Download or read book Tradition in Creative Writing written by Adrian May and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tradition in Creative Writing: Finding Inspiration Through Your Roots encourages writers to rediscover sources of creativity in the everyday, showing students how to see your writing as connected to your life. Adrian May addresses a key question for many beginning writers: Where do you get your ideas from? May argues that tradition does not mean anti-progress—but is instead a kind of hidden wealth that stems from literary and historical traditions, folk and songs, self and nature, and community. By drawing on these personal and traditional wellsprings of inspiration, writers will learn to see their writing as part of a greater continuum of influences and view their work as having innate value as part of that cultural and artistic ecology. Each chapter includes accessible discussion, literary and critical readings, creative examples, and writing exercises. While the creative examples are drawn from song lyrics and poetry, the writing exercises are appropriate for all genres. Undergraduates and practitioners will benefit from this guide to finding originality in writing through exploring sources of creative inspiration.

Download or read book Reading Old Books written by Peter Mack and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mack offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the 21st century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings.

Download or read book Craft in the Real World written by Matthew Salesses and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review). The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces? Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, "When we write fiction, we write the world."

Download or read book Traditions of Writing Research written by Charles Bazerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-10-16 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditions of Writing Research reflects the different styles of work offered at the Writing Research Across Borders conference. Organized by Charles Bazerman, one of the pre-eminent scholars in writing studies, the conference facilitated an unprecedented gathering of writing researchers. Representing the best of the works presented, this collection focuses solely on writing research, in its lifespan scope bringing together writing researchers interested in early childhood through adult writing practices. It brings together differing research traditions, and offers a broad international scope, with contributor-presenters including top international researchers in the field The volume's opening section presents writing research agendas from different regions and research groups. The next section addresses the national, political, and historical contexts that shape educational institutions and the writing initiatives developed there. The following sections represent a wide range of research approaches for investigating writing processes and practices in primary, secondary, and higher education. The volume ends with theoretical and methodological reflections. This exemplary collection, like the conference that it grew out of, will bring new perspectives to the rich dialogue of contemporary research on writing and advance understanding of this complex and important human activity.

Download or read book MFA Vs NYC written by Chad Harbach and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers write—but what do they do for money? In a widely read essay entitled "MFA vs NYC," bestselling novelist Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) argued that the American literary scene has split into two cultures: New York publishing versus university MFA programs. This book brings together established writers, MFA professors and students, and New York editors, publicists, and agents to talk about these overlapping worlds, and the ways writers make (or fail to make) a living within them. Should you seek an advanced degree, or will workshops smother your style? Do you need to move to New York, or will the high cost of living undo you? What's worse—having a day job or not having health insurance? How do agents decide what to represent? Will Big Publishing survive? How has the rise of MFA programs affected American fiction? The expert contributors, including George Saunders, Elif Batuman, and Fredric Jameson, consider all these questions and more, with humor and rigor. MFA vs NYC is a must-read for aspiring writers, and for anyone interested in the present and future of American letters.

Download or read book The Tradition written by Jericho Brown and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic—no, it's precision, and honesty—Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."—Craig Morgan Teicher, “'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview” for NPR “A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem.“—Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown’s “Dark” (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019) “Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.”—O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2019” One of Buzzfeed’s “66 Books Coming in 2019 You’ll Want to Keep Your Eyes On” The Rumpus poetry pick for “What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner” One of BookRiot’s “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019” Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

Download or read book Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty First Century written by Alexandria Peary and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creative writing workshop: beloved by some, dreaded by others, and ubiquitous in writing programs across the nation. For decades, the workshop has been entrenched as the primary pedagogy of creative writing. While the field of creative writing studies has sometimes myopically focused on this single method, the related discipline of composition studies has made use of numerous pedagogical models. In Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, editors Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley gather experts from both creative writing and composition studies to offer innovative alternatives to the traditional creative writing workshop. Drawing primarily from the field of composition studies—a discipline rich with a wide range of established pedagogies—the contributors in this volume build on previous models to present fresh and inventive methods for the teaching of creative writing. Each chapter offers both a theoretical and a historical background for its respective pedagogical ideas, as well as practical applications for use in the classroom. This myriad of methods can be used either as a supplement to the customary workshop model or as stand-alone roadmaps to engage and reinvigorate the creative process for both students and teachers alike. A fresh and inspiring collection of teaching methods, Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century combines both conventional and cutting-edge techniques to expand the pedagogical possibilities in creative writing studies.

