of Taroko Gorge is unique. Brows roam the flows. Stones hold. Monkeys roam the shape. progress through the encompassing objective— Forest frames the flow. Ripplings dream. Stones exercise the rocks. translate the objective— Brow ranges the ripplings The crages linger. Veins dream. Stone roams the rock. shade the fine straight—

FIGURE 11.1 Sample output of Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge”.2

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The appearance of the word “monkeys” in the first stanza of this example is significant, and I’ll explain why below. For now, it’s worth noticing how these poems use language to bring us to Taroko Gorge and how the software generates new poems and stanzas each time we open the Web page. While Montfort selected and authored the words that appear in these poems, he also authored the processes by which a computational machine selects and arranges those words. Programmers often carry out these two different kinds of writing—the authoring of both content and the processes by which that content is delivered. However, while we might associate procedural authorship with computer programming, this kind of writing is not wholly separate from the traditional practices of creative writing. For instance, when Noah Wardrip-Fruin explains the authorship of digital media in terms of data and process, he makes it clear that these terms need not only refer to computational mechanisms.3 The term data describes a collection of prefabricated elements—text, image, sound, or any other media—while process describes how that data is manipulated. Thus, the processes are “the working parts of the simulated machine.”4 If data is the “stuff” of a work of digital media, then the process determines how and when that stuff is arranged and delivered. But while Wardrip-Fruin uses the term “expressive processing” to describe the use of computational processes to make meaning, he also grants that the use of computational machines to process data has important precursors: Tristan Tzara’s Dada cut-up technique was presented in the wake of World War I as a process for turning a chosen newspaper article into a poem . . . the creation of board and card games has always primarily been the development of process definitions—embodied game rules—that determine how play moves forward.5 The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the workshop of potential literature), or Oulipo, offers another historical precedent for this kind of work. The Oulipo emerged in the middle of the twentieth century and experimented with the patterns and rules of constrained writing. As Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort explain in The New Media Reader, all writing is constrained by rules of grammar and syntax, but the Oulipo make such constraints explicit: “The idea of potential literature is to both analyze and synthesize constraints—drawn from current mathematics as well as from older writing techniques that never entered the literary mainstream.”6 Oulipeans are interested in authoring both the rules and the poems or narratives that emerge from those rules; they are interested in authoring both process and data. The processes of digital media differ from these precursors “by their potential numerousness, repetition, and complexity.”7 While a computational machine benefits from the computer’s ability to carry out a large number of processes quickly and efficiently, the

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machine is carrying out processes and procedures that could, theoretically, be enacted by humans. Given this understanding of how authors in various media can directly engage with constraints and procedures, the notion that we are writing “with” some sort of technology—a pen, a keyboard, a word processor, a typewriter—can take on added meaning. We may be using technologies to write, meaning that we are writing with a pen or with a computer. Technologies can be tools; however, they can also be writing partners. We can write alongside (with) such technologies. Montfort’s Taroko Gorge extends these complexities even further, demonstrating how both humans and computational machines are part of a collaborative network of writers. Taroko Gorge offers an object lesson in collaborative writing, since Montfort’s poetry engine has been remixed by a number of other writers. In addition to writing alongside machines, Montfort is writing alongside other poets and programmers. Multiple authors, inspired by Montfort’s work, have made their own poetry generators based on Taroko Gorge. Drawing on the ethos of open source and free software, which encourages appropriating and repurposing code, and exposing the collaboration inherent to any creative endeavor, Taroko Gorge calls out to other writers, asking them to engage it not only by reading but also by remaking and manipulating its mechanism. Any creative endeavor emerges from collaboration, from the various readers who comment on drafts to the inspiration we draw from other creative works. While there are certainly different kinds of appropriation (ranging from thoughtful remix to mere plagiarism), any creative endeavor emerges from a complex set of forces, texts, and technologies, and an object like Taroko Gorge can make this fact apparent to writers. The derivative works of Taroko Gorge—the term “derivative” here is not a perjorative; it merely describes works that are indebted to Montfort’s poetry engine—help us reflect on what creative expression can look like in digital spaces, and they are of particular interest to those of us who teach writing. As we engage with, and even manipulate, Montfort’s poetry engine, we are afforded the opportunity to learn much more than how to program a computer. We are also invited to reflect on issues of authorship, audience, and the writing process. No one writes alone, and Taroko Gorge exposes this fact in novel ways. In the writing classroom, discussing and manipulating computational objects like this one can help students to think carefully about their own writing processes and about how our writing tools shape and constrain creative expression. Any human writer authors data and engages processes, even if we don’t normally think in these terms and even if our “stuff” and our “procedures” are not so neatly separated. We often think of the writing process as something we follow, but it is perhaps best understood as an act of authorship. Each writer creates her own process, follows it, and then revises

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that process accordingly. From writing spaces to desks to favorite notebooks and pens to methods of revision to the observance of linguistic constraints, writers construct and author their writing situations. Much like a computer program, the human writing process is an authored set of procedures, created for a particular set of circumstances. So, examining some of the basics of Montfort’s machine can shed light not only on how digital media is authored and created but also on how such objects parallel human writing processes. Taroko Gorge follows in the footsteps of various conceptual and formalist modes of authorship. From the sonnet, which closely follows specific structures and rhyme schemes, to the aforementioned experiments of the Oulipo, creative writers have long been interested in how authors interact with processes and constraints. These constraints offer a possibility space in which writers can play—they lay out a maze from which the author must emerge as he tries to both observe and stretch the rules of the game. Taroko Gorge mechanizes these constraints, placing them in the hands of a computational machine that then dictates how or whether certain kinds of poems emerge. By interacting with, observing, and even reprogramming computational machines like Taroko Gorge, we can reflect on how both humans and machines write.

Data and process in programming and poetry Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing gives an account of how various digital objects—from story generation machines to works of electronic literature— use computation as an expressive medium. Wardrip-Fruin shows us that computation is not just a way to solve mathematical problems or to mine databases, but that it is also a mode of inscription, a type of writing. In fact, computer programming and traditional writing share a number of features, not the least of which is that they are both written for human audiences. While computer code is, of course, processed by a machine, the code itself is written for humans. Most computer programs are written in high-level programming languages such as Java, Python, or C. These languages offer humans an abstracted way of dealing with the binary data that a computer processes. Most programmers do not write strings of 1s and 0s, though, strictly speaking, this is possible. Instead, they write programs in languages that are later translated into the binary code executed by computers, and programs written in these high-level languages are often read by other programmers. This is one reason why comments—portions of a programming text that are not executed by a computer but that help humans make sense of code—and white space—which most, but not all, computer languages ignore—are crucial in computer programming. The human audience attends

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to spacing and comments as a way to understand how a program works, factors that a machine often ignores. However, even the computational processes authored by programmers are not written only for the machine. As we will see when we look more closely at Taroko Gorge, a close analysis of the code itself reveals important features of a work that uses computational processes to make poetic meaning. The procedures created by Oulipeans or digital media creators such as Montfort are writing processes; they are the conditions of possibility for writing. By observing, and sometimes even pushing against, such constraints, writers are forced to recognize the creative process as complex, chaotic, and emergent. When a writer is authoring both procedure and language— both process and data—she can reflect on authorship as a multilayered and dynamic process. Montfort’s engine takes a selection of data and applies a process to it; it establishes a library of words and then composes poems with that library. On first glance, we might see Taroko Gorge as mere mechanism, as a machine that applies rigid processes and that is far removed from the writing processes deployed by humans. But how might a close analysis of this computational machine shed light on all writing processes, and how might Taroko Gorge begin to open up questions about what we mean by the phrase “writing with technology”? To be sure, there is no Taroko Gorge without Montfort, but these poems cannot so easily be linked back to the poet. Who—or what—is authoring these works? Seeing writing as something that emerges from an interaction with tools not only calls into question the solitary author but also allows us to think and write across disciplinary boundaries. The founding members of the Oulipo included not only writers but also mathematicians, and the group prefigured much work in new media studies that combines the approaches of the humanities and computer science. The Oulipo ’s early efforts, carried out without computational machines and sometimes only with ink and paper, offer a model for the kind of collaboration that can happen in the digital creative writing classroom. Such collaborations allow us to see how a mathematician and poet might work together on poetic form or how a novelist and a computer programmer might collaborate on a game or story generation system. Taroko Gorge mechanizes the writing process and demonstrates the relationship between “data” (the stuff of our writing) and “process” (how we manipulate and arrange that stuff). While data and process always commingle, computer programs allow us to temporarily separate them and to reflect on how we are managing and linking together various narratives, words, and ideas. The computer programmer acknowledges that both data and process are authored artifacts—software does not only include words or images or sounds, but also a set of procedures that dictate how and when that material is delivered to an audience. This is an insight that can be productively imported

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into the creative writing classroom. The classroom is a particularly useful place to use such ideas to reflect not only on computer programs but also on human authorship. Thinking of writing in terms of authoring both data and process offers benefits to the writer, even if he is not engaging directly with digital media. Most important, it presents one strategy for displacing the notion of romantic authorship. The writer of both data and process acknowledges that meaning does not emerge from a solitary genius but is rather the result of a complex web of forces and entities.

Inside Taroko Gorge A closer look at how Taroko Gorge works sheds light both on how this computational mechanism writes poems and on how conceptual writing works. Of course, not everyone can conduct an analysis of code and not everyone wants to do this. Anyone can see the “guts” of this poetry generator by clicking on “View Source” in a web browser.8 Being able to make sense of what appears in that window requires some knowledge about programming and Javascript. But one need not take up Taroko Gorge from the position of expert. Instead, teachers and students can use this machine to learn more about conceptual writing in general or about programming and Javascript. For the purposes of understanding how Taroko Gorge might be useful in the creative writing classroom, I’ll step through just a few features of the code. My aim is to make this explanation accessible to those who do not typically write or read computer code, something I also do in the classroom when teaching works like this one. Here are lines of code from Taroko Gorge that can help us understand how this machine is creating poems: 34 35 36 37

var above=‘brow,mist,shape,layer,the crag,stone,forest,height’. split(‘,’); var below=‘flow,basin,shape,vein,rippling,stone,cove,rock’.split(‘,’); var trans=‘command,pace,roam,trail,frame,sweep,exercise,range’. split(‘,’); var imper=‘track,shade,translate,stamp,progress through,direct,run,enter’; imper=imper.split(‘,’); var intrans=‘linger,dwell,rest,relax,hold,dream,hum’.split(‘,’); var s=‘s,’.split(‘,’); var texture=‘rough,fine’.split(‘,’);

38 39 40 41 ... 81 adjs = (‘encompassing,’+choose(texture)+’,sinuous,straight,objective, arched,cool,clear ,dim,driven’).split(‘,’);

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As you can see from the line numbers on the left, I’ve only provided a selection of the code. However, this short snippet offers us most of what we might call the “data” of Taroko Gorge. These lines provide the generator with the words that it will use to compose stanzas. This data is manipulated by various processes as it is transformed into poetry. Each of these lines declares a variable, which is a container for housing data. The program creates a variable for the letter “s” (so the program can add this letter to nouns at various moments) and also variables for six categories of words: two lists of nouns (“above” and “below”), three lists of verbs (transitive, intransitive, and imperative), and a category for “texture” (containing the words “rough” and “fine.”) The “split” command that appears throughout this code transforms these lists of words into arrays. In computer programming, an array is used to organize a collection of objects, much like a spreadsheet. A computer program can access elements of the array by querying it and then displaying pieces of data that are stored in the array. Given this brief explanation of the code, we can start to make sense of how the lines of Taroko Gorge are generated. To generate the line “Brows roam the flows” (see the first line of the poem from Figure 11.1), the program is selecting a noun from the “above” list, a verb from the “trans” list, and another noun from the “below” list. 9 But things get slightly more complicated when we take note of the word “monkeys” in the first stanza of Figure 11.1, because the appearance of this word is a particularly rare event. Another portion of the code (lines 58–60, for those following along) determines whether the word “monkeys” will appear in the poem. This portion of the software contains a procedure that looks for a very specific and rare set of circumstances. If the word “forest” is chosen from the “above” list of words and if a random number generator selects a number between .25 and .49 (the number generator selects from all numbers between 0 and 1), then Taroko Gorge uses “monkeys” as a noun instead of “forest.” The mathematical probability of this happening is roughly 3 percent, so seeing the word “monkeys” in one of the poems is significant. Of course, this would be impossible to know by simply watching Taroko Gorge generate poems in our web browser, and this demonstrates what we can gain by digging beyond our surface interactions with computational artifacts. Beyond seeing how poems are generated, examining the code also sheds light on how others have “remixed” Montfort’s work. A number of writer/programmers have taken Taroko Gorge and transformed it, changing these lists of words so that their poetry generators create different kinds of poems. For instance, Mark Sample’s remix of Taroko Gorge puns on the title by creating a poetry generator called “Takei, George,” named after the famous Star Trek actor and gay activist. Sample’s remix returns lines such as “Married gay couples report the Romulans,” and the lines of verse also

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appear on a yellow background, a homage to the yellow shirt that Takei wore as Lieutenant Sulu on Star Trek. Sample also made some other changes to the code. In addition to editing the poem’s data, he made various changes to its computational processes. For instance, the “monkeys” portion of the code has been changed so that there is a less than one percent chance that the line “Kirk smolders and Sulu vows to attack” will appear. Sample also edited the list of imperatives and the list of adjectives to generate phrases such as “watch the slash lit fanfic,” matching the fan fiction ethic of the “Kirk smolders” line. Fan fiction involves rewriting the narratives of books, television shows, and films, allowing fans of shows to write their own versions of these stories. Sample’s remix of Taroko Gorge not only transforms it into a tribute to Takei but also opens up the possibility for alternative narratives in the Star Trek universe. “Takei, George” is one of the many versions of the poem, and as of August 2013, nineteen others had created their own remixes.10

Writing with Taroko Gorge Montfort’s engine and its various derivatives are authoring poems, and the operations of these various machines can open up a number of interesting questions in the writing classroom. In my own writing classes, I have used Taroko Gorge toward multiple ends. First, poetry generators and other computational machines present an opportunity to reflect on the writing process. When we say a computer program processes data, we mean that it takes data and applies dynamic procedures to it. These processes can generate unexpected, pleasing, or jarring effects. We are often confronted with beautiful or uncanny phrases as we watch the stanzas of Taroko Gorge tumble down the screen. As we learned during our close analysis of Montfort’s code, rare moments like “Monkeys roam the shape” emerge by chance. While these turns of phrase are only pseudorandom (they are programmed, after all), they do remind us of how much of the writing process is dictated by chance, by environment, by caffeine, by music, or by what we have been reading. While we might be tempted to see the serendipitous moments of poetic beauty in Taroko Gorge as the result of mere chance, these moments also parallel the emergent and complex scene of human writing. What writer has not experienced a moment in which the words on the page reveal something to her that she had not previously considered? It is these moments that encourage us to have students write and revise often, and it is why free writing exercises are often so useful. We often don’t know what will happen on the page before we put fingers to keyboard or pen to paper.

