For the Teacher Files: Creative Writing in the Digital Age

Every once in a while, friends and colleagues of mine make something cool. A recent example that has me excited to teach this fall is Creative Writing in the Digital Age: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy, compiled and edited by my former UWM colleagues Michael Dean Clark, Trent Hergenrader and Joseph Rein.

This coming fall, I am teaching a 200-level Honors course at UWM in Digital Prose, so this volume came out at the perfect time. Now is the era of multimodality in writing pedagogy, but most of us are new at the concept. It will continue to be a slow start, as writing teachers struggle with accommodating students through this exciting transition, when most of us are still learning what it all means. I’ve been dabbling with the possibilities that social media has to offer since my last creative writing course, in which I asked students to build a creative writing journal online. I presented the idea and some of the results at the Mix Digital Conference in 2013, an annual conference in England devoted to digital writing and pedagogy. But the idea of a digital project might consist of so many things. Let’s just say there’s a lot I still have to read and learn.

The End of the Physical, Corsham

Mix Digital Locale in Corsham

The essays in this book gave me a lot to think about in terms of what the digital realm has to offer students, and even edified some of my thinking about the writing project as material or artifact, which also interests me. I’ve done a lot of working with literary publications during a time when print is giving way to online media pretty rapidly. There’s still this attachment to the physical book form, and certainly there is something beautiful about that, but work published online can do things that work on paper can’t – make sound, feature images that move, and link to other texts for instance. The print journal is still more prestigious in terms of publications for your CV, but even our lauded cream city review may one day take the online plunge. Printing is damned expensive. Paper slows everything down in a way. I admit that if a journal doesn’t offer online submissions, they aren’t likely to be burdened with reading my stories.

As a teacher delving into this new territory, particularly valuable in this collection were the ideas it offered for student projects in digital form. I did my Mix Digital presentation with Prezi, and I love that program, but struggled with ways students might use it for their projects. Anna Leahy and Douglas Dechow’s essay titled “Concentration, Form and Ways of (Digitally) Seeing,” presented some interesting ways of building student portfolios with Prezi. They point out that including a week of instruction in which students exchanged ideas by sharing how they built their portfolios, which is important, because most students are nearly as green as we are when it comes to using this technology. What excited me most, given my teaching philosophy, is the way the Prezi assignment encouraged hyper-awareness of revision.

Trent’s chapter titled “Game Spaces: Video Games as Story-Generating Systems for Creative Writers” gave me food for thought in terms of the world-building possibilities in gaming. (It also does a nice job of breaking down the assumption that video games make young people unimaginative and stupid.) The video game presents a great way to think about the way we construct fictional landscapes and think about how those landscapes affect character decisions. Since Mix Digital I’ve given a lot of thought to the way digital mapping programs can offer a lot to creative writers, not to mention student in my Gender and Migration course. I heart maps.

Mike’s essay, “The Marketable Creative: Using Technology and Broader Notions of Skill in the Fiction Course” gave a nice practical rundown of a collaborative fiction course that echoed a lot of what I learned in teaching English 414: Literary Journal Production, which puts out the lovely Furrow every spring. (Great new issue by the way…students pulled it off again!) The digital realm allows for a lot of collaboration that wasn’t as easily done before. Importantly, Mike points out that collaboration, communication and professionalization are important extensions of the creative writing skill-set.

At the Furrow Launch 2015

One aspect of the class in which I assigned the online journal was the notion of the multiple self: particularly the public self and the private self, and how the literary self negotiates between them. Joe’s chapter “Lost in Digital Translation: Navigating the Online Creative Writing Classroom” spoke a lot to that idea, especially in terms of how you present who you are as the instructor of a class that does not meet face to face, which might include using video programs like Camtasia, which I’d never heard of. Janelle Adsit goes into this even more deeply in “Giving an Account of Oneself: Teaching Identity Construction and Authorship,” giving ideas for exercises that make students think about the way identity shifts when we move from one discourse community to the next, and the way we construct our identity online the way one might construct a character in a story or a voice in a poem.

Some of these exercises included a “code-switching exercise” in which she asks students to write query letters to positions and three very different publications. Another involved social media: she has students compose intertextual essays based on what they find in a Google search of themselves, which makes students think of the character they have created of themselves through the use of FB and Twitter and so forth. She also assigns a “pastiche essay” which asks students to record various words and phrases that they speak or type during the day, and then choose ten phrases that they will link together either by memory or Googling.

Other writers in the volume present ideas using digital programs like Inform 7 and Taroko Gorge to create story. Abigail Scheg’s “Reconsidering the Online Writing Workshop with #25wordstory” was especially interesting to me because of my interest in flash. #25wordstory invites Twitter users to post 140-character, 25-word stories followed by the hashtag to share throughout Twitter. In a creative writing class, this represents the opportunity to teach students (particularly flash students) how to work within constraints and be economical: to give the right weight to every word and every punctuation mark. At such a short length, every word must have great importance, and word choice is a tough one for students. Working in a public medium like Twitter also opens students up to the world of communication and networking, which are important aspects of the writing life.

Rob Wittig and Mark Marino’s “Acting Out: Netprov in the Classroom” provides ideas for creating “netprovs” or “stories creating in existing networked media that are collaborative and improvised in real time” (153). This chapter goes over best practices and ideas for using social media and other online forums to creative collaborative stories. An example included a blog in which all posts represent patients in a hospital who have lost their hearing and sight. (A doctor who performs their surgeries and a nurse are also characters.) This gave me a lot to think about in terms of how I might teach digital storytelling, and reflected a lot of what I learned from presenters at Mix Digital who practiced online communal storytelling. (One in particular asked users of the medium to help him find a woman he described loosely, and to post pictures of her and/or where she might be.)

Finally, my friend Christi Clancy writes a chapter titled “The Text is Where It’s At: Digital Storytelling Assignments that Teach Lessons in Creative Writing” which includes amazing ideas for using digital formats, especially for creative nonfiction and memoir. I’ll be teaching a freshman seminar in the fall on identity, and much of Christi’s ideas could be really useful in that course. (She also gave the idea of “Radical Revisions” which excites the heck out of me and which I’m giving a conference presentation on in the fall.)

Some exercises involved using photos and images. For example, students bring a photo to class and provide a brief narrative about what’s going on in the photo. The students swap photos with a partner, who then makes up their own narrative. Then students write a random noun and adjective on the board, which the instructor uses to make a Google search for an image. The image is displayed while the students read their narratives, though the image may have absolutely nothing to do with the story. Afterwards, they discuss tensions created between the stories and the images. She also assigns a “pechakucha” in which “participants display 20 images via PowerPoint and narrate for 20 seconds without notes or text accompanying the images” (169).

For the purpose of my freshman seminar on identity though, I liked the idea of the “story circle,’ that Christi borrows from Beloit’s Center for Digital Storytelling. Students sit in a circle and a student shares a short anecdote relating to something they’d like to write about. Then each other student asks a question. This might be as simple as, what did it smell like? The idea is that through these discussions, the story is transformed from a simple anecdote to something more complicated and universal. Since my seminar will likely involved students writing essays about who they are, and identity is usually constructed through narrative, I see this as an ideal activity. Actually, my developmental English students might benefit from it too.

I don’t like conclusions.

With Christi (left) and Other Lovely Writer Ladies