The creative writing learning community webpage.

Abstract

This article describes a Creative Writing Learning Community Webpage. This Learning Community comprises components addressing writing as process and writing as profession. A unifying component, the Reader Response Forum, addresses audience awareness and analysis. This interdisciplinary webpage thus spans composition, literature, and creative writing.

Background

North Georgia College & State University currently offers one creative writing course in its professional writing and publication concentration, a course typically offered once every other year. When offered, this writing intensive course usually enrolls 28-30 students and takes its place alongside the three other courses each instructor here is required to teach per semester. These include two survey courses that each enrolls up to 40 students and usually one upper-level literature course, enrolling between 15-30 students.

This demanding schedule, as well as the possible inconsistency of the course's being offered, keeps my classroom creative writing instruction to introductory workshop levels of prosody and narrative and so can prevent my helping, in a sustained way, those students who want to develop their writing beyond the introductory level. The AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs distinguishes undergraduate from graduate creative writing course workshops, stating, "Undergraduate workshops, especially at the introductory level, require students to work in various forms, styles, modes, and genres" (349). These course demands can require structured workshops, sometimes preventing more flexible workshops that build student confidence in their individual voices, their abilities to analyze audience, and the knowledge of (creative) writing as process. My course's classroom workshops require student feedback on works in progress so that students begin to learn the (creative) writing process of draft and revision. Additionally, my course teaches students the constituent elements of this type of writing: plot, character, setting, figurative language, and theme. Students in literature courses learn to identify these elements, to analyze their effective use in literature. Developing such critical and analytical skills also helps student writers to consider the generic pressures on these constituent elements, how plot reconfigures in narrative poetry, how character becomes action in drama, how setting evolves meaning in story.

This course teaches students themselves consciously to use these elements to achieve deliberate ends in terms of theme, character, event, or story. For example, one course assignment asks students to write a character description intending a specific reader response to this character; such responses could be disgust, horror, fear, or respect. Fulfilling this assignment requires students to select concrete descriptors that elicit their intended response, to select action and speech patterns that do the same, thus composing a piece of related elements that together create the character the writer envisages. If the reader does not relate these elements in the way that the writer hopes, however, then the writer most probably will need to revise the piece by selecting more focused details, more telling actions, more speaking words. Reactive reader feedback makes such conscious revision possible.

Creative Writing Learning Communities

Creative writing workshops elicit such reactive reader feedback. Among the many functions of creative writing workshops is creating a community of learners to support the writing activities of student writers. Such a learning community supports what can generally be a solitary task, what Warren Wilson College's MFA program description states as "the solitude and life patterns that are necessary for creative work" (AWP Official Guide 213). Low-residency programs, such as Warren Wilson College's, give student writers the opportunity to build such learning communities and networks; similarly, national and local annual, monthly and even weekly writing workshops as well as writers conferences and festivals provide such opportunities to student writers and to life long learners of creative writing.

Added to these resources for inspiration and exchange are a fast-growing number of online creative writing webpages, such as One of us, a creative writing webpage with links to a collection of individual writers' poetry and stories as well as personal webpages, many that include tips for writers; or In the Moonlight a Worm, a webpage that contains lesson plans and self study pages on writing haikus. Many college and university creative writing program webpages also include forums offering conference and workshop information, dates of live readings, and useful sites links; for example, George Mason University has a useful sites link to literary journals, electronic texts, writers' organizations, and local bookstores. Such links often further provide student writers with opportunities for inspiration and exchange. Joining a writers' organization can give student writers access to e-mail and regular mail addresses of writers, agents, and publishers in their area, reviews of local writers' works, and meeting dates.

The number of these online writing support sites, the number and variety of writing organizations as well as university creative writing programs that offer them, the cross-referencing that occurs among them, as well as the recorded number of visitors such sites receive, all suggest their growing usefulness to student writers. Particularly these computer based resources have inspired me to develop a Creative Writing Community Webpage at NGCSU. With this webpage, I hope to counter my course's possible limitations for its past, present, and future students, as well as to help all the students at NGCSU to develop their skills by guiding student writers into a community of learners. This site comprises several files addressing the writing process as well as the writing profession. In this way, it addresses in part AWP Creative Writing Program curriculum guidelines calling for a wide range of courses in literature, literary criticism, and the craft of writing as well, as extracurricular experiences in publishing. The webpage's discussion area, the Reader Response Forum, in particular responds to composition strategies by helping students give and receive feedback on work in progress. It thus instills a sense of audience, thereby helping prepare students to enter the field of creative writing as professionals.