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What data and process are at work in such moments? What storehouse of images, sounds, and words are we drawing from, and what processes are our bodies applying to that storehouse to create sentences and stanzas? Works such as Taroko Gorge remind us of how complex our writing processes really are, and they demonstrate that there is no way to reduce a text to its plan or process. No matter how closely we analyze Montfort’s code, that analysis can never fully explain what emerges once the machine is in motion. Of course, not all writing emerges from random moments of chance. We often have a plan for a given piece of writing, and even this approach to the writing process has parallels with computational machines. Such a plan or outline is a procedure, much like the one Montfort has created. Any writing process is an authored artifact—a set of procedures crafted with a specific set of goals in mind. Writing with digital media reminds us that any writing project is a two-tiered enterprise. It involves the authoring of both process and data. However, that process is never completely static—it shifts based on variables and inputs. Just as Taroko Gorge acts differently depending on the outcomes of certain computations, our own writing processes shift and morph. In addition to offering an example of serendipitous invention and creativity, Montfort’s machine presents examples of how authors build upon the work of others. It is nothing new to argue that all creative work emerges from citations of and references to previous work. Lawrence Lessig and many others have reminded us that current copyright law attempts to erase the fact that all writing is indebted to prior works. Lessig’s work in The Future of Ideas, Free Culture, and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy has demonstrated how digital technologies challenge a “permission culture,” in which we must ask authors before we remix, mashup, or sometimes even cite their work.11 Artifacts like Taroko Gorge allow us to think not in terms of permission but in terms of a “free culture.” This freedom does not encourage plagiarism or stealing but rather allows authors and creators to build upon previous works without fear of legal action. Taroko Gorge invites remixes, and we have already seen that many authors have taken advantage of this. However, this invitation is not only a result of Montfort’s willingness to share the work online or even his decision to link directly to the various derivative works. It is also a function of the artifact itself. Engaging with Taroko Gorge as we would a print poem does not necessarily bear as much fruit as playing with it. We can read and critique the stanzas generated by Montfort’s mechanism, but this is only one way of engaging the poem—and it might be the least interesting way. We can also look “under the hood” as I’ve begun to do above. This closer look at the mechanism behind the interface is not only a way of understanding how Taroko Gorge works but also a way of being inspired, of understanding how we might imitate Montfort or his machine in our own creative works.

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Finally, Taroko Gorge also offers a lightweight introduction to the use of code as a creative medium. For the writer interested in exploring computer programming and its creative possibilities, this poetry generator presents students and instructors with a fairly easy way to manipulate code. Writers can create their own remix of Taroko Gorge by following these steps (with minimal hardware and software requirements): 1

Navigate to http://nickm.com/poems/taroko_gorge.html and choose the “View Source” option on your web browser.

2

Copy the text in the “View Source” window.

3

Paste that text into a text editor application such as Notepad, TextEdit, or TextWrangler.

4

Edit the words in the “above,” “below,” “trans,” “intrans,” “imper,” “texture,” and/or “adjs” variables.

5

Add your own title to the tag (you can also add your name to the list of authors at the bottom of the page).

6

Save the file as an html document.

7

Open the html file in a web browser.

While this process includes some nontrivial computer skills, it does not require the writer/remixer to be an expert programmer. By accepting the invitation to play with and remake Montfort’s work, a broad range of writers can begin to explore the affordances of computation as an expressive medium.

Notes 1 Nick Montfort. “Who Grabbed My Gorge.” Post Position, July 26, 2011. Web. August 8, 2013. 2 Nick Montfort. “Taroko Gorge.” Nickm.com. n. p., January 8, 2009. Web. August 11, 2013. 3 Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. The MIT Press, 2009. Print. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 Ibid., 9. 6 Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. The New Media Reader. The MIT Press, 2003: 147. Print. 7 Wardrip-Fruin, 9.

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8 I recommend having the source code of the page http://nickm.com/poems/ taroko_gorge.html open in a browser window while you read this section of the essay. 9 Montfort, “Taroko Gorge.” 10 Each of these are linked on Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” site. 11 Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004: xiv. Print.

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12 Telling stories with maps and rules: Using the interactive fiction language “Inform 7” in a creative writing workshop Aaron A. Reed

D

uring two recent summer sessions at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I had the chance to design and teach a unique class combining a creative writing workshop with a seminar on reading and writing interactive fiction (IF).1 In the course, I led an interdisciplinary mix of students from both arts and engineering backgrounds with widely varying degrees of experience in programming and creative writing through the 40-year history of digital literature, taught them some tools to create it, and challenged them to make a creative project both as fiction and process that told a story demanding participation from its readers. Both times I taught the course, students rose to the challenge, creating a variety of fascinating pieces including playable recreations of emotional traumas, philosophical explorations of the meaning of choice, and simulated conversations with dead relatives. Making interactive fiction requires a unique blend of creativity and logical thought, of writing prose and crafting code, and that duality makes it an exciting entry point into the creative writing process for a generation weaned on digital games. Crafting good interactive stories is a unique form of constrained writing that challenges students to strengthen their traditional writing muscles in unique

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and surprising ways. I’d like to share some of my successes and failures in teaching the course using the language Inform 7 and why this nontraditional approach is worth considering for instructors looking to engage their students in novel ways.

A beautiful precision of language Why muddle programming together with writing? The two acts may seem to have little in common: the epitome of logical, orderly thought and the chaotic, freewheeling energy of raw creative process. But I’ve found many productive, surprising synergies between these two forms that can be explored together in IF projects. Both practices require a careful precision of language to achieve a desired effect, either perceptually (in a human reader) or mechanically (for a computer running a piece of code). Just as a misplaced word in a story can jar a reader out of a sense of flow and immersion in an imagined world, or radically alter perception of place or character, a misplaced word in a computer program can cause it to crash, misbehave, or perform in a drastically different way. Both novice writers and coders underplay the need to choose words with care. To explore this point in the course, we took a tour through progressively shorter forms of fiction, starting with microfiction of a few hundred words and moving down to “Twitter fiction” and six-word stories. These miniature forms make it clear how much the right word can convey, as in the classic Hemingway example, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”2 In a workshop session, students wrote sentences and then aggressively edited them to weed out unnecessary language, aiming for the sharpness of the six-word stories where each word contributes meaning to the whole. This precision of language is useful not only for creative writing but also for programming, where a misplaced word or punctuation mark can create not just aesthetic but functional problems. Focusing on clarity of language is also important because IF does more than just tell a story: it creates an interface into a fictional world that the reader-player must understand and communicate with for a successful traversal of the narrative. While in theory any text can appear in an interactive story, in practice those words must also function to explain the environment and indicate how a player can interact with it. One of IF’s unique charms (and archetypal frustrations) is that the verbs and nouns a given work understands are usually not explicitly revealed: instead, the player must learn them through experimenting with the story and studying its text. One of the key differences between a well- and poorly written IF is how successfully it leads the player toward productive actions (those for which the author has created a response). Like a magician subtly forcing a card on an audience member, the IF author

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must do everything possible to suggest certain commands and undercut others, while still giving players the impression of free will and possibility. Consider this sentence from Eric Eve’s IF Snowquest : “So far as you can see nothing grows here; the ground is quite bare apart from an abundance of snow lying deep and crisp and uneven.”3 While a seemingly casual description, the words carefully hint at the correct course of action: the player can find something buried under the snow if they dig. “Deep” implies there’s enough snow to cover something; “uneven” and “so far as you can see” both suggest something might be hidden awaiting discovery. “Crisp” suggests an unbroken expanse waiting to be disturbed. The lack of any substantial noun other than the snow-covered ground focuses the player’s attention; by not mentioning trees, pine cones, footprints, the sun, or any of hundreds of other things that might exist in a real-world location, the author signals that these things are not an important part of the story world, and players will probably not be successful if they try to interact with them. At the same time, IF authors share the desire of any writer to create beautiful prose and compelling stories, so the text’s functional purpose must be woven into its aesthetic goals, even if these at times seem at cross-purposes. We might productively call this a form of constrained writing, like constructing a sonnet or writing a story without using a certain letter: careful work is required to produce a result both aesthetically pleasing that also follows the rules of the form. Forcing writers to think around constraints can result in both a heightened awareness of the act of construction and an output that breaks from the writer’s familiar style. By asking authors to continuously work to craft a specific mindset in the player, IF encourages the kind of intentional thinking that is just as useful in traditional writing, where helping the reader understand a character or concept can require equal care and precision.

IF and Inform 7 It’s worth contextualizing the history of this form of writing in a little more detail before moving on. Interactive fiction as a mode of storytelling has been around since the 1970s and is probably still most recognizable as the “text adventures” Zork and Witness, popular on early home computers. After a commercial heyday, the medium was rediscovered and reinvented by nostalgic hobbyists, writers interested in programming (and vice versa), and more recently, academics, all of whom have helped shepherd the form through various waves of experimentation and innovation, trying to discover how adding interactivity changes an encounter with a textual narrative. At its core, IF relies on a call-response form, where a narrator tells a story happening to a central character (usually through second-person present tense text) and

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readers must frequently give instructions as to what they’d like that character to do next. IF has been placed in the tradition of the literary riddle,4 a fragment of story that only becomes complete when the listener supplies the correct solution. More broadly, Umberto Eco classifies all such artworks as “open works, which are brought to their conclusion by the performer at the same time as he experiences them on an aesthetic plane . . . his comprehension of the original artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective.”5 Having experimented with the form for years and produced some major works with it, I wanted to find a way to share the sense of discovery and exploration that diving into this unmapped territory awoke in me. While the course began with hypertext projects created in Twine, a popular tool for making link-based fictions,6 we spent the bulk of our time with a more powerful program called Inform 7.7 Both a programming language and a tool for working with that language, Inform is designed specifically to create IF. Writers describe an environment (a series of connected locations containing objects), a set of actions that can happen in that environment, and rules defining behaviors between, or cause and effect relationships for, the characters and objects in the world. The uniquely literary character of these environments and rules can go beyond simply describing scenes that could be visualized graphically, potentially making use of the whole range of techniques available to traditional literature. IF has made explorable inneremotional landscapes, subjective realities filtered through an unusual or unreliable narrator, or environments rife with wordplay. An example of this is Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey,8 which imagines a world where letters can be inserted or removed from items to alter them: the title references a scam involving a monkey and a “k-remover,” typical of the delightful lateral thinking found throughout. Inform is an unusual programming language as its code reads like English sentences, rather than the more opaque input of a language like C++ or Java. Writing “Al’s Bistro is east of Downtown” establishes two locations and a spatial connection between them; adding “A grilled cheese sandwich and a half-empty glass of beer are on the table in Al’s” decorates one of these places with incidental details. More complex sentences can create rules and behavior, such as “After insulting Al, now every person in the bistro hates the player.” These sentences are still code—Inform can’t understand arbitrary English—but the approach allows example programs to be understood much more easily by novice programmers and creates a pleasing symmetry between the language of input and the language of output. One of the interesting side effects of this playful intersection of words and logic is that poems can be written in Inform 7 that compile into playable simulations of themselves, such as this limerick:

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The Hole Below is a dark room. The description is “Cavernous gloom.” The lamp is in Seoul. Before going in hole, Instead say “You will break your neck soon.” In addition to its interesting intrinsic properties, Inform is well suited for classroom use. It’s freely available and runs on any modern operating system, eliminating the need for all students to have access to the same type of computer. The Inform editor is easy to use and simplifies much of the complexities of compiling and releasing projects; it can easily output a story and its source code as a set of styled webpages a student can upload or submit. A large and active community online uses the language and answers questions about it, and a great many tutorials, references, and other resources are available online.9 Finally, Inform is an established, stable platform that has been around for a decade in its current format and rests on foundations that have been largely unchanged since the 1980s, so it’s not likely to disappear within a semester or two. While the full language includes a lot of powerful functionality, its core features are enough to produce playable textual environments within minutes of getting started, while still leaving headroom for more advanced students to tinker and explore more complicated features.

Strategies for character-driven interactive stories What kinds of stories can students tell with IF? One important way the form differs from traditional fiction is in its presentation of character. While humans excel at making up imaginary people, computers don’t; it’s much easier to create a convincing textual simulation of a static object or landscape than of a living, acting, and reacting person. While this is still an evolving problem for the field of interactive storytelling, authors have nevertheless managed to create meaningful, moving, and effective interactive stories that, yes, are about people anyway. Since some of their strategies can be counterintuitive from a traditional creative writing perspective, it’s worth exploring a few of the more common approaches to characters in IF. The most familiar metaphor is probably story as tableau, where the player controls a character investigating the physical remnants of a story that happened in the subjective past. The story of the player’s character exploring this detritus becomes a frame for the interior past story, revealed perhaps

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through letters, abandoned possessions, details of setting and environment, and other physical remnants. A variant is to make the interior story the main character’s own past, revealed to the player through flashbacks or memories. In my IF Sand-dancer,10 the main character plays a troubled teenager who crashes his pickup on a lonely New Mexico road while on his way to make a significant life choice. As the player explores an old ranger station trying to find a way to fix the truck, the character encounters places and objects that remind him of his troubles, through which the player slowly learns his backstory, what’s at stake, and what the eventual choice will mean. Exploration of physical spaces can easily map to exploration of mental spaces, emotional spaces, or many other frames and paradigms. Stories can also use conversation as a map, treating an interaction with a character as a tree-like branching structure with nodes representing points where the player-controlled character chooses what to say next. Many works using this structure are designed to unfold across several playthroughs, revealing different facets of a character as the player sees how they respond to different kinds of conversational gambits or actions. Emily Short’s Galatea11 consists entirely of a highly branching conversation with a complicated character whose full story can only be uncovered through multiple traversals. While care must be taken to minimize the scope of a conversation, this format is familiar to many game players and can be an interesting way to explore a dialogue-driven approach to story. A more complex but potentially more rewarding model is using social norms as rules, where the expected social behavior in a particular story context is encoded as rules that characters (including the player) must obey. In Stephen Bond’s Rameses,12 the player controls a bullied teenager who will often refuse to obey commands not because they are technically impossible or improperly phrased, but because they violate the character’s sense of his own role and agency within the constrained social order of a boarding school. The reader gains a powerful understanding of these implicit social rules through exploring the author’s construction of them as a formal system. This technique touches on the concept of procedural rhetoric,13 the idea that interactive systems can convey meaning through the structure of their rules and play, not only their “content” in the more traditional sense of words and pictures. Though it requires an adjustment in thinking, as a style of storytelling this can be a powerful, engaging way to tell character-driven stories by putting the reader-player in a character’s shoes, in an even more direct way than a linear second-person narrative. As another example of this last approach to character, in the course we studied an IF called ’Mid the Sagebrush and the Cactus14 which uses a basic conflict system to drive a Wild West showdown between a wounded gunslinger and a grieving son. Various conversational strategies (such as

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placate, explain, and taunt) and physical actions (such as shooting or dodging) will succeed or fail based on your past actions, the other character’s changing mood, and a certain amount of randomness. The system in the short piece is just complicated enough to allow for some strategy, while remaining simple enough to get a sense of how it works with only a few playthroughs. Completing the story with a satisfactory ending requires understanding the two central characters well enough to know what their soft and hard spots are, both physically and emotionally—an understanding gained through interacting with the system abstracting their perceived options and the social rules of Western showdowns into programmatic form. Thinking about characters in these procedural, abstracted ways can be challenging. Students might be tempted to turn the focus away from characters to abstract puzzles or story-free environments, which can work for traditional IF but isn’t the ideal outcome in a creative writing workshop. But by encouraging students to tell stories about people, introducing them to techniques such as character studies when developing their story ideas, and pushing them to think about conflicts, emotional stakes, and other facets of good storytelling, an instructor can encourage students in directions that will help strengthen their writing muscles. A writer needs to think carefully through the heart of a story to convey it in a form where the characters can’t be as expressive as in traditional fiction.

