For Those Who Teach Creative Writing

By Dan Lukiv

You may be a grade one or a grade 12 teacher, and perhaps you have wondered what creative writing activities in your language arts or in your English courses carry merit. By those of merit, I mean activities that encourage students to actually grow up to be creative writers. Does that last sentence sound, at the global level, grandiose? By grandiose, I mean, how can I address what activities, or events, in school have been the driving force to encourage students to join the world ranks of millions of writers without sounding horribly inflated?

One answer lies in starting somewhere, as I did in my MEd research, by simply asking someone, an established creative writer, what events in school had encouraged him or her to take up the serious art and craft of writing. I thereby erase the “grandiose” from this discussion. I start with the themes I discerned from interviewing a successful, published Canadian poet I call Arthur (a pseudonym). Arthur and I confirmed the essential quality of those themes through participant review, one element of the hermeneutic phenomenological methodology I used. Clearly, the eight themes don’t speak of the writers of the world; they speak of Arthur, but they present a starting point, a place to add further discoveries of themes related to events that likewise encouraged other creative writers.

Those further discoveries will lie in the series of studies that I, now an independent researcher, will conduct, using the identical methodology of my MEd research, through interviewing other established writers. A body of knowledge about what sorts of events in school encouraged these writers will grow, but for now I present what I have learned to date, from Arthur. I present the events that encouraged Arthur as themes turned into questions for teachers of creative writing to ponder. Without a preponderance of direction for teachers, since my ongoing research remains only partway into the Study Number Two stage, ponder seems the operative word; however, the high-ranking validity of Arthur's themes, established through rigorous, established methodology, to ponder becomes time well spent.

Here are the themes-turned-into-nine questions:

1. Do I provide opportunities for students to read poetry and fiction silently?
2. Do I provide quality oral reading of poetry and fiction in class?
3. Do I provide class singsongs?
4. Do I provide language experiences--movies, plays, novels, short story and poetry collections, scripts, and electronic media--uninterrupted by questions or other assignments?
5. Do I provide reasonable opportunities for students to daydream, to enjoy flights of imagination fuelled by the connotative and imagistic value of words?
6. Do I provide reasonable opportunities for students to pun and joke and verbally inform others about what they have learned?
7. Do I passionately discuss with students thoughts and feelings based on poetry and fiction texts read in class, and do I openly value their attempts to write down those thoughts and feelings?
8. Do I provide opportunities for students to explore literature through freedom of choice?
9. Do I compassionately provide sound direction about how to write well?

(Reprinted from Teachers.Net Gazette, which published an abbreviated version of my research in 2020 [April]; the complete study resides in the Geoffrey R. Weller Library at UNBC: LB2020.8.L85)

Why do these theme-questions, for teachers of creative writing, define a good starting place? Well, we may not require all our students to become creative writers, but some students, given the right environment, like a marigold seed given the appropriate combinations of soil, nutrients, water, and sunshine, might germinate into a poet or fiction writer, into a Wole Soyinka or a Thomas Akare, or into a Lindsey Collen or a Tayeb Salih. Some students might germinate into great dramatists. On the other hand, some students might germinate into poets, fiction writers, and dramatists of humble ability. That is fine too. If we, as educators, want to think about what that right environment might be, the theme-questions from this study create a starting place.