1,720,965 research outputs found
Meekings, Sam
No full textIdentity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It is the first anthology to comprehensively represent the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of "the pluralist now". It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the distinctive breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry. These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland - from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway - as well as further afield. Many new and undersung poets appear alongside this generation's most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year. Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado, with each poet introduced by a biographical note also covering their themes and concerns, plus an author photograph. This is the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now
The Writer as Citizen:Creative Writing, Social Action, and Political Responsibility
No full textWriters often seem to be motivated by two apparently contradictory impulses. The first, the aesthetic impulse, impels us to write very well – to find the right narrative shape, the resonant poetic line, the script that will capture performers and audiences. The second is the ethical drive – to fulfil a sense of responsibility to our community, culture, context. Oscar Wilde pithily sums up the mood of some writers to this conundrum, asserting: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” For Milan Kundera, “Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.” For many writers, this is the response of the privileged; ecowriting, intersectional voices, prose and poetry that might motivate political change, personal wellbeing or social resilience are what matters. This chapter examines some of the key moves and techniques that writers can draw on in learning how to deploy what philosophers call axiology – ethics+aesthetics – and to produce creative writing that avoids the didactic impulse, and captures its audiences while illuminating a something that needs to be addressed
Refreshing the curriculum
Get PDFCreative writing courses have expanded remarkably since the mid-twentieth century, and now around the world there are degrees offered at undergraduate, postgraduate and research levels, as well as national and international peak bodies to support creative writing scholars, lobby for the discipline, and exchange resources. Over this same period, and alongside the increasing academic-professionalism of creative writing programmes, universities and the government bodies that regulate them have increasingly demanded that all graduates are prepared for the workforce, with success measured by graduate employment levels. For creative writers, this constitutes a problem: as with other art practices, their work remains outside the flow of capital. All the evidence gathered over past decades shows that graduates who continue their creative practice typically experience either precarity and underemployment or engage in what Bernard Lahire terms a ‘double life’—as a writer, as employee. This places on universities the responsibility to incorporate within the curriculum both the life skills and the professional skills that will allow creative graduates to build satisfying and productive futures. While curriculum designers point to graduate attributes, it is clear that creative writing graduates are not finding much success in transferring those qualities into income-generating activities. Most courses focus on practice—the creative writing workshop or tutorial—along with attention to traditional and contemporary literature, and some training in theory. More recently, professional (‘career’, or business skills) training has been incorporated in most courses, but feedback from graduates suggests that these are not effective, not sufficient, or not offered at the right point in their degrees. Drawing on data from a recent study into the careers of creative writing graduates in two UNESCO cities of culture—Melbourne and Shanghai—in this chapter suggest some changes to the design of courses that may support graduates in crafting life-long careers that provide sufficient income without diminishing their creative capacities
From the Shadow of a Myth to an Academic Subject : Teaching Writing from a Cognitive Base
No full textIn order to truly understand one’s teaching methods and share them with others, one first needs to understand what has been done in the past. The aim is to become conscious of habits, models and attitudes that have become a part of local lore – either in studies of creative writing or in the education system in general. One way to do this is to read creative writing guides written in different periods of time. This paper examines Finnish writing guides published since 1900. It also shows how teaching creative writing slowly became possible in Finland. Finally, the article describes how the historical situation, writing guides and academic tradition influenced the practice of teaching writing at the University of Jyväskylä.peerReviewe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Under fishbone clouds
No full text'Under Fishbone Clouds' is a love story and family saga interwoven with traditional folktales and stories from ancient Chinese history. Set against the backdrop of dramatic events of recent Chinese political history, we follow the lives of Jinyi and his wife Yuying
The book of crows
No full textA young girl is kidnapped and taken through the desert to an isolated mountain brothel. Two thousand years later, after a suspicious landslide near Lanzhou, a low-level bureaucrat searches for a missing colleague. A thirteenth-century Franciscan monk, traversing the Silk Road, begins his extraordinary deathbed confession, while five hundred years earlier, a grieving Chinese poet is summoned to the Emperor’s palace. In a series of delicately interlaced stories, Sam Meekings’ richly poetic and gripping second novel follows the journeys of characters whose lives, separated by millennia, are all in some way touched by the mysterious Book of Crows: a mythical book in which the entire history of the world – past, present and future – is written down
Utilizing Digital Literacy in the Creative Writing Classroom
Get PDFThis paper will examine contemporary approaches to utilizing the pre-existing skills and knowledge of students in order to reconceptualize the process and reception of writing. Using social media platforms in the Creative Writing classroom presents a range of possibilities for experimenting with character, voice, structure, tone and world-building. This paper will share examples and exercises from a range of resources, and discuss ways of using the technical, formal, and cross-platform innovations of online applications to extend lessons beyond the classroom. Consideration will also be given to the problems inherent in using social media platforms for storytelling
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