teaching writing

  • The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Patrick O’Neil

    The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Patrick O’Neil

    Patrick O’Neil talks about his debut memoir Gun Needle Spoon, being big in France, the drug/recovery genre, and writing through trauma.

  • Keep It Simple

    Recently, several novelists have criticized the primary curriculum in the UK for teaching a brand of creative writing that is too “complex.” For the Guardian, Ella Slater explains why she agrees with such criticism, arguing that her primary education has made writing simple and…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner

    The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner

    Paul Griner talks about his newest novel, Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.

  • Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Julia MacDonnell

    Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Julia MacDonnell

    Julia was one of those “students” whom you suspect, after maybe fifteen seconds, should actually be teaching the class you are currently (allegedly) teaching.

  • The Rumpus Interview with Christian Kiefer

    The Rumpus Interview with Christian Kiefer

    Writer, musician, and poet Christian Kiefer discusses his literary influences, the “beautiful, beat up, and weird town” that is Reno, and writing from the perspective of beasts in his new novel The Animals.

  • Word of the Day: Didascalic

    (adj.); intended to teach; related to teaching or education “How did it come to be … that ‘those of us for whom English is a line of work are also called upon to love literature and ensue that others do…

  • MFA-Gate Continues

    Last week, Ryan Boudinot published the MFA-disparaging essay/listicle/cranky advice column that launched a thousand angry tweets. Electric Literature has two responses: one supporting Boudinot’s core argument and one rebutting it.

  • The Unteachable Dark

    Writers Rivka Galchen and Zoë Heller, over at The New York Times, discuss the question that will never go away: can writing be taught? They raise valid points about whether teaching writing is fundamentally different from teaching something like science and the…

  • Not Writing to Write Better

    Julia Fierro has a debut novel Cutting Teeth, but for much of the last decade, the writer was so dispirited by the rejection of her first manuscript that she stopped writing. Instead, she launched Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, a Brooklyn-based writing…

  • “Please Let It Go Okay”

    Teaching is a complicated profession, especially in the field of creative writing where emotions run high. Does teaching hurt your writing? What if you’re an able writer but a mediocre teacher? Joyce Hinnefeld tackles her ambivalence about the job she’s…

  • The Only Woman in the Room

    The Only Woman in the Room

    At the Tazewell County Justice Center, on a Monday night in May, five women gather for a creative-writing class. They microwave plastic cups of instant coffee, then drag chairs up to the conference table where we’ll write.

  • To Teach Or Not to Teach?

    The ever-contentious subject of teaching creative writing is up for discussion. You can teach the elements, but there are always the “intangibles that cannot be taught.”  Roxane Gay is inciting a discussion on HTMLGiant, laying some foundation for all of…