The professional aspect of creative writing is spoken to in the AWP guidelines I refer to above through their calling for extracurricular experiences in publishing. Such experiences could include a practicum, such as an internship with editors or publishers. The University of Georgia's creative writing program webpage lists internship possibilities with local journals and publishing companies. In-house publications such as university literary journals also offer students practical experience in professional publishing and editing. Such internships and university sponsored editorial work help students learn how to develop and function within professional writing communities and networks.

Web-based learning communities seem appropriate to creative writers since writers often work with their editors at a distance. Accepting works submitted electronically is standard for many publishing companies nowadays. Similarly, writers are rarely present when 'real life' readers read their work. They cannot explain to readers what their work intended; their work must speak for itself. Gaining feedback through electronic communication, feedback of any kind--for example, descriptive, prescriptive or reactive--thus helps student writers prepare themselves for these real life writing situations.

Among its several files, the Creative Writing Community Webpage's Reader Response Forum presents students with opportunities for electronic feedback. The webpage's home contains directions on how to participate in this discussion forum in terms of posting and responding to creative work. It explains the intended uses of the helpful hints page and the calendar. It also informs students how to contact me by either e-mail or telephone. And it assures students that I monitor all discussion area postings with my occasional reactive and prescriptive feedback. This site thus helps me teach beyond the classroom in accordance with my classroom pedagogy. It allows me to present online the interdisciplinary aspects of creative writing, its interdisciplinary connection of composition, literature, and creative writing. [1]

Writing as Process

The compositional page on the site addresses writing as process: the helpful hints page. When teaching creative writing, I often question students about their perceived needs in improving their work. Because students consistently list inspiration and development as major concerns, I include helpful hints that especially attend to the pre-writing stage of a writer's work. These hints share practices of, and offer links to, other websites; for example, they include writing prompts akin to the writing tips on WritersDigest.com, a linked site. They also share practices of, and give bibliographic information on, useful craft texts such as Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. They customize these practices for our student body and local community, though, by including students' own inspirational suggestions and prompts.

For example, the site includes writers' prompts in the form of 'artist's dates.' Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist's Way, suggests that we feed our creativity by taking ourselves out on 'artist's dates' every week. The only requirement for these creative-growth times is that we spend an hour on our 'date' with ourselves alone. Some of the 'dates' posted on the webpage are student Alan Fornek's suggestion that writers "attend a public event and record what you see but only include sensory images and details;" student Jonathan Kiel's that writers "take two hours and drive; listen to any music you wish; however, do not stop driving;" and student Amy Linenburger's that writers "groom an animal." [2] Other prompts include customized prompt questions, such as, 'what would happen if ...' 'why not ask ...' 'where did they meet ...' 'who was lost first?' These questions are inspired by the "Ask a Question" chapter in Naomi Epel's The Observation Deck, bibliographic information of which appears on the site. Some of the questions developed by students include Michael Lane's question, "what would happen if you learned that God did not exist?" and Gloria Bennet's question, "who lost track of their friendship first?"

Also, this page offers questions that writers can ask themselves on character construction, authentic dialogue, scenic development, and plot. These questions address each element of writing separately so that writers can apply them in layered ways to their chosen genre. Questions on character include: "Can you identify your protagonist?" "Can you identify your antagonist?" "What are the moral grounds, if any, of your character?" "What are your character's goals?" "What obstructs your character's achieving these goals?" "How does your character talk?" "How do other characters talk to/about your character?" and "Does your character change?" I drew most of these questions from the glossary of linguistic terms in Rob Pope's The English Studies Book by putting the book's definition of character, for instance, into interrogatory form. Additionally, the chapters on character, plot, scenery, etc., in Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing offer useful guidelines for such questions.