Successes Pushed outside comfort zones and easy solutions by the challenges of authoring IF, my students produced surprising and invigorating stories that engaged with the creative possibilities of an interactive medium, with prose often reflecting the greater thought and attention to detail provoked by the unique constraints of IF and structure of Inform. One standout student project, Will Lee’s Apathology, alternated between sequences of hypertext fiction and traditional parser-based IF to tell a Kafkaesque story about an unnamed protagonist arrested for a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to death. As his freedom is stripped away, the player’s freedom also changes through both the different textual media used and the shifting commands and environment in the IF sequences. The ability to make meaningful choices, and what choices are available even when choice is offered, becomes a central theme. The story’s conclusion suggests that God is the only one with true choice, and this is followed by a readout of the project’s source code and an invitation to edit it, literally rewriting the rules of the protagonist’s universe. In another project, Zane Mariano’s Lex, the player explores the life of a deaf synesthete who can literally see words spoken by

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people around him. Exploring this character’s life, the player moves through a map of sentences, adding and removing key words from them to uncover different biographical moments and facts of the character. The player’s control over language echoes the complex relationship the protagonist has with it; the unique structure and the player’s primal potency over the text makes the experience fundamentally different from the same story if told with traditional prose. These and other projects bore rich fruit from approaching creative writing from the unusual directions of game design and procedural practice, encouraging students to think about storytelling and writing in fresh, original ways.

Challenges and strategies Teaching creative writing with IF and Inform can present several significant challenges it would be remiss to overlook. While the rewards in my experience have been worth the trouble, running an ambitious course like this can be frustrating. Learning a whole programming language in a few weeks can be a daunting prospect even for students who have coded before and especially for those who have not. I quickly learned that trying to cover too much of Inform’s extensive capabilities in a five-week course was overly ambitious, especially with all the reading and writing I was asking my students to do. A revised version of the course was more thoughtful in selecting a careful subset of Inform’s full capabilities, designed to give students a core set of connected skills without overwhelming them with extraneous or complex details. In the first week of using Inform, we learned how to create locations and link them together spatially, add objects to those locations, and respond to commands by players to move around and look more closely at those objects. This basic “explore and investigate” paradigm offered a step up in complexity from the hypertext module in the course’s first week without being overwhelming. In the following week we focused on actions and logic; I introduced Inform’s action rulebooks to adjust the behavior and responses of the built-in verbs, and we looked at how to create new actions and behaviors. This gave students enough power to start creating procedurally interesting stories that could really explore the possibility of IF while leaving more advanced material for students who were more ambitious or already had a background in programming. Most of Inform’s features were never mentioned in class in favor of focusing on and reinforcing a small core skill set. This approach worked well, and the final projects demonstrated a better grasp of the core material, and thus more competent narratives than the more scattershot work from the first year.

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While Inform’s natural language syntax makes for elegant code, it can be misleading in that it offers the illusion that any natural language sentence should be understood. Students often came to me with programs that wouldn’t compile because they were using sentences that read like English, but weren’t patterns that Inform could understand. Taking care to stress that Inform only recognizes certain sentences and that sentences should be written just as they appear in the textbook and supplemental materials I’d provided for reference helped address this issue. Inform hampers itself a little in this regard by frequently offering a number of alternate ways of phrasing any given command. I found that picking a single syntax to teach in class and ignoring the others helped students recognize and learn through reinforcement the particular tools they needed to get their projects running. While many parts of writing and coding can be productively explored in parallel, other aspects of these two processes are less easily reconciled. Consider the process for peer critique and feedback. Game design focuses on rapid prototyping to converge on a “core gameplay loop,” then iterating and refining this basic skeleton into a more and more polished final version.15 Feedback from play-testers is sought continuously during this process, and the conventional wisdom says it’s never too early for feedback. Game design also tends to encourage collaborative processes of creation, and game programming is frequently collaborative, as in the practice of “pair programming,” where two coders work together to build a single piece of code, watching to catch each others’ mistakes. By contrast, writing is more often perceived as a solo craft, its output not shown to others until it’s ready for feedback; a work presented at a workshop or critique group might be expected to be the author’s best work, not an unfinished work-in-progress. Reconciling these different practices and traditions raises some interesting questions. Should IF-in-progress be polished in a workshop once nearly finished, or shown as a skeletal prototype early on? Should an instructor ask for frequent milestones and encourage collaboration, or put the focus on individual effort and a final product? The answer depends to a certain extent on the context of the course and what the instructor most wants his students to take from it. In my case, I wanted students to create personal, meaningful work, and felt working in groups might stifle truer, more introspective stories in favor of “safer” subjects, so I required that all projects be individual. However, many students struggling to learn Inform said they would have benefited from being allowed to work in teams: a second pair of eyes can be immensely helpful when trying to catch a stubborn bug. Splitting the project into two halves, one collaborative and focused on mastering skills and the second solo and focused on writing, might be a good solution. I also wanted students to have a chance to get feedback on their work, but the class size and quick timetable precluded a traditional round-table

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critique format. My compromise was to assign a series of quick “weekend experiment” projects through the first few weeks of the course that students could optionally show off to each other in a “demo fair” open exhibition at the beginning of next week’s class. The hope was that students could get feedback on small-scale individual works that would be helpful for their final project, learning the kinds of things that did and didn’t work in an interactive story. While this was largely successful, some students who were working on more personal pieces didn’t feel comfortable showing their work in this sort of casual format and missed out on the sort of insightful feedback they might have gotten from a critique-group approach. Striking the right balance between the differing creation practices of two communities means paying attention to the size and needs of a particular group of students. In my case, stealing elements from both game design and creative writing practice best led to the hybrid works my course was designed to explore, but an approach that focused more on one school or the other could also be equally successful. Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to using Inform in the classroom is the time investment in learning the language well enough to teach it and answer questions, as well as creating new lesson plans to cover it. Fortunately, there are several great resources to help instructors using Inform in a classroom setting. The language’s official website at inform7.com has a whole section on teaching, with resources broken out by grade level and subject. Inform comes with extensive free documentation and examples, and several full textbooks both online and from major publishers can help guide instructors or students through creating their first stories.16 The language has a large and active community quick to offer advice and answer questions. At press time, the central hub of Inform users was the Interactive Fiction Community Forum at http://intfiction.org. IF author Emily Short has also compiled a list of courses with syllabi that have used Inform.17 Finally, a course like this can also be a chance for cross-disciplinary collaboration. I’ve found computer science departments are often willing to engage with the arts and humanities, but rarely know where or how to begin. Bringing a group of students together from multiple backgrounds to work on projects at the boundary between engineering and art is a great way to make connections, for students and faculty alike. All told, is teaching creative writing with Inform worth the struggle? While it took some preparation, I found the class to be intensely rewarding both times I taught it. I was able to introduce creative writing to game design students who might never have encountered it in a college context otherwise, and introduce some experienced writers to a new mode of storytelling. People have fun designing interactive stories; it’s a surprisingly beguiling activity, tapping into our natural urge to manufacture secrets and then share them

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with each other. Notably, in neither class did I have a single student who tuned out and gave up; there were frustrations, there were tears, but nobody flat out quit. I took that as an encouraging sign as to the effectiveness of using IF in a writing class, and hope it will inspire others to try the same approach.

Notes 1 “Literary Games: The Intersection of Writing and Play.” DANM (Digital Arts and New Media) 132, Summer 2011 and 2012. Syllabus available at gamesaslit.textories.com. 2 Another favorite, from sixwordstories.net: “Saigon Hotel. Decades later. He weeps.” 3 Eve, Eric. Snowquest. Inform 7/z-code, 2009. Interactive fiction. 4 Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003: 37. Print. 5 Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Print. 6 You can find more about Twine online at twinery.org. 7 Nelson, Graham. “Natural language, semantic analysis, and interactive fiction.” The IF Theory Reader, eds. Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler. Boston: Transcript On Press, 2006. 141–88. Print. 8 Short, Emily. Counterfeit Monkey. Inform 7/Glulx, 2012. Interactive fiction. Web. 9 The official website at inform7.com is the best starting point to explore this information. 10 Reed, Aaron A. Sand-dancer. Inform 7/Glulx, 2010. Interactive fiction. Web. 11 Short, Emily. Galatea. Inform 6/z-code, 2000. Interactive fiction. 12 Bond, Stephen. Rameses. Inform 6/z-code, 2000. Interactive fiction. Web. 13 Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. Print. 14 Gijsbers, Victor. ’Mid the Sagebrush and the Cactus. Inform 7/Glulx, 2010. Interactive fiction. Web. 15 Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop. 2nd edn. Burlington: Elsevier Inc., 2008: 176. Print. 16 Aikin, Jim. The Inform 7 Handbook. MusicWords, 2010. Web. January 18, 2014, and Reed, Aaron A. Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. Boston: Course Technology Press, 2010. Print. 17 Short, Emily. “Teaching IF.” Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling, 2009. Web. January 18, 2014.

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13 Acting out: Netprov in the classroom Rob Wittig and Mark C. Marino

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here is a supreme joy in watching a work of art emerge in unexpected directions through a collaborative process. For the past few years in our own creative work, we have been exploring an emerging art form called netprov (networked improv narrative),1 and through this emerging form, we have been exploring ourselves as creative writers. Because netprov is such a light-weight and malleable form, it offers an excellent platform for engaging new and experienced creative writers in journeys of discovery and play. Netprovs are stories created in existing networked media that are collaborative and improvised in real time. They can be as simple as a poetic language game played on Twitter: trying to write with an Elmer Fudd accent or to write without using the letter “e.” Or they can be as rich as fleshed-out characters meditating on their own low status and income inequality in the late capitalist era as they enact a fictional workers’ revolt. Netprov writers can compose tales of rising flood waters from their iPhones or bid on past lives on a blog. Netprov is a creative writing mode made for the age of networked writers. Netprov projects investigate important issues in contemporary life and the contemporary culture of writing. Today people routinely work in virtual workgroups spread around the world; love relationships and friendships are increasingly written, in addition to being spoken; educated young people access nearly all culture—written, recorded, and filmed—on portable electronic devices. This confluence creates rich soil for netprov to flourish.

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Although it grows out of a tradition of innovative digital literature, netprov is an agile form that takes as its quill and parchment any available digital media—the same media that people use in their everyday lives for work or romance—and uses them to create stories with fictional characters. All that’s needed is a shared premise and a few rules of the game. Still in its earliest of phases of development, netprov’s playground has been the writing classroom, where college students have not only been enjoying writing in the form but are also significantly shaping its development. Our test ground for the netprov writing exercises was Mark’s Advanced Writing course at the University of Southern California. This class is the second of the two required writing courses taken predominantly by juniors or seniors. Note that this class does not cater to creative writing majors; however, Mark’s emphasis on writing in emerging media forms made these exercises in social media a useful fit. The fact that the students were from all areas of the university, though mostly from humanities and social science majors, underscores the ease with which these exercises can be adapted for a broad pool of collegiate writers. Of course, this kind of creative networked play has a rich history. One notable precedent for netprov in the classroom dates back to the early days of hypertext fiction at Brown University, where Robert Coover set up the Hypertext Hotel where students populated the narrative rooms with characters and stories or swung from room to room like bellhops or gigolos.2 Following Coover’s lead, we invite students into our netprovs, though our games tend to be more like campgrounds or roving carnivals than towering hotels. In this chapter, we outline the basic features of netprov and give several examples of how it has been incorporated in a college writing classroom. However, the first challenge is often to help students see their now familiar networked modes of digital writing (e.g. Tweeting, posting status messages, snapping selfies, sending emails) in unfamiliar ways—as sites for creative play.

Characteristics of Netprov Netprov is radically interdisciplinary. It draws from literature, from theater, from mass media, from interactive digital role-playing games, and from everyday Internet personal media and social media practices. Our backgrounds are primarily literary, so we tend to look at netprov through a literary lens. We both also have experience and fondness for performance and for writing for theater and film. ●

Netprov uses multiple media simultaneously.

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Netprov is collaborative and incorporates participatory contributions from readers.

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Netprov is experienced as a performance as it’s published and is read later as a literary archive. During the performance, netprov projects can incorporate breaking news.

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Netprov projects can use actors to physically enact characters in images, videos, and live performance.

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Some writer-actors portray the characters they create.

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Netprov lends itself well to parody and satire, which help students engage initially and can lead to deeper, more serious subject matter.

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Some netprov projects require writer-actors and readers to travel to certain locations to seek information, perform actions, and report their activities.

The historical moment when nonfiction begins to be fictionalized “What’s on your mind?” This question sits in the status box of every Facebook user. But what if you didn’t answer that question? What if instead you wrote a Haiku? Or ordered pizza? Pretended to be an object or a place? Or told a story . . . At the heart of netprov is the use of networked forms of communication for artistic purposes. Such uses are not always universally accepted. What if you pretended to hire a workstudy student to run your social media? What if you created a fake occupy movement to protest the horrid real-life conditions of adjunct faculty? What if you pretended to have found a reality TV star’s mobile phone and Tweeted from his account? These are all projects we have done,3 but many people find this to be breaking the rules, like laughing in a church or making paper airplanes out of math tests. Students (and most other people) need to be shaken out of their relationship with these media forms that have only been around for a nanosecond. They ask: Why would you tell tales in Twitter? Why write novels in email? Why produce flights of fancy in Facebook? Aren’t those forms for clear and direct communication, used only for pure, unadorned presentations of self? When these questions arise, we find ourselves harkening back to the origins of fiction in a more established medium: print. We recall, for example, this moment in 1713 when Richard Steele published an account of Alexander Selkirk’s shipwreck, an account that was

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aggrandized and exaggerated if not completely fictional. But it was published as the genuine article. The next year, another tale of shipwreck appears, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which is published with a title page that does not name Defoe but instead claims to be an account by Crusoe himself. The liminal zone between fact and factual writing and fiction becomes hazy—right from the start of novels—if not long before in, say, Gilgamesh. By creating fictions in digital venues considered to be sites of nonfiction, though rife with all the exaggerations, emendations, and elisions that people regularly use in their “real-life” self-presentation, we’re repeating that same foundational fiction-making gesture in digital media. In other words, we’re enjoying being shipwrecked in a literary sense. Unchaining a medium or mode of discourse from its conventions can be quite liberating for students. All young writers can learn from going through the netprov process, and there are a certain number of them, dear to our hearts, who share with us one of the primary impulses of fiction-izing: the joy of taking a new form and venue for writing (e.g. email, blogs, text messages, social media) and being among the first to create fictional personages within it for comic and dramatic effect. Both of us share this very formative creative impulse in our work that any time we see a new place where human beings can write, we develop an uncontrollable urge to invent a character and act out that character in netprov. In these classroom exercises, we try to share that thrill with students.