Download or read book The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball written by Dori Jones Yang and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chinese boy struggles to adapt to American life—and discovers baseball. Despite his impulsive and curious nature, twelve-year-old Leon is determined to follow the Emperor’s rules—to live with an American family, study hard, and return home to modernize China. But he also must keep the braid that shows his loyalty—and resist such forbidden American temptations as baseball. As Leon overcomes teasing and makes friends, his elder brother becomes increasingly alienated. Eventually, Leon faces a tough decision, torn between his loyalty to his birth country—and his growing love for his new home. The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball is a lively, poignant, and nuanced novel based on a little-known episode from history, when 120 boys were sent to New England by the Emperor of China in the 1870s. This story dramatizes both the rigid expectations and the wrenching alienation felt by many foreign children in America today—and richly captures that tension between love and hate that is culture shock. It gives American readers a glimpse into what it feels like to be a foreigner in the United States and will spark thoughtful discussions.

Download or read book Insectopedia written by Hugh Raffles and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A stunningly original exploration of the ties that bind us to the beautiful, ancient, astoundingly accomplished, largely unknown, and unfathomably different species with whom we share the world. For as long as humans have existed, insects have been our constant companions. Yet we hardly know them, not even the ones we’re closest to: those that eat our food, share our beds, and live in our homes. Organizing his book alphabetically, Hugh Raffles weaves together brief vignettes, meditations, and extended essays, taking the reader on a mesmerizing exploration of history and science, anthropology and travel, economics, philosophy, and popular culture. Insectopedia shows us how insects have triggered our obsessions, stirred our passions, and beguiled our imaginations.

Download or read book Uncreative Writing written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

Download or read book Every Day I Write the Book written by Amitava Kumar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amitava Kumar's Every Day I Write the Book is for academic writers what Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Stephen King's On Writing are for creative writers. Alongside Kumar's interviews with an array of scholars whose distinct writing offers inspiring examples for students and academics alike, the book's pages are full of practical advice about everything from how to write criticism to making use of a kitchen timer. Communication, engagement, honesty: these are the aims and sources of good writing. Storytelling, attention to organization, solid work habits: these are its tools. Kumar's own voice is present in his essays about the writing process and in his perceptive and witty observations on the academic world. A writing manual as well as a manifesto, Every Day I Write the Book will interest and guide aspiring writers everywhere.

Download or read book Immigrant Montana written by Amitava Kumar and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK ONE OF THE NEW YORKER’S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR Carrying a single suitcase, Kailash arrives in post-Reagan America from India to attend graduate school. As he begins to settle into American existence, Kailash comes under the indelible influence of a charismatic professor, and also finds his life reshaped by a series of very different women with whom he recklessly falls in and out of love. Looking back on the formative period of his youth, Kailash’s wry, vivid perception of the world he is in, but never quite of, unfurls in a brilliant melding of anecdote and annotation, picture and text. Building a case for himself, both as a good man in spite of his flaws and as an American in defiance of his place of birth, Kailash weaves a story that is at its core an incandescent investigation of love—despite, beyond, and across dividing lines.

Download or read book A Stranger s Journey written by David Mura and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long recognized as a master teacher at writing programs like VONA, the Loft, and the Stonecoast MFA, with A Stranger's Journey, David Mura has written a book on creative writing that addresses our increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer technique-focused readings of writers such as James Baldwin, ZZ Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Garrett Hongo, while making compelling connections to Mura's own life and work as a Japanese American writer. In A Stranger's Journey, Mura poses two central questions. The first involves identity: How is writing an exploration of who one is and one's place in the world? Mura examines how the myriad identities in our changing contemporary canon have led to new challenges regarding both craft and pedagogy. Here, like Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark or Jeff Chang's Who We Be, A Stranger's Journey breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between the issues of race, literature, and culture. The book's second central question involves structure: How does one tell a story? Mura provides clear, insightful narrative tools that any writer may use, taking in techniques from fiction, screenplays, playwriting, and myth. Through this process, Mura candidly explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir and how questions of identity occupy a central place in contemporary memoir.