Literary and Professional Writing

For the literary and professional aspects of writing, the site offers such pages as a calendar of writing related events; a student authors' page as well as a Dahlonega based authors' page, since these are writers whom the students might meet; an agents' link page; and a publishers' link page. On the calendar of writing related events page appears networking, inspirational, and publication opportunities. This may include a contest call for submissions to Dahlonega's Second Annual Literary Festival, a series of professional poetry readings at Georgia Tech, and the Poets and Writers call for participants in their short story and poetry contest for Georgia residents. These postings and links help to supply students with the extracurricular opportunities that contribute to their learning.

Networking with published writers, attending professional readings, and submitting contest entries are all useful developmental activities for student writers. Michael Begeja, in his Poet's Guide, suggests that beginning writers in particular share their work at local literary readings; students who consult the calendar page can learn where and when such readings occur in our area. Moreover, exposing themselves to the literature of the moment and to contemporary writers helps students develop critical analysis skills, learn literary analysis through practical application.

The site also includes links to area literary agents interested in working with new writers and another with links to area publishers whose editors are open to queries from new writers. Again, the more professional interaction a student writer has with editors and agents the better. Writers need to know what the professional standards are in terms of presenting one's manuscript, following up on an e-mail query, or asking for critiques. Writer's Market, an important annual reference text, precedes its market listings with information on just such professional standards and expectations. The southern-based editors, publishers, and agents on this site have assured me that they welcome student contacts and would be willing to work with students, in a variety of ways, to help them develop their craft.

With these literary and professional pages, I hope to help students understand readership not as singular but as multiple, as itself comprising various communities. As Valerie Miner writes, "writers need to know about the world around them to understand how to protect the integrity of their work ... it is essential to understand what does and doesn't get published and why" (233-34). These pages do not teach students how to subordinate their voice or vision to market pressures; rather, they bring students' attention to the possibility of exploring the multiple available readerships as they begin to think about placing their work professionally.

The Reader Response Forum

The most important page is the one that helps students learn reader responses to their work and so to consider how consciously to shape these responses: the Reader Response Forum. This part of the site allows me to help my students along the lines of my creative writing classroom pedagogy, as I describe it above, especially in terms of (creative) writing as process in that it allows a workshop type of feedback. However, students need not have attended any of my classes to benefit from this page. They need only access the page through its link on my personal or the English Department's webpages, pages linked to the NGCSU server.

Reader responses and feedback give student writers a sense of audience. Audience awareness is probably one of the most important tasks for writers to master. Fulkerson argues that "readers and their responses are the final criteria of [the] effectiveness of any rhetorical endeavor" (156). Part of a writer's exigence, the audience effects Aristotelian logos, ethos, and pathos in any rhetorical situation. Composition students generally understand how audiences shape presentation when I ask them to write a letter about their weekend activities to their best friend and then to write it again, this time addressing their parents.

Creative writers, however, need to be especially aware of how readers read, that is of audience, in determining how effectively they have shaped the intended responses to their image, symbol, character description, setting, theme, or story. When writers encounter a discrepancy between intention and effect, they can revise their work in the ways that I describe above. Also, they can revise by experimenting with alternatives, by changing narrative points of view, for example, by reversing story events, or even altering genres; alternatively, they can cut their words in half in order to hone their work to its essential descriptors. By knowing the choices available to their writing, and the effects on their readers of these conscious choices, student writers learn how best to achieve their intended effects. Such experimentation could include student writers consciously applying Barry Kroll's view of audience, or reader-writer interaction:

   [T]he writer's task more centrally involves creating an audience
   within the text, largely by observing conventions which "imply" or
   "project" an audience with particular knowledge, assumptions, or
   attitudes toward the writer and subject matter. A text is a type of
   drama, with roles for writer and reader, and the audience is invited
   to enact the role which the writer has created for the reader. (182)

Again, I do not suggest that writers conform their individual voices to their readers' expectations; rather, I hope student writers take the opportunity to experiment with achieving their conscious intentions by noting how closely, or not, their intention matches their reception. Knowing how readers participate in a written work, how they respond to it, can help students consider how to make use of the options available to them for revision. Experimenting with point of view, characterization, imagery--the constituents of writing--helps student writers further develop methods of shaping responses. But such experimentation can only be effective once writers know how their work can be read.