Case study: Who would you like to have been? Chicago Soul Exchange, a netprov http://robwit.net/?project=chicago-soul-exchange Fictional premise This project created by Rob Wittig is predicated on the proposition that there are more human beings alive now than the sum total of human beings that have lived in the past and that, therefore, not everyone can have a past life. The fiction imagines a resale market, in the style of eBay, for past lives, and the fiction unfolds on this e-commerce website and its associated blog. In contrast to the romantic knights, ladies, and sages that tend to populate the American pop culture underground of past-life discovery, our website’s catalog was stocked with a more plausible selection of simple, short-lived agricultural workers. Against this backdrop, the Past Life Maven (her screen name) who is the heroine of the story comes into the possession of the soul of an actual knight. Prices escalate as she attracts the attention of a Mafioso character who swoops in and tries to claim the knight in an ominous bidding war. Drama ensues until finally at the end of the week the

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entire homespun company of the Past Life Maven is taken over by a giant multinational banking corporation. Technology and team structure The fiction unfolded on the Chicago Soul Exchange e-commerce website and its associated blog. A core group of writers played the leading roles working from a plot outline. Other writers invented their own characters and their ideas were incorporated into the evolving plot. Rules of the game Writer/players were invited to bid on the past lives offered for sale on the e-commerce site and to write in the comments section of the catalog, which resulted in some hilarious arguments among self-appointed pastlife experts. Writer/players were also invited to write on the blog. The bittersweet, funny-and-sad literary constraint for contributing to the catalog was that each human life needed to be summed up in two sentences.

Writing roles in netprov Chicago Soul Exchange, like other netprovs, offered various modes of participation—featured players: writer/actors who are in on the project from the beginning and are privy to the story outlines and story conferences; players: reader/writers unknown to us who follow the story and accept the invitation to play and co-create; readers in real time; and readers of the archives.

Collaboration and performance There are two aspects of using netprov in the writing classroom that seem the most unusual from traditional exercises—the fact that it’s collaborative and the fact that it’s performative. We find these to be great additions to the toolset of writing pedagogy. First of all, in a world of labored drafts and writer’s block, we find collaborative play to be a useful way of breaking the inhibitory self-consciousness, fear, and plain-old not knowing how to get started that students often experience by putting writing into a familiar social and dialogic mode. If your first line of writing is a response to someone else, suddenly the walls of insecurity, that performance anxiety, disappear. Secondly, the performative aspect makes writing something that can happen in the moment, rather than something that can only emerge from sweating it out in the woodshed. Netprov draws out a character-embodiment, character-mimicry mode in which writers “become” their characters in a way modeled on improv theater and other theater training exercises aimed

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at promoting relaxation and creative confidence. We find that, for many students, this is another effective way of escaping traditional inhibitions. Netprov also has the advantage of momentarily turning on its head the traditional creative writing injunction to find your own unique voice. Instead, we invite students to don a number of different voices and assume different characters in a light-hearted and playful way. Think of role-playing games or murder mystery dinner parties where people inhabit their characters. For some students, this can lead to a breakthrough in their ability to draft freely. Netprov says to the stymied student, take off that hairshirt of isolated genius, put on a mask and speak!

Timing Timing emerges as a key aesthetic in this new art form, just as it is in students’ social media lives (just ask a young person to wait five hours before replying to a text message from a close friend!). As writers and teachers we have found ourselves in the middle of netprov projects on the delicious, tortuous cusp of a life-changing moment in the story—will he accept the marriage proposal? does she die?—deciding to delay a crucial piece of dialogue by one minute, five minutes, ten minutes, creating such an exciting, agonizing, suspenseful, dramatic creative moment. As in stage or cinematic drama, netprov harnesses timing as a powerful narrative force.

Generative constraints When it comes to narrative content, we try to find rich ways to explore real issues, such as climate change, social geography, and new technologies. Last Five Days of Sight and Sound, for example, created fun with a Gothic edge that appealed to a student population enamored of zombie tales. However, baked into that netprov was the new normal of young people sharing spaces and yet removing themselves from shared moments through the busy distraction of smartphones. Thus, key to successful netprovs are the fictional premises just focused enough to be engaging and inspiring while open-ended enough to accommodate a wide variety of participation without “crashing” the overall narrative. The proclivity for online communities to erupt in “flame wars,” or arguments, is a phenomenon that can mar a fiction or enliven it, depending on how such interaction has been contextualized by the frame narrative.

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For example, diverse reactions are welcome (and realistic) in a fictional citywide disaster like The LA Flood Project,4 which was designed to accentuate the multiple points of view of those who make up such a heterogeneous metropolis. Arguments among patrons of Chicago Soul Exchange add spice and comedy to the goings-on. In F.A.I.L., students were cast as workers in fictional companies. No possible reaction on the part of the students playing the workers could sound a false note. Some students wrote out their extreme boredom and how they hated going to work. Others became activist leaders within the worker’s community. One student’s schizophrenic character lashed out. All these reactions made sense because of the design of the frame. Our netprov projects follow the golden rule of theatrical improv: creative partners never respond to a partner’s idea with “no, but;” instead, they always say “yes, and.” Once a character is described as wearing a blue hat, that hat is a fact. We say that netprov writers never disagree about facts, but always disagree about interpretations and opinions. Our most successful netprovs are animated by individual responses to a common dilemma. “Yes, and” avoids the doldrums of a common style of literary collaboration: the add-on story for which one person writes chapter one, the next person writes chapter two, and so on. The collaborators who come later find themselves increasingly hemmed in by previous ideas. The first chapter is fun to write; the last chapter is not.

Netprov: In- or out-of-classroom activity? Netprovs thrive in the emerging classrooms of contemporary higher education where copresence is not a given. Since they exist primarily online, netprovs provide a structured interaction for students working in these virtual classrooms. However, we have found a particular kind of value to cowriting sessions not only at the same time but also in the same location. The first exercise of l5dosas asked the students to pass a bottle of water around the room while looking only at their smartphones with jackets or sweaters over their heads. On the other hand, the most recent LA Flood instantiation took place in a hybrid classroom that was meeting only online. The fictional story gave a new narrative framework to the students’ learning situation, as the flood became the reason for students to be away from a physical classroom. Certainly, copresence is not a requirement, but simultaneity offers excitement. In any event, we did find it useful in the week-long netprovs to have periodic check-in with the class to reflect on the process and to offer a more informal (and undocumented) feedback environment.

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Case study: Sensory gothic Last Five Days of Sight and Sound, a netprov http://l5dosas.blogspot.com Fictional premise Students are cast as patients who have just awakened from the first of a series of operations that promise to restore the sight and hearing they have lost. Until the operations are complete, the patients are able to see and hear only “through the Internet.” The two main characters are Dr Vossergon, who performs the surgery, and Nurse Zink, named after the nurse in the Joyce Carol Oates story “The Night Nurse.” Students communicate with one another and Nurse Zink, finding out that they are part of a group of such patients on several floors of a single hospital. They make friends and compare experiences with the other patients. As the week-long project draws to a close, it is revealed that Dr Vossergon has run away and will be unable to perform the final surgery. At the end of the five days the patients will lose even the electronic sight and hearing. They share about what they are doing with their last days of sight and sound. At the very end, the patients are promised the return of their sight and hearing if they succeed at an online game. Technology and team structure Daily assignments were posted in a blog and students communicated via Twitter. Rules of the game Students were given specific prompts for several different kinds of writing each day. They also were instructed to perform certain physical experiments and thought experiments and write about their experiences.

Prompt examples from Last Five Days of Sight and Sound Here, as examples, are the blog instructions for two days of the project and the day-after reflective writing prompts.

Day 1: All is Rosy Twitter: Keep your eyes on the #l5dosas hashtag. Follow: @NurseZink on Twitter The Story: Today, everything is rosy. You awake at the Phoenix Center after part one of the treatment, which has you confined to your bed. You are one

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day away from having your sight, sound, and speech restored! As a stop-gap, your brain has been connected to the Internet. All the things you see, hear, or say must go through either Twitter or some other Internet site. Dr Vossergon is nowhere to be found, but Nurse Zink is hereabouts. Somewhere. Or you think she is. Literary Prompt: Tweet your backstory. How did you lose the ability to hear, see, and speak? Use your imagination. These can be purely psychosomatic conditions, largely metaphoric. The main illness Dr Vossergon treats, Multisensory Dysphasia, seems to primarily plague millennials. What triggered your case of it? Your use of media? Traumatic incident? Or did you lose these senses some other way? Challenge: (at least one tweet) Sensory Deprivation: Tweet what it’s like to experience the world just through the Internet. Put a blanket over your head and wear headphones for a period of time and interact audiovisually only through the Internet via phone, tablet, or laptop. Keep that blanket handy. You will need it for future challenges. Inspired? If you would like to write a longer bit, just post it as a reply to this message and link to your comment in your Tweet. Minimum Requirement: Six tweets a day. At least one on the Daily Challenge. At least two have to address other people in the netprov (through the @ symbol + their username). You cannot Tweet all at once. There must be at least an hour between your sets of Tweets. Return here tomorrow for your next challenge.

Day 3 Story: Dr Vossergon is officially MIA, and the surgeries are postponed indefinitely. You could live with that except . . . Nurse Zink announces that the batteries in your Sensorex system only have three more days of life, including today. That means Monday will be your last day to experience sight and sound even through the Internet. Then it’s lights out, noises off. Literary Prompt: Now that you face the total loss of your sight and sound, even as mediated through the Internet, what do you plan to spend your time watching or listening to? What dream can you still try to accomplish in real life with online sights and sounds? What sights and sounds from your past will you try to see and hear one more time? Challenge: The Group Dance Off: You’ve experienced sensory deprivation alone and have tried to perform a task with your sight and hearing preoccupied. Now it’s time to try to connect with other patients and share an experience.

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And given all the bad news, it’s time to blow off some steam and share some music while you still can. This challenge pits the three floors against one another. (Guests count for all three floors.) Your goal is to get as many people on your floor as possible to dance simultaneously to the same song. You are on your own to coordinate with your floor and to decide when the dance session will occur, where the music will come from, be it blip.fm, youtube, pandora or some other source. Deadline: 11:59pm Sat. (You can only coordinate via Twitter, BTW.) First, you must prove people are attending the dance off. You don’t physically have to be in the same place, just online, listening and dancing wherever you are. Then, you must document somehow that you are listening to the song and dancing. We recommend photos or short videos (three seconds should suffice) taken by the nurses (or your friends). Any photographic evidence should indicate that you are dancing with the proper sensory deprivation: eyes closed, towel over head, headphones in, phone held up to your eyes. The floor with the highest number of participants wins this challenge. (Hint: Accomplishing this challenge will help you on future challenges.)

Day 6 Reflections Many of you lost your sight and sound forever, but at least one small band and several others managed to execute the Daisy Chain. You’ll have to fill in what happens next. In the meantime: Literary Prompt: In comments posted to this blog, reflect on the L5DOSAS experience.

140 Characters: The Harshest constraint of all As has often been noted, the draconian 140-character limit of Tweets functions as a powerful literary constraint. The combination of time and character limits has occasioned an explosion of wonderful experimentation with orthography and expression through the constraints of social media. This inspired us to do a project by the French Oulipo and their systems of mathematically constrained writing. The creative goal for the project was to begin to test Oulipian systems of text generation and modification so fun and appealing that people would take them outside the class and to see if they would literally spread in a viral way.

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Netprov and evolutionary orthography Alongside teaching standard scholarly and professional grammar and usage as we always do, we have found netprov a fertile way to explore and discuss alternative spelling and usage for artistic effect. The new orthography of the digital—“misspellings,” contractions, acronyms, and so on—is a fascinating historical phenomenon. English orthography has been remarkably stable in historical terms for the past 150 years (the high imperial and postimperial era) and a longer view of history would tell us that we are undergoing an inevitable evolutionary shift.

Netprov best practices While netprovs are all around us, playing out every second across social networks, structured netprov writing assignments offer the opportunity to optimize the potential for dynamic interactions and emergent lessons. As we have developed netprov exercises, we have amassed the following set of best practices: 1

Create a main info site and account. Although we don’t always have narrators, we have found it useful to create a primary Twitter account and/or website to act as the scaffolding for the netprov and as a central source for new prompts, directions, misdirections, and ultimately archives. This can be as simple as a Twitter account (as in the case of LA Flood ) or a blog on Blogger (as in l5dosas ) or as complex as a custom designed site that combines Twitter, announcements, and a discussion forum.

2

Chart a shared timeline. While netprovs are best when they emerge, these exercises work best when students at least have some common milestones. Again, this might take the form of daily prompts (as in l5dosas ) or status reports (as in the height of the waters in LA Flood ).

3

Require interaction. While our exercises need to have a baseline requirement for participation (x tweets per day), we have also found it important to require a number of Tweets that respond to something someone else has posted. That requirement keeps students from prewriting all of their posts and also requires them to pay attention to the ongoing developments. We’ve found it’s best to require students not only to create their own individual texts but also to respond

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to other students’ texts. A typical assignment: each student is required to post four original Tweets and three responses to another student’s Tweet to the project’s Twitter hashtag. This is successful in encouraging students to build on each other’s ideas. 4

Prepare and build archives. The flitting about of the Twitter API5 has taught us that we need to think about archiving before the project launches rather than after. There are a number of lightweight solutions to this question that will no doubt be outdated by the publication of this book. Nonetheless, archiving is crucial for critical reflection on the project.

5

Frame the play clearly. First, before anyone can play, they need a clear and concise description of the overall fiction—both what is known at the start but also some sense of where it is headed. Second, we needed to create a set of specific writing prompts or invitations for various kinds of written participation. And third, we needed to offer examples or models to get the projects started.

Notes 1 For more information on Neprov, see Rob Wittig’s thesis http://robwit. net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Wittig_Thesis_FINAL_singlespace.pdf (University of Bergen, 2011) and “Netprov: Elements of an Emerging Form”

2 The Hypertext Hotel was “The Talk of the Town” in John Seabrook’s “The Pleasures of (Hyper)Text” in the New Yorker. Seabrook, John. “The Pleasures of (Hyper)text.” The New Yorker June 27, 1994: 43. Print. For more see: . 3 The Ballad of Workstudy Seth, Occupy MLA, and Reality: Being @spencerpratt. 4 The LA Flood Project was a netprov that included fictional accounts of an epic flood delivered via annotations on an online map as well as through a real-time Twitter simulation (conducted several times now), during which players reported the impact of the flood on their characters. For more information, see: Marino, Mark C.. “Mobilizing Cities: Alternative Community Storytelling.” The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farmon. New York: Routledge, 2014. See a hands-on netprov exercise here: http:// themobilestory.com/ch-20-crises-and-community-storytelling/ 5 API (application program interface) is a set of programming functions or routines that interact with specific software components.