Download or read book Three Story Method written by J. Thorn and published by Thorn Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storytelling isn’t complicated. We’ll prove it to you. Do you have an amazing idea for a novel but you struggle to get words on the page? Maybe the problem isn’t writer’s block. Maybe you need a writing process. Publishing veterans and bestselling authors Zach Bohannon and J. Thorn share their proven system for developing a plan that will bridge the gap between a collection of random notes and a cohesive first draft. This comprehensive book will teach you the foundations of fiction: Plot, Structure, Genre, Theme, Character, and World. Discover: Why you need a system to finish a first draft whether you plot or pants What Aristotle said about storytelling thousands of years ago that still applies today How studying Star Wars can make you a better writer What some of the most prolific authors believe about the craft How all stories can be reduced to three components Which archetypes create a more engaging reader experience How the Hero’s Journey is alike and different than the Virgin’s Promise Why you should cast your characters like a movie producer Developed over 10 years and applied on millions of words of fiction, Thorn and Bohannon will show you how to layer your approach and build a fantastic story from the ground up. No more staring at a blinking cursor when you sit down to write! Become a master storyteller today. Three Story Method will transform you from a struggling writer into a career author. Downloadable worksheet and full list of resources included! Get it now!

Download or read book The Magic of Writing written by Adrian May and published by Red Globe Press. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging guide, teacher, poet and lyricist Adrian May shows how magic is a tool used by writers to generate creativity, where concepts of magic are seen as portals of creative power. This unique book features approachable chapters on aspects of magic and writing - such as the Tarot and the creative methods of W. B. Yeats. Blending literary criticism with practical exercises, this text will enable readers to understand the magical nature of creative writing, giving them a sense of wider possibilities and equipping them to improve their creative writing. This an ideal resource for undergraduate or postgraduate students taking courses on Creative Writing, as well as established or budding writers working independently.

Download or read book Writing Creative Nonfiction written by Philip Gerard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-05-10 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the power and the promise of working in today' most exciting literary form: Creative Nonfiction Writing Creative Nonfiction presents more than thirty essays examining every key element of the craft, from researching ideas and structuring the story, to reportage and personal reflection. You'll learn from some of today's top creative nonfiction writers, including: • Terry Tempest Williams - Analyze your motivation for writing, its value, and its strength. • Alan Cheuse - Discover how interesting, compelling essays can be drawn from every corner of your life and the world in which you live. • Phillip Lopate - Build your narrator–yourself–into a fully fleshed-out character, giving your readers a clearer, more compelling idea of who is speaking and why they should listen. • Robin Hemley - Develop a narrative strategy for structuring your story and making it cohesive. • Carolyn Forche - Master the journalistic ethics of creative nonfiction. • Dinty W. Moore - Use satire, exaggeration, juxtaposition, and other forms of humor in creative nonfiction. • Philip Gerard - Understand the narrative stance–why and how an author should, or should not, enter into the story. Through insightful prompts and exercises, these contributors help make the challenge of writing creative nonfiction–whether biography, true-life adventure, memoir, or narrative history–a welcome, rewarding endeavor. You'll also find an exciting, creative nonfiction "reader" comprising the final third of the book, featuring pieces from Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Beverly Lowry, Phillip Lopate, and more–selections so extraordinary, they will teach, delight, inspire, and entertain you for years to come!

Download or read book Myth and Creative Writing written by Adrian May and published by . This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myth and Creative Writing is a unique and practical guide to the arts of creative writing. It: Gives a historical perspective on the storyteller's art Takes a wide view of myth, to include: legends, folklore, biblical myth, classical myth, belief myths, balladry and song. Considers all aspects of the creative process, from conception to completion Provides tips on seeking inspiration from classical and mythic sources Shows how myths can be linked to contemporary concerns Enables beginning writers to tap into the deeper resonances of myth Guides students to further critical and creative resources A secret that all writers know is that they are part of a long tradition of storytelling - whether they call it mythic, intertextual, interactive or original. And in the pantheon of storytelling, myths (those stories that tell us, in often magical terms, how the world and the creatures in it came to be) are the bedrock, a source of unending inspiration. One can dress the study of literature in the finest critical clothing - or intellectualise it until the cows come home - but at its heart it is nothing more - and nothing less - than the study of the human instinct to tell stories, to order the world into patterns we can more readily understand. Exploring the mythic nature of writing (by considering where the connections between instinct and art are made, and where the writer is also seen as a mythic adventurer) is a way of finding close links to what it is we demand from literature, which is - again - something to do with the essences of human nature. Further, in the course of examining the nature of myth, Adrian May provides a very practical guide to the aspiring writer - whether in a formal course or working alone - on how to write stories (myths) of their own, from how to begin, how to develop and how to close.