This Reader Response Forum offers writers the opportunity to do just that. This forum is based on discussion web, offering writers automatic entry into the discussion area. Anyone can post in this area work of any genre, at any stage of its writing, either complete or still in progress. The posted works are organized from newest to oldest, and the area allows replies to these works, replies that are then automatically threaded.

Such discussion areas can be important components of WebCT courses. Brittany Patterson, a student web designer, obtained our discussion web from Bravenet.com, a website that offers free web tools, and linked it to the home as well as to the helpful hints page so that students can enter this discussion area from either the main or the helpful hints page. We elected to use Bravenet.com, rather than a WebCT discussion tool, in order to keep the webpage independent of any single course or semester.

The home page instructions, to which I refer above, offer what I believe to be a very useful direction: to most effectively ascertain their writing's effectiveness in terms of intention, writers ought to consider describing their intended reader response to their work. They can limit their response to a character, plot, theme, or image, if they like. The instructions then ask readers to give their feedback in descriptive form. Alan Ziegler classifies literary feedback as "reactive, descriptive, prescriptive, and collaborative" (209). Of these types of feedback, the descriptive offers only the audience response. In the Forum, readers post their responses; student writers can then gauge these responses against their stated intentions. For example, student Tim Childree posted this untitled poem:

   I miss you
   Miles between us I,
   In your arms, I long to feel them
   Surrounding me as I surround you I.
   Souls belong together, but time separates.
   You are distant as the winter air chills.
   Only soft windmusic of birds and grass to enjoy.
   Under the crystal sky, in all I do
   I miss you.

He wanted his readers to "feel the emotions straining against the strict form." To this poem, readers generally responded by feeling the emotions and perceiving the gaps in the form but only rarely seeing its chiasmic structure. In response to these reactions, Tim Childree revised his poem by adding the title "Chiasmus."

As I state on the home page, I occasionally post my own feedback to student writers' work; also, I sometimes invite student writers to journal their responses to their audience feedback, thus objectifying their readers' critiques. In this way, I hope to suggest how students can maintain helpful interaction within this, and future, learning communities. Sometimes these journal responses elicit further threaded responses from readers, agreeing or disagreeing with the writer's representation of their feedback. This further interaction helps student writers invoke and evoke, shape and reshape not only their own work but also their own audience responses. Often this interaction results in writers taking the opportunity to test revisions, test the effect of their revisions on both themselves and their readers. In Tim Childree's case, he revised his poem into this prose meditation:

   The vast mountainscape stretches farther than the eye can see as I
   sit here, shivering in the soft winter wind. The old mountain road
   climbs past this overlook normally reserved for the courteously slow
   or the night's young lovers, yet here I sit, hoping to sketch a
   moment.

   All I can think of is You, filling my moments, making me wish my
   journey led me in the opposite direction. "Miles between us I" sigh.
   They will stretch even longer when I am finished here Life can be
   unfair that way. When I left, I had Your embrace, its memory as I
   drove. Now my only embrace is the soothing, chilling wind, the soft
   yet vibrant grass.

   Three years now ... three years we've been together, you my perfect,
   my only love. We've had to fight to keep our love together, fight
   against all the people trying to separate us, but now, just like I'm
   sighing, "time separates." Even time separates us, but it will bring
   us back together, too.

   I wish You were here with me, gazing at the sky, the mountains. I
   want You to see the faeries rowing their boats over the vast ocean
   of clouds that covers the valley basin. All the trees, the cities in
   the distance, the very ground itself vanishes, and the dense,
   roiling waves of cloud look so real you could almost swim on their
   quickly-vanishing surface. Someday. The weather will be just right.
   I hope it's not on a day I'm forced to say, "I miss you."

After thus experimenting with genres, Tim Childree journaled his own response, deciding that he preferred the restraint of the poem to what he saw as the overly sentimental voice of the meditation.