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14 The text is where it’s at: Digital storytelling assignments that teach lessons in creative writing Christina Clancy

T

he conversation around the use of technology in the creative writing classroom is an expanding work in process. Or maybe it is better to see it as a draft in the revision process. The Fiction Writers Review recently ran a two-part series called “Where Are We Going Next?” in which the contributors engaged in a discussion of the use of digital technology in the creative writing classroom that reveals varying degrees of comfort among instructors. Anna Leahy writes, “I’m dabbling in digital media when I can, but I’m not yet confident enough to embrace it,”1 while Stephanie Vanderslice is more enthusiastic. She says, “I came to understand that it’s absolutely essential that we catch up and understand that multimodal composition needs to be incorporated into courses at every level.”2 Whether instructors of creative writing embrace such multimodal composition or not, the discussion—and even the question of where we are going next —indicate that new modes of writing are seen as part of a movement away from the traditional text-based methods of teaching and executing creative writing. The shift is unsettling for many instructors, and no wonder. Multimodal forms of expression, including digital storytelling—a

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hybrid, multimedia form that involves photography, video, voice, and soundtrack—challenge every aspect of our teaching, from assignment design to the implementation of workshops to establishing new forms of grading rubrics. I, too, felt pressed to incorporate new ways of storytelling in my classroom, yet I also felt there was a rising urgency to do so when I read Rick Moody’s twitter story “Some Contemporary Characters.”3 Not only was the story told in a new form for its time, but it was also published in Electric Literature, a journal that leverages print and multimodal forms of publishing. Then I downloaded/read/interacted with Robin Sloan’s unusual “Fish: A Tap Essay,” his smartphone manifesto about engaging with content on the internet.4 The application is novel for its simplicity: the reader moves forward by tapping the words on the screen and is not given the choice to move in any other direction with the text or read it any faster than it is presented screen by screen. Sloan said, “It’s not the case that words are outdated and we need to replace them with interaction and videos and birds flying in outer space. No, words are still a great technology and we don’t have to go searching for something new.”5 Storytelling is changing and finding new audiences in new places. As a writer and teacher, I didn’t want to be left behind. And I didn’t want my students to be left behind, either. Or, rather, I worried my students were already “there” while I was teaching the eight-page short story. I wanted to embrace multimodal forms of writing, but I lacked confidence. Digital storytelling, then, seemed like a good place to start. The medium had an enticing high-tech sexiness on the small, liberal arts campus where I teach. International affairs courses already employed digital storytelling to help students process and communicate what they’d learned from their time abroad, and administrators were enthusiastic about the samples they’d seen. After attending a workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling, I engaged students in my creative writing class in simple “snapshot stories”—a story told with a single image. My focus was primarily on the script as the backbone of the story. I eventually became more comfortable assigning longer, more involved stories and engaged students in a process called Radical Revisions6 where they made the beginnings of their stories the endings, changed the voice, told the stories in only questions, and retold the stories as folk tales, mysteries, and surreal fiction. Teaching the workshop also gave me more confidence with programs like Final Cut, iMovie, and Windows Movie Maker. Most recently we have been using WE Video because it works on both Apple and Microsoft platforms and offers more features than Movie Maker. This work has also helped me become more comfortable teaching students how to read their work out loud and edit their audio files. While not without frustration, the pedagogical value of digital storytelling became immediately clear to me. Instead of moving away from the text, I’d

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actually found a means of getting my students into it, engaging more deeply in the written word. Digital stories are intimate artifacts. Because students use their own voice and images, they exhibit more ownership of their stories. It seems so simple and obvious that storytelling is at the heart of any narrative, fiction or nonfiction, yet it took the multimodal digital approach for me to see my students truly engage with their role as storytellers, partly because they were more aware of their audience(s)—both the known in the other students in the workshop and the unknown audience of the internet or the radio. Since then, I’ve had the luxury of teaching entire semesters devoted to digital storytelling, in which my students engage in a series of recursive assignments I’ll outline here. They introduce the use of image, voice, and sound in their stories, yet the text, or the script, is always the backbone of the narrative. Returning to the notion of the Twitter story for a moment, Moody addressed the importance of the text in “Some Contemporary Characters.” In an interview with “Speakeasy,” Moody said that his project was ultimately intended to get readers back to books. He said, “I hope that it will lead people back to books, because I am a true believer in the book as a form. Everything else, for good or ill, has a perfume of gimmickry about it.”7 Digital and multimodal forms of storytelling, then, can ultimately lead students back to the text as a sort of warm-up for deep engagement with traditional narrative, readying them for the challenge of writing the personal essay and the eight-page short story we are accustomed to teaching in the creative writing classroom. They see the value of the written word as if in photo negative, growing more appreciative of the power of their writing to communicate experience and ideas and move audiences. Digital storytelling, then, can be thought of as a circling back to the text rather than a shift away, or a “what’s next.” That’s what these assignments—most of which are appropriate for use in the face-to-face, hybrid, and online classroom environments—are intended to accomplish.

Exercises that utilize digital media to teach creative writing lessons Every creative writing class covers fundamentals like genre, tone, style, and voice. In my digital storytelling class, students participate in exercises that help illustrate the importance of these elements while laying the groundwork for the digital story they’ll ultimately produce, as well as to reinforce the value of their script as the spine of their project. They demonstrate how the use of image, voice, and other media help students find new ways to engage with the most important concepts of creative writing.

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Swapping images, losing authorship, changing tone On the first day of class, I have my students go outside and use their cell phones to take a photo of something on campus. It could be a scene that every student would know about, like the prominent cupola on the Middle College building, one of the Native American Indian burial mounds on the quad, or the bell tower on the chapel. Or it could also be more obscure, like a branch on an oak tree or a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. When the students return to class, I have them write a brief narrative explaining how and why the subject of their photo is significant to them. Or, if it is insignificant, they can write about that, too. Next, they text their photos to a partner, who then writes about what they do or do not see in the photograph. When the students return with their narratives of their partner’s photos, I have them write a noun and an adjective on the chalkboard—any noun or adjective. Before each student reads, I do a Google image search using a random noun and adjective as search terms and project the image on the overhead. While the student reads their narrative out loud—an exercise that serves as practice for the audio recordings they’ll do later in the semester— the other students see an image that is usually totally unrelated to what they are hearing: a zombie jumping off of a building while someone reads about playing ultimate Frisbee, a giraffe grooming another giraffe while a student reads a story about a statue by the library, or a darkening pre-tornado sky over a small town while a student relates the story of the fraternity party where he met his girlfriend. After the readings, we discuss the ways in which the image and narrative create interesting tension between the story being told and the “story” they see. The disconnect can sometimes be random, but is often dynamic and productive. Sometimes students find that an image relates to the story in unexpected ways, or that it can either undercut or accentuate the tone in a story. Nobody needs to be told that a clock is ticking while looking at a clock ticking. Such literal representations are boring in both traditional and digital narrative forms. This exercise reinforces the importance of tone in writing, while also driving home some of the ideas in a text frequently taught in creative writing classes, Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author.” The students’ role as author is challenged when they see how audiences receive their composing decisions under different circumstances, a vivid example of Barthes’ statement that “[t]he birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.”8 It’s also a lesson in trusting the reader to draw their own ideas from the script and image. Not everything needs to be “told.”

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Story organization and writing process: The Pechakucha Writing within the framework of rhetoric and composition, James McCrimmon stresses the importance of encouraging students to see what they are writing about—to look, and look again. He posits that teachers of composition must “drill into our students that observation is a prerequisite for thinking, and thinking a prerequisite for writing. The structure of the writing must reflect in all significant details the structure of the subject as the writer perceives it.”9 When this happens, he says, “rhetoric recapitulates experience.”10 This is an equally useful framework in the creative writing classroom and the implementation of pechakuchas is a powerful way to incorporate that frame. Pechakuchas help enable students to “see” story structure and are becoming increasingly popular ways of telling stories, with pechakucha nights in bars and theaters across the country. Participants display 20 images via PowerPoint and narrate for 20 seconds without notes or text accompanying the images. As a result, the “burden” of narration is completely on the presenter. This is a helpful means of “looking,” or pointing out specific, relevant details and organizing ideas around them. I’ve found that pechakuchas are valuable not as a final product, but as a beginning: the first part of the process of both finding a story and organizing ideas around the story. It’s an exercise that marries writing as a form of knowing and of telling. A pechakucha is also an excellent means of teaching students about the power of setting in stories. To begin, I ask students to visit a place that is unfamiliar to them because we tend to be more observant of details when we are in new places. The novelty of the experience is exciting for students as well as their audience. This is an assignment that is best done in the face-to-face environment, although students can also upload videos of themselves narrating their pechakucha. The first challenge of the experience is to “look” or, more specifically, find the very images that are interesting and representative of a place: a cruise line poster in a Liberty Tax office, an ashtray on the counter of the vacuum repair shop, an old armchair in the middle of a graveyard. Objects have power. When students narrate these objects, they discuss the ways in which they reveal the environment, from socioeconomic status to how the place is used. The students’ status in relation to the place they explored changes: they become knowledgeable and informed, reinforcing the benefit of research. From a writing perspective, the most essential part of the pechakucha is the element of feedback. Instead of jumping from one pechakucha to the next, I’ll workshop the pechakucha as a means of helping the student find the story. The student’s peers usually have strong responses to the images they found most interesting, as well as to the power of the “story” that emerges. Those

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students who merely narrate the elements of the image that are obvious to the viewer draw immediate feedback from students wanting “more.” There’s usually a story, and students are quick to find it. Once this becomes apparent to the student, the process of writing can actually begin because there’s a main idea or subject or “hook” for them to organize their ideas around. After completing the pechakucha process, I’ll have students turn their narration into a story. Building off the previous exercises, I ask them to explore how the interaction of their new narrative and the images impacts tone. From there, they write a script and rearrange the images based on the feedback from class, along with the newfound sense of where the story lies. This is like going from a first draft to a second, and the images become a visual means of helping the student “see” how to organize their ideas, one of the most challenging editing techniques we teach in creative writing classes now built naturally into the experience.

The radio essay It’s one thing to write creative nonfiction for print; writing for radio, or the “ear,” presents its own unique challenges. The storyteller has to engage listeners with a hook, or a dramatic question, and continue to stud the essay with more questions and answers to prevent listeners from changing the station, and also to engage someone who is just tuning in. The typical radio listener looks for ways to relate to the teller’s personal experience. That’s why an awareness of universal themes is so critical to the composition of a radio essay: fear of death, feelings of inadequacy, body image, loss, romance, coping with disability, aging, parenting. Ira Glass, producer of “This American Life,” discusses the ways in which a radio essay requires the writer to know about two primary components to this form of storytelling. In broadcasting I think you have two basic building blocks and they are very powerful and you can use them as you will. One is the anecdote, really just a sequence of actions . . . The other thing . . . you want to constantly be raising questions. You want bait . . . The whole shape of the story is that you’re throwing out questions to keep people watching or listening and then answering them along the way. The other building block is the moment of reflection . . . the bigger something that we’re driving at.11 While this advice might seem straightforward, it can be difficult for students to make sense of a personal experience in a meaningful way. I recently asked my students to write 500-word essays for Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Wisconsin Life” program, employing the “Story Circle” methodology I’d learned from the Center for Digital Storytelling. We sat in a circle and a student would share

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an anecdote or something they’d thought of writing about for their essay. We went around the circle and each student asked the storyteller a question. The first storyteller told a story about sneaking into an abandoned power plant near campus when he was a freshman. One by one, the students asked about the story. “What did it smell like?” Dust. “What did you see?” Dead rats in the water, 1960s’ porn on the walls of the manager ’s office. “Were you afraid?” No. I was thrilled. I was on an adrenaline high for an entire hour. “What happened after you left?” The cops showed up the next day and installed video cameras over the doors and windows. “What do you think about that experience now?” That it was the last time I ’ d ever take a risk like that. I ’m about to graduate, and I still want to take risks, but not the same kind. That was the kind of risk you take when you ’re a kid. As soon as he said that, other students related stories of risks they’d taken, or that they wished they’d taken more risks like that in the past—the storyteller had a chance to see how he’d hit on a universal theme that his classmates could relate to, and he could witness that loss of authorship because the students used his experience as a lens through which they could see their own. The story circle helped this student move the story from the anecdote about sneaking into an abandoned power plant into a powerful meditation about the relationship between risk taking and growing up.

Genre One of my colleagues describes digital stories as “wet”: highly confessional, raw, and emotionally manipulative. While not all digital stories are tearjerkers, it isn’t surprising that he has this impression, given the medium’s pedigree outside the creative writing classroom. Social workers, community groups, health-care researchers, and therapists have embraced digital storytelling as a tool to help people work through trauma. They’ve found therapeutic value in the process of having people tell stories through the power of their own words, with their own voices, and through their own images. They essentially turn their trauma into a “story,” a process seen as cathartic for the sake of healing, and the short movie becomes a sort of intimate artifact that can be studied and reflected upon as a means of finding what Cathy Caruth might consider “the reality” of trauma: [I]t is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.12

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This criticism of digital stories could well apply to creative nonfiction in the traditional classroom. The genre of creative nonfiction often features stories of “the wound” told with emotional honesty. Regardless of the medium, such confessional stories create privacy and comfort issues in the workshop setting, issues that are only heightened in the form of digital stories because of the added layers of personal images and voice narration that could potentially implicate certain individuals or even the storyteller. While there is value in focusing on the wound, I made an effort to design an assignment that would push students to see digital storytelling as a useful vehicle for exploring genre, moving from strict narratives about the lived experience toward a form that challenges the borders of journalism and documentation, a challenge the creative writing class is uniquely able to make. I also wanted students to think about intertextuality and the ways in which writers organize their ideas. To this end, I provided specific parameters for the next assignment in a checklist form that students were required to complete for their digital story: ●

You must use at least 10 new or borrowed images.

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You must appear in one of the images.

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At least four of the images must be “researched.” For example, if you write about a building on campus, you could research the architect and the year it was built. Try to make sense of your research, or put it into context of how or why this research is relevant and/or interesting to you and your project. You should demonstrate that you put effort into learning more about this image than is immediately apparent.

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At least two of the images must be from an area beyond the campus.

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You should borrow (and cite) text from another source, for example, song lyrics, lines from a poem.

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Your images and text should be thematically and stylistically linked. Your project should sound like it is unique to you: your perspectives, insights, quirkiness, and tone.

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Don’t be afraid to incorporate yourself into the text. You should use the first person “I” when it is appropriate.

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Your entries do not need to appear chronologically, however there should be some sort of cohesive order to them.

This project, inspired by Henri Cole’s “Paris Diaries” in The New Yorker,13 felt more firmly rooted in the creative nonfiction discussion of genre. While the students were given more parameters, they also found more ambiguity in the project. They frequently asked me what it was I wanted, a question I found

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productive. The other advantage of this project was that it challenged students to embark on a more blended approach to digital storytelling, incorporating narrative with research, borrowed text and images, an exploration of physical geography, and meditation on the power of place. While the results were not uniformly effective, the diaries of place offered an opportunity for students to take chances with the genre. As they did, they began to feel more comfortable with each other after the screenings of the short movies they’d made, some more successful than others. In response, I informed students that I would drop their lowest grade of the term to promote risk taking. Those efforts that weren’t as successful provided opportunities for discussion. What makes the stories effective? Humor? Insight? Revelation? Analysis? Research? Students began to see for themselves how and when personal narrative could be used effectively, but as part of rather than all of the broader stories they wanted to tell. The concept of place offered helpful context to ground their personal stories in larger narrative setting.

