ABSTRACT
It is both torturous and fitting that this collection of teaching essays by professors of Creative Writing (CW) in Asia, with our more than 66 books of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, lives by such a boring title. Chronologically and, I contend, developmentally, each of us 13 writing professors was first a reader, then a writer, then that increasingly common figure, the writer-professor. As should already be clear, we are also either from or have taught CW substantially in Asia, and in English. With Chad Harbach’s 2014 MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction as one of the recent precursor and parallel books to this one, it is fitting to cite, and amend, one of Keith Gessen’s essays there on what is now not so much the “intersection” as the inseparability of the contemporary creative writer and the university: “Practically no writer exists now who does not intersect at some point with the university system—this is unquestionably the chief sociological fact of modern American literature” (176). The earliest recent book that both prompts and requires this one, no writing professor needs to be reminded is Mark McGurl’s 2009 The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing from Harvard University Press. Canada, too, has an anthology devoted to Gessen’s university writer in Rishma Dunlop et al.’s Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field. However invaluable those three very different books are, with Harbach and Dunlop et al. as writer field generals and McGurl the parade-general scholar, each contributes to a growing body of scholarship and advice on CW pedagogy yet is focussed on (monolingual) North America. Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings’ new The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy transcends the North American and monolingual focus of the other three, with our contributors James Shea, Fan Dai, and Ling Li in both, but is more of a globe-trotting anthology rather than one fixated on a single (and relevant) continent. This new CW study, like the Moore and Meekings, does Ezra Pound proud by “making it new” by doing more than just re-examining yet another facet of the programme jewels of Iowa or East Anglia (where our contributors have both studied and taught). 2Instead, Teaching Creative Writing in Asia turns to the vanguard, to the teaching laboratory that is simultaneously novel, unique, and expanding—the English-language university writing classroom or programme in thriving, multilingual Asia.