Preparing student writers for real life writing situations and readerships, the writer-reader interaction in this learning community also helps student writers become aware of diversity in both audiences and audience responses. For example, Ben Parham posted a poem on chivalric love and was surprised at the negative responses it received from those readers who did not like the appropriating attitude of the male speaker to his subject-lady. Similarly, Maria Murphy posted this untitled poem:

   Let my spirit transcend
   and delve into the cells
   of your being.
   ... I want to slide into
   the deep recesses
   of your brain and explore
   your dark secrets, hidden fears, passionate desires.
   When you die
   I pray to God
   I die too.
   I will wander through purgatory,
   descend into hell,
   soar to the heavens,
   and join you.
   I love you.
   Is that alright?

She hoped the poem would "stir the readers' emotions; make you cry, smile, feel sexy after reading it." Readers almost uniformly responded by feeling spiritually uplifted instead. Experimenting with revision choices, Maria Murphy consciously evoked these spiritual responses in later versions of her poem. As she considers placing her work professionally, she can now include spiritually-inclined readerships, in such publishing homes as Illuminations or SharedVision, for instance.

Conclusion

This aspect of audience awareness responds to Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford's synthesis of dominant reader/dominant writer approaches to rhetoric, a synthesis that takes into consideration the enormous variety of rhetorical situations when it suggests that we include in the writer-reader relationship "a wide and shifting range of roles for both addressed and invoked audiences" (169).

Beyond my formal classroom creative writing course, this Creative Writing Community webpage offers interdisciplinary direction to student writers, as well as guiding them into a community of learners, by encouraging a reflective process in their writing through inspiration, analysis, feedback, and exchange.

Endnotes

[1] An NGCSU Faculty and Staff Leadership grant gave me funds to pay student web designer Brittany Patterson to develop with me the web community's navigation tools, banner, buttons, logo, font, color scheme, and content. Our department's webmaster D. Brian Mann added the webpage to both my personal and the department's webpage. My thanks go to them both.

[2] This and subsequent student pieces/postings are quoted with the students' permission.

References

Begeja, Michael J. Poet's Guide: How to Publish and Perform Your Work. Oregon: Story Line Press, 1995.

Bennett, Gloria. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/ Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit/english/BJ/Writersprompts.htm>.

Bravenet.com. 2005, <http://www.bravenet.com>.

Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 2003.

Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher Press, 2002.

Childree, Tim. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit/english/BJ/forum.htm>.

Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: the Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." CCC 35:2 (May 1984): 155-71.

Epel, Naomi. The Observation Deck. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998.

Fenza, D. W., Supriya Bhatnagar, Kirsten Hilgeford, and Carrie Addington, eds., The AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs. Eleventh Edition. Virginia: Association of Writing Programs, 2004.

Fornek, Alan. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/Academic/ Arts_Let/LangLit/english/BJ/Writersprompts.htm>.

Fulkerson, Richard. Teaching the Argument in Writing. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

Illuminations. 2003, <http://www.evolvingeditions.com>.

In the Moonlight a Worm. ed. George Marsh. 1999, <http://haiku.insouthsea.co.uk>.

Kiel, Jonathan. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit/english /BJ/Writersprompts.htm>.

Kroll, Barry M. "Writing for Readers: Three Perspectives on Audience." CCC 3 (1984): 172-85.

Lane, Michael. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit/english /BJ/Writersprompts.htm>.

Linenburger, Amy. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit/english /BJ/Writersprompts.htm>.

Murphy, Maria. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit /english/BJ/Writersprompts.htm>.

Miner, Valerie. "The Book in the World," Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy. Ed. By Joseph M. Moxley. Urbana: National Council of Teachers, 1989.

One of Us. 1999, <http://www.oneofus.co.uk/index.htm>.

Parham, Ben. 15 October 2004, <http://ngcsu.edu/Academic/Arts_Let/LangLit/english/BJ/forum.htm>.

Pope, Rob. The English Studies Book. New York: Routledge, 1998.

SharedVision. 2004, <http://www.dragonflymedia.com/sv/sv1801/index.html>.

WritersDigest.com. 2005, <http://www.writersdigest.com>.

Writers Market. 2004 ed. Cincinnati: Writers Digest, 2004.

Ziegler, Alan. "'Midwifing the Craft'--Teaching Revision and Editing," Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy. Ed. By Joseph M. Moxley. Urbana: National Council of Teachers, 1989.

Bonnie J. Robinson, North Georgia College & State University

Bonnie Robinson, Ph.D. is associate professor of English.