The final step: Teaching editing through digital storytelling One of the challenges of crafting a digital story is that it involves the braiding of images, voice, and soundtrack, all of which are timed to complement each other. “Finishing” a digital story is an involved process that requires rendering and time. The final product feels, in a very real sense then, like a product. One of my students remarked that she could almost “feel it in my hand, like a gift.” That’s why students are hesitant to blow apart their carefully assembled stories in order to make edits, and part of the reason many instructors are hesitant to engage students in editing. As a result of this hesitancy, I’ve begun to incorporate mandatory editing, a process that prepares students for text edits in their written work. Some students tend to feel that editing text is difficult, and if they struggle, it means they are “bad writers.” I’d like to think that engaging students in a substantive editing project prepares them to think of editing as hard and recursive, but necessary and important for a quality finished product, whether it involves video, audio, text, or a combination of all three. To accomplish this goal, it is important to build in time for those edits and to clearly articulate what is expected of them with a rubric that accounts for the various elements an instructor deems important. I ask students to think about how they narrate the image, or if the image needs narration at all. Ultimately, a digital story should amplify the script. The added layer of images and sound should do something. They must assess whether or

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not the elements of their film are interacting, or if there’s an issue with the pace. As Glass mentioned, maybe the anecdote is weak or the moment of realization isn’t realized. Whatever the issue, the writer needs to know that they will be required to go back and make the edit. Unlike working with text, the video format facilitates editing because they can often “see” where they are weak, and they hopefully have the skills to think imagistically about how to make modifications.

Final thoughts Far from removing students from the text, I’ve found that the steps leading up to the completion of digital storytelling projects reinforce what’s already taught in the creative writing classroom. The assignments allow students to focus on the value of the script as the core of any successful project incorporating other media. The addition of audio and visual content adds a kaleidoscopic element to the story. This allows the story to be seen, felt, and understood differently, while also making more obvious its strengths and weaknesses. After completing a radio essay, pechakucha, or a digital story, students find more comfort and authority in their role as writers and storytellers. An appropriate analogy might be the value of study abroad, or experiencing other cultures as a means of better understanding our own—moving away in order to get closer. The same can be said for utilizing other media to amplify the lessons we teach in the “traditional” creative writing classroom. We move away from the text in order to return to it.

Notes 1 Cathy Day, Anna Leahy, and Stephanie Vanderslice. “Where Are We Going Next? A Conversation About Creative Writing Pedagogy, Part 2.” Fiction Writers Review. Web. February 11, 2011. 2 Ibid. 3 A note on Rick Moody’s Twitter short story “Some Contemporary Characters”: Originally released in Electronic Literature’s Twitter feed as 153 tweets over a three-day period beginning November 30 of 2009 and ending on December 2, the original tweets are no longer accessible. However, there are a few ways to get an impression of the story. The story was later performed in its entirety by Aya Cash and Mike Birbiglia. That performance is available for download on the site symphonyspace. org at the following URL: http://store.symphonyspace.org/products/somecontemporary-characters-by-rick-moody-mp3-download. In addition, artist Adam Thompson created a visual representation of a line from the story

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that can be accessed on YouTube at this URL: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=anaHMP7PUM4. 4 “Fish: A Tap Essay” can be downloaded as an app from the author’s site. Robin Sloan, http://www.robinsloan.com/fish. n.d. Web. February 24, 2009. 5 John Moe. “An App to Teach You To Love and Not Like.” Marketplace Tech. Web. March 26, 2012. 6 See Radical Revision assignment, available on this book’s website. 7 Alexandria Alter. “Are Tweets Literature? Rick Moody Thinks They Can Be.” The Wall Street Journal “Speakeasy” Blog. Web. November 30, 2009. 8 Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print. 9 James McCrimmon. “A Cumulative Sequence in Composition.” The English Journal, 55.4 (April 1966): 425–34. Print. 10 Ibid. 11 Ira Glass. “Ira Glass on Storytelling, Part 1.” Youtube. Current TV. Web. August 18, 2009. 12 Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. JHU Press. March 24, 2010: 6. Print. 13 Henri Cole. “Street of the Iron Po(e)t.” The New Yorker. Web. September 19, 2012. Available: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/ street-of-the-iron-poet-henri-cole-paris-dairy.html

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15 Creative writing for new media Amy Letter

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igital literature has been around for decades, but it’s still fair to say creative writing for new media is a “new field” in the college classroom. It even strikes many so-called digital natives as new and strange: while most 20-somethings are adept as end users of programs and as normal contributors to established social networks, that doesn’t mean they have made a Web page or even used familiar digital systems in “off-label” ways to create literary art. And while many instructors intuit course structures and teaching methods based upon how they were taught when they were students, most instructors teaching creative writing for new media have never taken a class in this subject, have not seen it done, and are not sure what such a class should look like. However, there are many corollaries between teaching creative writing for new media and teaching a traditional “type-on-paper” creative writing course. Experience teaching traditional creative writing courses, combined with an enthusiasm for technology and experimentation, is all that is required to begin teaching in this field. I teach at a moderately sized private Midwestern university where the students are strong in general, but on the average no more computer savvy than other college students; this is not MIT. Our university promotes interdisciplinary scholarship, and many of our English and Writing majors are also pursuing majors or minors in Graphic Design, Computer Science, Drama, Journalism, and so on. My course (unsurprisingly) attracts a fair number of students whose second major is either Journalism or Graphic Design. These students have already worked with “new media” in a journalistic or commercial way and are intrigued by the idea of writing fiction or poetry in more dynamic

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modes. But such students are not the majority; the majority of the students who enroll are more or less novices. They have never opened Photoshop, never made a Web page. Some of them have never set up a blog or even looked at the basic HTML that underlies so much of their digital experiences. I may have a few students in a class with programming experience, but most of them, presented with the simple challenge of hyperlinking text, are baffled. No matter their past experiences with technology, my students are not, on the whole, regular consumers of digital literature as we tend to think of it. Most have never heard of Oulipo and are unexposed to the work of Stephanie Strickland, J. R. Carpenter, Michael Joyce, or Nick Montfort. Yet every semester that I offer creative writing for new media, the course fills quickly, and the demand exceeds the number of available seats. My students know they want to write creatively for digital media before they even know what that means. For these reasons, I consider my students an ideal test group: eager and interested but not particularly prepared; they are, on average, neither especially skilled nor especially underexposed to modern technology. I am grateful to have the participation of three former undergraduate students for this essay. These students have permitted me to share descriptions of their work and their thoughts on the creative writing for new media course they took with me. The three represent very different backgrounds and types of technological experience, but each found value in the course and were able to create original, meaningful work. Frank was a major in both Writing and Radio/TV Production with an additional concentration in Jazz Studies. He entered with a background in creative writing and also computer science courses, and was concurrently taking a course in Web page design through our Journalism School. Lily was a major in both Writing and Graphic Design, with a minor in Art History. She entered with a background in creative writing, and experience using Adobe Create Suite programs through her Graphic Design courses. Cecily was a major in both Writing and Public Relations. She entered with a background in creative writing, but had little experience with technology except as a basic user of commercial programs and social networks. There is a popular but largely unfounded belief in the phenomenon of the “digital native,” a term introduced by Mark Prensky in his somewhat alarmist 2001 essay, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” which claimed that younger people’s brains were fundamentally different from the brains of their elders because of their immersion in technology. The essential metaphor is that young people are “native speakers” of technology while older people are, like nonnative speakers, less skilled in this “language” and speak it “with an

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accent.” Without diverting into a survey of the scholarly literature, suffice it to say that this tidy dichotomy does not stand up to empirical scrutiny. Researchers who have examined people’s real-life technology usage patterns have found it makes more sense to break the population up into four or more groups divided not only by mere “skill level,” as though everyone were doing the same things, just with more or less skill, but by habits, approaches, and preferences. A 2007 Pew study1 decided upon the categories Omnivores, Connectors, Lacklustre Veterans, Productivity Enhancers, Mobile Centrics, Connected but Hassled, Inexperienced Experimenters, Light but Satisfied, Indifferents, and Off the Network to describe what they found. A 2010 Australian survey2 of college students came up with the categories power users, ordinary users, irregular users, and basic users. And an influential and widely cited page on the Stockton College website3 added to “digital native” and “digital immigrant” the following “digital denizens”: digital recluse, digital refugee, digital immigrant, digital native, digital explorer, digital innovator, and digital addict. Any of these schemes is more realistic and useful than the native/immigrant dichotomy. Studies also find that, proportionally, more people fall into what might be called the “basic user” category (to use the Australian study’s scale); that is to say, most people are not using technology in a particularly creative or sophisticated way. In every age group, the more sophisticated and creative users are vastly outnumbered by those who use technology casually and passively. The only divide that has proven genuine is a socioeconomic one.4 Technology costs money, whether at home or in school, and so people from less privileged homes and school districts usually have less access and therefore less experience in the digital realm. The three students who serve as my examples, Frank, Lily, and Cecily, are all traditional students in their early 20s. They would certainly fall into different categories were they subjects of a study on technology use, but it is not necessary to label them “basic user” or “power user,” “digital recluse” or “digital addict.” It is sufficient to say that Frank, who had some experience with programming, is my least common type of student and that Lily, who had experience specifically with Adobe Creative Suite programs, is also not representative of the majority. It is Cecily, whose experience with technology was limited to chatting online and typing up essays and stories on her laptop, and therefore least fits the stereotype of the “digital native,” who best represents the majority of students who take this class. I found technology and different ways of communicating messages or stories/pieces to be fascinating, but I never really experienced much with any new technologies before taking this class. My only form of creative writing was done in a Word document or on a crisp sheet of notebook paper. (Cecily)

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Working with a group of students with diverse backgrounds is not unfamiliar to the teacher of traditional “type-on-paper” creative writing courses. Writing is a technology too, and not everyone uses it in the same way, nor with the same results. One researcher refers to most young people’s use of technology as “passive, solitary, sporadic and unspectacular”5 —a description that just as well applies to most people’s use of writing. It may seem, at first, like a burden to tailor a course to students as diverse as Frank, Lily, and Cecily, but creative writing instructors are already doing this when they work with some students who have been devouring novels and writing their own stories since childhood, others who are clever but infrequent readers and writers, those who read and write competently but only in a task-oriented way, and finally the students who are infrequent readers and grudging writers, for whom every sentence is a struggle. Creative writing instructors can do this because our courses aren’t about teaching the technology. When we teach poetry writing, we aren’t teaching grammar and syntax. We are teaching an art form that uses grammar and syntax in a variety of ways. We aren’t making the students sit down together and write comparable lines that alliterate or enjamb as we prescribe. We inform them of the presence of these tools and methods, and they decide whether and where to use consonance, rhyme, caesura, or a pun as they pursue their larger creative goals. Far from having them create projects step by step according to model and formula, we reward their unique approaches, encouraging them to “write what they know” and to “develop their voices,” which means using the technology of writing as they know it, and simply refining it or making it “better,” acknowledging that this means vastly different things in different contexts. When teaching creative writing for new media, we should similarly encourage students to use what they already know, how they already use the technology, as their starting point. There is a powerful temptation with a course like this to teach the technology: to simply sit down with the group of students and teach them step by step “here’s how you build a Web page, here’s how you create an animated GIF in Photoshop.” The temptation doesn’t only come from the instructor; there are some students who would greatly prefer to be led through their projects step by step, as though they were executing origami instructions. But for it to be truly creative, the work our students do must be more analogous to discovering their own origami forms than to simply performing someone else’s predetermined steps. Further, students come in with vast differences in their digital-creative experiences, tastes, and knowledge. Some make GIFs regularly. Some find GIFs uninteresting. Some don’t know what a GIF is. Large group lessons will inevitably be boring to some, useless to many, and over the heads of others. Therefore it is best to focus assignments on form and function and, perhaps, theme. In a traditional creative writing class, the analog might be “flash fiction, with a surprising twist at the end, that is

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about the nature of time.” Students can then choose from a large and wide selection of possible methods to accomplish their goals. For example, as an early project, I’ve assigned students to create an artificial persona online, one that could not plausibly be real. Examples of this on the internet include “Suri’s Burn Book”6 on Tumblr, “Why is my cat so sad?”7 on Blogger, or the “Sarcastic Rover”8 on Twitter, among many others. The assignment is called the “impossible blogger,”9 and for some this assignment manifests simply; setting up and populating a blog with engaging text and other media is definitely a technical and creative challenge for many students. For others, though, this same assignment can be a complex multiplatform media-enhanced performance art project that engages an outside audience and becomes truly interactive. Either way, all of the students are focused on the same form (blog) and function (the blogger is impossible). I might also assign a theme by asking them to make their project communicate something about the nature of the internet, for example. But the majority of the creative and technical decisions are theirs to make. Later in the semester when I introduce my students to the concept of nonlinear, branching literature, I introduce them to the concept of form, but allow them to choose from several different “functions.” I show them examples: Queneau’s sonnets10 and his “Story As You Like It,”11 a selection of “Choose Your Own Adventure” paperbacks, Ana Menendez’s “End-less Stories,” Maddox Pratt’s “Anhedonia”12 (made with Javascript-based Twine,13 an excellent student resource), Ten Thousand Stories by Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, Paul La Farge’s online companion to Luminous Airplanes,14 and more. We examine maps of CYOAs and gamebooks; video games, especially nontraditional, “literary”-seeming games like Molleindustria’s “Every Day the Same Dream”;15 and even the concept underlying Tarot card packs, which act as nonlinear meaning-makers. Once the students are immersed in the concept, they begin to think of how they personally can employ it, and they are drawn toward enacting the concept in different ways: sprawling hypertexts, goal-focused and game-like hypertexts, linked video CYOAs, and in rare cases actual video games. One of my students employed an existing make-your-own Jeopardy !-style game system embedded in a series of linked blog pages to create a story about a student’s nightmare before (and about) a very important test. The game’s double goal is to both answer the questions correctly and wake up in time for the test! Another student wanted, for her own reasons, to learn Adobe Flash even though she had no experience with Adobe Creative Suite. She made an amateurish but engaging interactive cartoon that offered the viewer a handful of choices to determine the story’s outcome. Students capable of making video games or teaching themselves the basics of Flash over the weekend are not going to be engaged by a class that

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handholds all the students through the process of hyperlinking step by step, and students for whom hyperlinking is a creative revelation are probably not ready to make interactive animations and video games. But in every case, the concept of branching one’s text, of making it interactive and subject to the reader’s choices, is at the core. It’s essential that the students share a goal with each project, but that goal should not be the technology itself. The technology is always best viewed as a means to an end, even though in some cases, the finished product will say as much about the medium as anything else, and this is not to dismiss such work. For this goal-oriented approach to work, students with more experience must take on more challenging projects than students with less experience. And to make sure everyone achieves the maximum benefit from the course, students must work at or near the edge of their skill set: every assignment should ask the students to consciously identify something they don’t yet know how to do, whether that’s creating a hyperlink, using a specific program for the first time, or creating a certain effect, and to accomplish that new task as a part of the larger project. The three students who have allowed me to use them as examples, Frank, Lily, and Cecily, had very difference kinds of technological experience coming into the class, but each of them was able to identify, at the start of each project, a challenge for themselves. For her branching project, Cecily had to learn how to make and publish basic Web pages, manipulate HTML, and link from page to page. She wrote a series of simple Web pages that supported a lightly interactive poetic narrative, in which simple changes in font size and color were used as cues. Her project may not have challenged Lily or Frank, but it was certainly challenging for her and quite worthwhile; it resulted in a final piece of which she was rightly proud. Frank had a greater background in coding and Web design, and so he took on a very different kind of project: I had a fun idea to write silly things about the 50 states. But the creative element must be supported by a technical element. Luckily, every community thrives upon the act of sharing and collaboration. Forums are filled with open sourcers talking about their code problems and helping others solve their own. I was able to find a pre-written java tooltip that basically did everything I needed my project do from a technical standpoint. The tedious element came from fielding out each individual unit of code. It takes knowledge and patience. While I had already written my drafts for each state and designed my U.S. map in Photoshop (another fun challenge), I then had to image map the whole thing—state by state—and place the text within the designated parameters. (Frank)

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After he completed these steps, he still had a project that was buggy and required concerted trouble-shooting; that alone might have been beyond most students’ abilities. Yet even though Frank might seem “more advanced” in every way, he, unlike Lily, had no experience with Adobe products, and he had to spend a good portion of this project struggling with Photoshop, a program he’d never opened before and which challenged him significantly, as he wished to carve his own images into the shapes of the 50 states. And while Frank built an interactive map practically from scratch, another student with a very different aesthetic and skill set, not to mention an interest in library science, used Google Maps to create an interactive map with pins linking to blog pages on which she provided text and images from out-of-print books about small towns in her home state. For another project, the Kinetic Text project, Lily used her skills with Adobe Creative Suite: I decided to create three short poems that each center around the momentary thoughts or feelings of the characters involved. The poems are animated to fade away as they are being read, and within a minute, so that they cannot be reread. This fading mirrors the loss of time we experience every day. Experiences, thoughts, and feelings, are all fleeting and once they are gone they can never be truly relived. (Lily) Lily established a clear thematic connection between her medium and her content, and made it manifest in videos animated with Adobe AfterEffects. But once the videos were created and hosted on Vimeo, she still faced challenges: she needed to create the Web page to display the videos and control the viewer’s aesthetic experience of that page. Despite her relatively advanced skills with Creative Suite programs, she, like Cecily, had little experience with Web design or coding. Other students created their text-based videos using PowerPoint and/or iMovie, and for them this was sufficiently challenging. The different approaches resulted in work with different appearances, but no matter the program used, the students found ways to write creatively for moving or animated text. Of course for a professional animating text commercially, PowerPoint isn’t good enough. But just as undergraduate poetry courses help the students create the best poetry they can, and are not in the business of producing professionalized poets, courses in creative writing for new media should allow students to make competent drafts that bring their concepts to life, not professionalize them. The important point for students working with kinetic text is not mastering AfterEffects or any other program, it’s to understand why their text is in motion, and how the details of that motion (speed, direction, animated “bounce,” etc.) interact with the meaning and rhythm of the words. Professional polish might not be possible,

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and it also might not be desired. Instructors should remain method-agnostic and focus on emphasizing the underlying concepts, the form and function of the work. Allowing this variety of approaches also improves the learning experience for everyone: the students see and experience, among their classmates’ projects, just how many ways an author/creator can use a single concept, and every student can genuinely claim creative ownership of his/her work, which would be less the case were the instructor handholding them through a particular process. It might seem that this individualized approach would cause difficulty for the instructor who must assist with such a wide variety of programs and problems. But the skill of problem solving is independent of the knowledge of any particular process, and, further, the instructor’s divided attention encourages the students to be active participants in the troubleshooting, rather than sitting idly by (and learning less) while the instructor “makes it work.” So individualized instruction is not the central difficulty in this work; rather, it is helping students to maintain enthusiasm for their creative vision in the face of “technical difficulties,” and even helping them to see, in many cases, their “technical difficulties” as a form of artistic constraint, the possible spark of a new stage in their creative process, rather than a wall that stymies progress. This essential philosophy, that the limitations of the technology can be a positive creative force, must be reiterated throughout the course, because for a significant number of students, if not the majority, technical difficulties will primarily cause feelings of helplessness and frustration, and a desire to give up. The problem is analogous to teaching a story-writing course to a group of students who learned to read and write only recently. The students have the imagination and the creative drive to be great storytellers, but they encounter a significant lack of fluency between the ideas in their mind and textual manifestation on the page. These hypothetical students might feel cornered into enacting a few nonideal behaviors: they might cut their ideas short or engage with them shallowly, unable to fully think through their own projects because they are distracted by the new and unfamiliar task of translating them into written text; they may express their ideas clumsily or confusingly, or even misleadingly, because they are not adept with the technology of writing. However, we know that out of these nonstandard uses of language could come original, inspired, and honest works of fiction. One of my colleagues created an exercise to help professors understand this feeling of frustration and the value of writing that may result from it. The exercise assigns a simple, single-paragraph personal essay, which must be written using a given set of grammatical rules which are strange and unfamiliar.16 For those of us who have participated in this exercise, two things

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are very clear: not only can it take even adept writers a long time to write something very simple under these conditions, which is frustrating, but also the author’s accustomed voice and style is sacrificed as the writer struggles to learn, remember, and form thoughts using these unfamiliar rules, which can be doubly frustrating. But again, because of the tension between the author and the rules, the exercise often results in beautiful, unconventional, and revelatory written language. Students writing creatively using unfamiliar technologies often respond with frustration as well. A student has an idea for a set of linked, interactive videos. This student’s eyes are alight with creative fire. She’s sketching out the concept in her mind and making notes. Then she encounters her first technical difficulty—something she wants her videos to do but which she’s not sure can be done—and that creative process seems stopped. She goes online and begins searching for solutions to this problem. A moment ago she felt like an inspired inventor; now she feels, at best, like a buckled-down problem solver, and at worst, like a child lost in the woods. Rather than imagining a million possibilities, she’s searching for the one right answer to her problem. She is impatient; she doesn’t want to sit through a whole video tutorial, she just wants the answer, and as a result, she can barely remember her great creative ideas anymore. This is a typical scenario, and you’ll notice it is not very different from a less-literate person being stopped in the midst of his first line of poetry so he can refer to grammar guides and dictionaries. By the time he’s done his research, the train of thought carrying his great ideas seems to have derailed. The role of the instructor here is clear. It is most explicitly not to solve the problem for the student, though that temptation is there: everyone loves to be a hero. But it is essential that the students learn to research and solve their own problems and that they become accustomed to the task-switching that creative work in new media requires. They must also do the work themselves if they are to begin seeing research as a source for new ideas, an essential part of the creative process. There is a strong temptation to instruct the students to fully conceive their projects, enumerate the technical skills required, and research them one by one, separating invention and planning into discrete activity sessions. This will work for some, but I find that those it works for will gravitate toward the method from the start. And even for these students, reality is also very often the mother of invention, as they frequently come to even better ideas after learning what can be done. The instructor assists here by helping them remain engaged in the creative process, by showing enthusiasm and asking questions about the project that will lead them to their next stages. The instructor assists, in other words, by getting students into the habit of getting back on track, and ultimately into the habit of staying on track even as they trouble-shoot and problem-solve.

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My experience has centralized the importance of this in-person interaction between the student and the instructor. During a three-hour class session, I will engage in this way with virtually every student in the classroom at least once: acknowledging the frustration born of task-switching to help them overcome it, helping students regain their creative footing. As the semester progresses, the students become more accustomed to the rhythm of the work, more comfortable operating within it, but to a certain extent, this form of assistance must be continued throughout the course. Whether despite or because of the digital nature of the work, I believe the best assistance for these projects is live and in-person. Frank, Lily, and Cecily represent a spectrum of experience levels with technology, but all three of them agreed on this point. So much of what the instructor must do in this course is interpersonal and nuanced, coaching and supporting the students emotionally through an often frustrating process. I believe that were this class held online, and the students were working at home, alone, many would simply give up in the face of difficulty. But more than that, the physical classroom becomes a stimulating creative environment full of ideas, opinions, and solutions to problems. Something about [in-person] collaboration and feedback really helps develop an idea and transform it. Granted, some of that can come from online discussion, but face to face seems to be more effective in my experience. (Frank) I liked meeting, looking at and discussing new media writing and interesting examples. This part of the class would not have been as effective online. (Lily) Holding the class live and in-person also allows for demonstrations of in-progress and finished projects. Students have the opportunity to see their projects used by fellow students, to actually stand behind a “test audience” or “beta tester” and observe how their project works in the hands of another. The students also get to tell each other the stories of the challenges they faced along the way, and how they dealt with them—again, acknowledging difficulty as a normal and essential part of the process and acknowledging the perseverance and creativity that the students put into solving those problems. This makes lively discussions of all aspects of the work part of the rhythm of the class. The best part of this class was viewing the pieces all together. We then participated in a verbal open workshop where classmates volunteered what they liked or didn’t understand and things to enhance or change. The

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immediate feedback was very valuable. I found it to be very helpful and proactive to work off of one another’s ideas. (Cecily) It gave me insight into how others perceived my work and validated my efforts, which is always nice. I also gained some knowledge into how my project was working or not working in certain ways. There’s nothing quite like a real time reaction to an interactive piece. (Frank) It was a way of presenting and having to talk through your concepts and ideas with other people, rather than just keeping the thinking behind the piece to yourself. It also was helpful to get feedback both about the writing and the way the content was working with the media. (Lily) An in-person class allows for a level of immediate collaboration that’s more difficult to achieve with a distance course. Students working side by side establish camaraderie and support one another’s ideas. Students across the room will respond to a call of, “Hey, does anyone know how to make a button in Flash?” by coming over not just with a link to online instructions, but targeted help, more far-reaching or anticipatory tricks or tips, and even some much-needed sympathy or commiseration. Students who have less experience gain from the knowledge of their peers, and students with more experience gain the confidence in their skills that comes from successfully assisting others. Even more experienced students like Frank benefit from a room full of live peers: Mostly I got info from forums and how-tos, but my classmates offered suggestions that influenced how I went about creating the project. Basically, they gave me a test base much like app or web developers use to gauge the most effective way to communicate my artistic message. (Frank) From the instructor’s perspective, it seems to me that the course benefits from being live in part because so much of the work is computers based. Projects for this course require the students spend an enormous amount of time staring into a screen, focused on complex, sometimes frustrating tasks. Human contact and camaraderie helps balance out the experience, moderates the stress levels, and maintains the flow of creative energy. Traditional creative writing is not simple. It too involves multiple steps: invention, drafting, revising, polishing, the refining of thematic ideas, crafting tone and style, employing imagery, and so on. Creative writing for new media involves all of these steps and adds (1) selection from a sometimes dazzling panoply of media/mediums, and (2) the use of technology: coding, designing, navigating, linking, montaging, timing, clipping, giffing, and/or syncing— depending on the project. And of course while juggling these additional

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creative aspects, the author must also be sensitive to the medium-message connection. But this does not mean that teaching creative writing for new media is a world apart from teaching traditional creative writing. There are more similarities than differences, and most of the differences have corollaries to traditional course practices. Key to success for instructor and student alike is acknowledging difficulty and creating realistic but challenging goals for projects based on students’ individual experience levels. The natural path is for each student to begin with the most familiar technologies, but students must push beyond the familiar, and it’s the rare instructor who can be an expert in every technology the students might want to use. Teaching creative writing for new media, therefore, means primarily (1) inspiring students to synthesize skills they already have but previously regarded as unrelated (e.g. narrative and design, code and poetry, social networking and storytelling), (2) supporting them as they take on new and unfamiliar technical challenges, and (3) supporting them, as the instructor, as they learn to effectively task-switch and derive creative energy from technologies that may, at first, vex them. There is not yet much of a tradition or many established methods or pedagogies for the creative writing for new media classroom. Nonetheless, there is enormous as-yet-unmet demand for these courses as people wish to become more capable creators in the digital literary arts. When I began teaching this course two years ago, I was flying blind, but through trial and error I have come to what I believe are some valuable conclusions. I hope that my observations will inspire more people to teach courses along these lines, and that through our collective observations and best practices, we can, as a community of creative professionals, begin building a set of classroom traditions that will benefit students, instructors, universities, and the literary culture as a whole.

Notes 1 Horrigan, John. “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users.” Pew Internet and American Life Project. May 6, 2007. Retrieved April 13, 2014. 2 Kennedy et al. “Beyond Natives and Immigrants: Exploring Types of Net Generation Students.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning , 26.5, September 15, 2010. 3 L. Feeney’s “Digital denizens,” Instructional technology resources: In the spotlight, is no longer available on the stockton.edu website, but it may be read in archive (as saved on October 12, 2011):

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4 For example see Aerschota and Rodousakis, “The Link between Socioeconomic Background and Internet Use: Barriers Faced by Low Socioeconomic Status Groups and Possible Solutions.” Innovation: the European Journal of Social Science Research, 21.4, December 2008: 317–51. (Among others.) 5 Neil Selwyn. “The Digital Native—Myth and Reality.” Aslib Proceedings, 61.4, 2009: 364–79. 6 http://surisburnbook.tumblr.com/ 7 http://whyismycatsosad.blogspot.com/ 8 https://twitter.com/SarcasticRover 9 The description of this assignment is available on the publisher’s website for this chapter. 10 Originally published on paper that the reader would cut into strips to allow for mixing and matching (image: http://moviesofmyself.typepad.com/.a/6 a00d8341ca2da53ef01156fe5a9fe970c-800wi), there are now some fun interactive digital versions online, for example this http://www.growndodo. com/wordplay/oulipo/10%5E14sonnets.html or this http://www.bevrowe. info/Queneau/QueneauRandom_v5.html 11 http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/queneau_1.html 12 http://mkopas.net/files/anhedonia/anhedonia.html 13 http://twinery.org/ 14 http://www.luminousairplanes.com/ 15 http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/ everydaythesamedream.html 16 The exercise is the work of Professor Elizabeth Robertson of Drake University, who describes exercises of this type as fairly common in composition studies circles.

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Author biographies Janelle Adsit teaches writing at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her poetry, book reviews, and essays have appeared in journals such as Caketrain, MidAmerican Review, ForeWord, Colorado Review, and Requited. She is the author of Unremitting Entrance, a collection of poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015). She holds a PhD in English from SUNY-Albany. Joe Amato’s recent books include Big Man with a Shovel (Steerage Press, 2011) and Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (SUNY Press, 2009). His novel Samuel Taylor ’s Last Night is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. With Kass Fleisher, he’s completed several award-winning screenplays, including a new screenplay, The Adjunct. James J. Brown, Jr is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University-Camden. His research and teaching take up the connections between computation and composition, and his book Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Christina Clancy teaches English and writing at Beloit College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Milwaukee Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, Glimmer Train Stories, Hobart, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She contributes radio essays to Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Wisconsin Life” program, and WUWM’s “Lake Effect.” Michael Dean Clark is an Associate Professor of Writing at Azusa Pacific University in the Los Angeles area. An author of fiction and nonfiction, his work has appeared in a variety of outlets including Relief, Fast Forward, Paper Tape, and others. Additionally, he contributed a chapter on memory and constraint to Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy. Formerly an award-winning journalist, Clark also spent six years working as a high-school English teacher in the East Los Angeles area before moving into higher education. Douglas Dechow recently became the first Digital Humanities Librarian at Chapman University. He is the Curator of the Roger and Roberta Boisjoly Challenger Disaster Collection and also works with the Center for American War Letters. He holds a PhD in computer science and is a coauthor of SQUEAK:

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A Quick Trip to Objectland. He teaches a graduate and undergraduate course in humanities computing and publishes in the areas of digital humanities and library science. With Anna Leahy, he writes the blog Lofty Ambitions. Among Kass Fleisher’s recent books are Dead Woman Hollow (SUNY Press, 2012) and Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008). With Joe Amato, she’s completed several awardwinning screenplays, including a new screenplay, The Adjunct. Fleisher is the founder and publisher of Steerage Press and directs the creative writing program at Illinois State University. Graeme Harper is Dean of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan, and an honorary professor in the United Kingdom. He holds doctorates from the University of East Anglia and the University of Technology, Sydney. Editor-in-Chief of New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing , his latest book is The Future for Creative Writing (2014). Among other roles, he has been a strategic research reviewer for Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). His latest work of fiction, writing as Brooke Biaz, is The Invention of Dying (2014). He is currently exploring eventfulness and how we creatively respond to it. Trent Hergenrader is an Assistant Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work focuses on digital pedagogy, creative writing pedagogy, and game studies. His essays have appeared in Dungeons, Dragons and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game, Building Literate Connections with Videogames, and in multiple peer-reviewed proceedings of the Games+Learning+Society Conference. His short fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Federations, and Best Horror of the Year, among others. Adam Koehler is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at Manhattan College. His work has appeared in Enculturation, The Collagist, Radiohead and Philosophy, and College English. Anna Leahy is the editor of Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, which launched the New Writing Viewpoints series by Multilingual Matters. Her pedagogy essays have appeared in Teaching Creative Writing, Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? and The Handbook of Creative Writing, among others, and in periodicals such as The Huffington Post, Fiction Writer ’s Review, and New Writing. Constituents of Matter won the Wick Poetry Prize. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she directs Tabula Poetica and edits TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics. Amy Letter is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in journals including Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, and PANK , as well as in gallery

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spaces including the Jaffe Center for Book Arts and the 18 Rabbit Gallery. She earned her MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas and teaches Fiction and New Media at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Mark C. Marino holds an MFA from Notre Dame and a PhD from UC Riverside, where he focused on chatbots, electronic literature, games, and other digital media. His works include “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” “a show of hands,” and a collection of interactive children’s stories called “Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House.” Mark is the founder and editor of Bunk Magazine (http://www.bunkmag.com). He currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab, a research group dedicated to humanities approaches to the exploration of computer source code. He is also the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization. His portfolio is here: http://markcmarino.com. Aaron A. Reed is a student, teacher, and author of interactive narratives. His best known pieces include the interactive fiction novel Blue Lacuna, a 2010 IndieCade finalist for Best Narrative; Whom the Telling Changed, a selection for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One; and 18 Cadence, a Kirkus Best Book Apps of 2013 selection and Independent Games Festival Nuovo Honorable Mention. His textbook Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 has been used in classrooms around the world. Aaron is currently pursuing a PhD in computer science at UC Santa Cruz. Joseph Rein is coeditor of Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in over 20 journals and anthologies, most recently Pinch Literary Magazine, Laurel Review, Beyond the Workshop, and New Writing. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. Abigail Scheg is an Assistant Professor of English at Elizabeth City State University where she teaches first-year composition, advanced composition, and some literature courses. She is also an adjunct Dissertation Chair for Northcentral University. Her first book, Reforming Teacher Education with Online Pedagogy Development, was published in January 2014. She is currently working on a number of edited collections on various topics including flipped classrooms, an interdisciplinary look at the history of distance education, bullying in popular culture, and teaching introductory literature courses. Dr Scheg serves as a reviewer for several publications including Interdisciplinary Studies in Education, TESOL Journal, Queen City Writers, New Media & Society, and The Writing Commons. Rob Wittig plays at the crossroads of literature, graphic design and digital culture. A Silicon Valley native, he co-founded the legendary IN.S.OMNIA

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electronic bulletin board with the Surrealist-style literary and art group Invisible Seattle—a ground-breaking online art project of the digital age. On the basis of this work, Rob received a Fulbright grant to study the writing and graphic design of electronic literature with French philosopher Jacques Derrida in Paris. Rob’s book based on that work, “Invisible Rendezvous,” was published Wesleyan University Press. He then embarked on a series of illustrated and designed digital fictions, including “Blue Company” a subscription novel in email, “Friday’s Big Meeting” a fictional chatroom with emotive photoavatars, and “El Dorado,” a horizontally scrolling travelogue (as part of an international collaboration with writers from Hamburg, Germany). Alongside his creative projects, Rob has worked in major publishing and graphic design firms in Chicago, rising to positions of creative direction and leadership of R&D teams. Rob’s web fiction “Fall of the Site of Marsha” was among the first works of electronic literature to be archived in the Library of Congress. In 2011 Rob earned an MA in Digital Culture (equivalent to a US MFA) at the University of Bergen, Norway, completing two major projects: “Chicago Soul Exchange” and “Grace, Wit & Charm.” He is currently developing a high-design, collaborative fiction in a form called netprov, networked improv narrative. Rob is Assistant professor in the Art & Design and Writing Studies departments of the University of Minnesota Duluth.

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Index Adobe, AfterEffects 183 Creative Suite 179, 181 Photoshop 178, 180, 182–3 aesthetic 3, 18, 26, 32, 78, 80, 82, 93, 107, 109, 114, 119, 158, 183 agency 48, 86, 123, 146 artifacts 13–14, 19 asynchronous discussion 93–4, 121 audience 4, 11, 13, 32, 68, 75, 105, 108–9, 117, 122, 124, 127, 131–2, 166–7, 181, 186 audio (capture, file, recording) 32, 33, 56, 96–7, 99, 102, 161, 166, 168, 174 authorial identity 110–11 authorial self 108–10 authorial voice 107 avatar 50 Beck, Heather 1, 92–3, 117 Bell, Daniel 11 Bergson, Henri 11, 15 Bervin, Jen 36 binary 20, 62 binary code 132 Bishop, Wendy 1, 82, 84 blog 2, 34, 42, 76, 111, 115, 153, 156–60, 163, 178, 181 Butler, Judith 106, 113–14, 119 C++ 132, 144 Carr, Nicholas 30 cell phone 8, 10, 30, 45 characterization 145–7 classroom, digital or online 14, 27, 47, 61, 64, 71, 92, 95, 100–3, 123, 128, 133, 159, 165, 167, 188 code (programming) 40, 55, 61, 131–8, 141–2, 144–5, 147–9, 182, 188

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code switching 108–9, 112, 113, 116–17 collaboration 41, 64, 70, 76, 86, 93, 95, 121–2, 133, 150, 182 collaborative (work, construction, assignments) 51, 53, 55–7, 62, 64–8, 131, 149, 153–4 composers and creative composers 80, 82 concretists 20–1 constraints 130–3, 141, 143, 158, 184–5 craft 17, 23, 48, 50, 56, 64, 66, 73, 78, 106, 114 creative disruption 67 creative nonfiction 2, 106, 114, 115, 122, 172 critical world building 56 Dawson, Paul 1, 22–3, 82 Day, Cathy 93, 121 digital humanities 4, 38–41, 44, 83 digital literature 130, 141, 154, 177–8 digital media 8, 26, 40, 46, 130, 132–4, 137, 154, 156, 165, 178 digital native 33, 177–9 digital persona or presence 92, 95, 97, 110–11 digital role-playing games (DRPGs) 51, 58, 154 digital sound 8 digital storytelling 26, 124, 165–74 digitalism 7–10, 13–14 discovery 33, 50, 143–4, 153 discussion-based pedagogy 94 edutainment 47, 57 Egan, Jennifer 21 electronic literature 25, 74–5 email 27, 42, 96, 154–5 embodied learning 48, 49

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INDEX

emergent gameplay 48 enacted stories 49 English studies 78–80, 86 environmental storytelling 48–9 evocative spaces 49 experience technologies 8 expertise 76, 78–9, 84 exploration 9, 13–14, 50–1, 56, 68–9, 126, 141, 144, 146, 173 expressive processing 130, 132 Facebook 19, 24, 27, 30, 76, 99, 105, 111, 121–3, 155 face-to-face 62, 64–6, 68, 69, 91–100, 121, 167, 169 Fallout 3 (videogame) 51–4 fan fiction 2, 47, 53, 136 feedback 93–100, 149–50, 170, 186–7 fiction 141–4, 154–6, 166, 180, 184 film 45, 50 Final Cut 166 freedom 17–18, 38, 85, 107, 137 game design 45, 48, 148–9, 181–2 game-based learning 46–7, 51 Gee, James Paul 47 GIF 180, 187 goals 9, 13, 19–20, 31, 33, 36, 38, 41, 47–50, 97, 124, 137, 143, 180–1 Goldsmith, Kenneth 18, 20–6, 106–7, 112–13 Google 65, 99, 111, 113, 168 Google map 55–6, 183 graphic novel 46 Haake, Katherine 1, 32 Hayles, N. Katherine 22, 24–6, 30–1, 36, 64 Hesse, Douglas 73–4, 76–7, 87, 105, 118 Hirschfield, Jane 29 humanities 31, 39, 40, 63, 70, 87, 133, 150 humanities computing 39, 44 hybrid and hybridity 62–70, 122, 126, 150, 159, 167 hyperlink 178, 182 hypertext 144, 147–8, 154, 181

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identity 41, 53, 107–8, 110–11, 113–14, 116, 118 ideology 17, 20, 22–3, 25, 41 image 32–3, 36–7, 56, 58, 65, 79, 82, 96, 100, 130, 133, 137, 155, 166–72, 182–3 immersion 29–30, 42, 49–50, 142, 178 iMovie 100, 166, 183 Inform 7, 141–51 interactive fiction 141–3, 145–51 interconnection 8–13 interdisciplinarity 39, 41, 44, 80, 141, 154, 177 Internet 8, 21, 24, 31, 39, 66, 154, 160, 161, 166–7, 181 intertextuality 111, 113, 119, 172 iPad (tablet) 30 iPod 45 iStory 21 Java 132, 134, 144, 182 Javascript 134, 181 Jenkins, Henry 49 Juul, Jesper 48 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 38–9 laptop 30–1, 45, 161, 179 Leahy, Anna 62, 97, 165 Learning Management System (LMS) 36, 65–6, 68 learning principles 47 Lin, Tao 19 linearity 8, 50 link 21, 27, 43, 53, 56, 99, 124, 133, 137, 144, 148, 161, 172, 181–3, 187 literary theory 22 “long-take syndrome” 100 marketability 63, 64, 66, 68, 70 material 7–11, 20–5, 31–2, 64, 75 materialism 7, 9 Maxwell, Glyn 35–8 Mayers, Timothy 1, 22–3, 27, 56, 106, 115 media studies 62, 65, 133 memoir 105–7, 112, 115 memory 10, 31, 125

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INDEX

Microsoft, PowerPoint 100, 169, 183 Windows Movie Maker 166 Word 35–7, 96, 179 mod 47 modernism 26 Monson, Ander 21, 109–11 Moody, Rick 21, 23, 166–7, 174 Morton, Donald and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh 17–18, 20–7, 107 movies 22, 31, 79, 100, 173 multimedia 25, 113, 154, 166 multimodality 2, 21–2, 25, 27, 73, 79, 81, 87, 99, 112, 165–7 music 21, 25, 31, 76, 136, 162 Myers, D. G. 1, 83, 102 narrative 13, 19, 46, 48–51, 53, 56, 66–7, 85, 112, 124, 133, 136, 142–3, 146, 148, 158, 167–8, 172–3, 182, 188, 193 Netprov 153–64 network 8, 11, 21, 25–6, 50, 67, 127, 131, 153–5, 163 neuroplasticity 30 new media 21, 31–3, 40, 51, 57 nonlinearity 8–9, 13–14, 21, 36, 51, 56 novel (fiction) 8, 9, 19, 22, 66, 101, 156, 180 online communities 47, 114, 158 open-ended narrative 47 Oulipo 130, 132, 133, 162, 178 pastiche essay 112 pattern recognition 49 PDF 36, 100 Pechakucha 169, 174 pedagogies, digital 64, 92, 94 legacy 62, 64 play 14, 21, 24, 33, 35, 47–57, 106, 112, 115, 123, 130, 132, 137–8, 141, 146–9, 153–64 play (drama) 9, 27 poem 8–9, 21, 29, 31–42, 79, 96, 107, 130, 132–7, 144, 172, 183 poetics 24, 27, 82, 107, 119 portfolio 34–8, 43, 128 possibility space 48, 55–7

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post-apocalyptic genre 51, 53 postdigital age 13 postmodern 19, 26, 107 Prezi 33, 35–8, 100 print (medium) 19–26, 31–2, 35–6, 40, 45–6, 50–1, 53, 57, 75, 99, 105, 109, 155, 166, 170 procedural rhetoric 146 publishing 46, 87, 105–6, 110, 127, 166 Python 132 Ramsay, Stephen 41 realism 17–18, 20, 27 revision 32–4, 37, 67–8, 91, 132, 165–6 Shipka, Jody 21–2, 27 short story 19–21, 24, 26, 45, 68, 166–7, 174 SimCity 48 Sims 48 situated learning 49 situationism 20 Skype 96 social media 2, 27, 45, 154–6, 177 social network 106, 110–11, 163, 177–8, 188 space 10–11, 13, 18, 23, 27, 36–7, 41, 48–9, 56, 71, 129, 131, 146, 158 Stein, Kevin 31, 40 structure 12, 19, 31, 39, 48, 65, 71, 86, 95, 132, 146–8, 160, 169, 177 subjectivity 18–19, 23–6, 34, 113–14 synapticism 7–8, 10–15 tablet 10, 161 Taroko Gorge 129–38 television 22, 31, 46, 58, 79, 136 text message 19, 23, 26, 156, 158 textbook 37, 47, 50, 106, 143, 150 textuality 30, 35, 76, 86 textuality, distributed 75 topology 48 Tumblr 181 tweet 19, 21, 26, 76, 105, 106, 110, 118, 122–6, 154, 161–4, 174 Twine 144, 181 Twitter 21, 43, 105–6, 110–11, 118, 122–6, 142, 153, 155, 160–4, 167, 181

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Vandermeulen, Carl 1, 92 Vanderslice, Stephanie 1, 101, 121, 124, 165 video, capture or recording 21, 25, 31, 33, 47, 56, 67, 74–9, 96–7, 99–102, 104, 155, 162, 166, 169–72, 183, 185 videogame 25, 40, 45, 47–8, 50–1, 53, 57–8 Vimeo 183 virtual world 47 visual art 21, 25, 38, 41, 46 visual media 45 voice (creative writing) 12–13, 18, 23–7, 29, 106–8, 113, 116–19, 123, 127, 158, 167, 171, 180, 185

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WE Video 166 wiki 2, 53, 56 Wikipedia 38–9, 44 Wordpress 33, 36 workshop or workshop model 17–19, 21–7, 33–5, 41, 48, 56, 62, 73, 74, 78, 83, 92–5, 102, 121–4, 128, 147, 149 Wright, Will 48 writing community 47, 121 writing process 11, 42, 98, 123, 125, 127, 131–3, 136–7, 141, 169 Young, Dean 31, 33 YouTube 67, 76, 99, 111, 162

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