A Reading List for Creative Writing

01/01/2011

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When, a way long time ago, I put together my dissertation reading list, I focused on the main area of writing that interested me: the relationship between the writer and his or her region.  My list was in three parts: Theories of Place, where the relationship was explicitly discussed; Regional Literatures, where the relationship was performed; and 20th Century American Memoir and Travel Narrative, where the relationship is usually performed or discussed.  Few of the books are about “Creative Writing” per se, at least as it is often taught and theorized, yet all of them combine to give a picture of what I think is important in writing.

Then, a few weeks ago, a couple of grad students asked me for recommendations on writings about creative writing. My dissertation list wasn't quite what they were looking for.  So I had to give it some thought....For me, creative writing breaks down into four rather broad areas:

Where It Comes From: How place influences writing and the writer.
What It Means: a more traditional critical look at writing and the production of writing.
What Produces It: looking at the “creative” part of creative writing.
How It’s Done: Looking at craft, usually from the point of view of the writer

So, here are a few books toward a creative writing reading list:

       Where It Comes From

Turchi, Peter.  Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
Taun, Yu-Fi.  Space and Place
Bachelard, Gaston.  The Poetics of Space
Lippard, Lucy.  The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. 
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff.  Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
Clay, Grady.  Real Places


       What It Means

Booth, Wayne.  The Rhetoric of Fiction
Forster, E. M.  Aspects of the Novel
Weing, Siegfried.  The German Novella: Two Centuries of Criticism
McGurl, Mark.  The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
Lucaks, Georg.  The Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel
Wood, James.  How Fiction Works


       What Produces It

Pirsig, Robert.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Madsen, Patricia Ryan.  Improv Wisdom
Richardson, Robert.  First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process
Flaherty, Alice.  The Midnight Disease
Pinker, Steven.  The Stuff of Thought
Andreasen, Nancy. The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius


       How it’s Done

Butler, Robert Olen.  From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction
Addonizio, Kim.  Ordinary Genius
O’Connor, Flannery.  Mystery and Manners
Shelnut, Eve.  The Writing Room
Hills, Rust.  Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular


Of course, this is just a list.  Many, many other fine, interesting books could be on it.  You could really read forever--and maybe you should.


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Photo: "The End of the Road: 1964," from the Shorpy Photo Archives.  http://www.shorpy.com/node/1003?size=_original

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TDL Nominated....

11/08/2010

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I've learned that That Demon Life is a finalist for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award!

Yeah, that's an exclamation point in the previous sentence--I'm pretty excited.  You've heard the cliche about how it's nice to be nominated, right?  Well, it is nice.

Thanks, WLT!

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Books I'm Teaching this Semester

08/29/2010

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Our semester at Texas A&M begins tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to getting started and meeting all the new Young Scholars.  These are the books we’ll be reading in class….

For my two sections of composition:

§  Modern Language Association.  MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.  New York: Modern Language Association, 2009.
§  Nathan, Rebekah.  My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student.  New York: Penguin, 2006.
§  Miller, Char.  Fifty Years of the Texas Observer.  San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2004.

My experience as a composition student took place many years ago, but it continues to traumatize me.  Our professor was an old fart whose pedagogy was based on reading the comp handbook out loud.  Yeah.  No kidding.  Reading the handbook out loud.  For the whole 50 minutes we would read aloud fascinating factoids about comma splices and sentence fragments.  I hated that book, and I hated the class, and I hated the professor, and I go on hating them: every time I teach comp I have evil flashbacks, a sort of Post-Traumatic Comp Disorder.  (I elaborated on this disaster of a class in an essay, “Comp: a Personal and Pedagogical Narrative,” which is scheduled to be published in an anthology at some point next year).

I guess that ancient class left me with some lingering disgust or distrust of composition books—I don’t even like thinking about them.  Still, I’ve got to use something, I guess, and so I started looking around for a basic comp handbook.  And then I was totally shocked and appalled—the prices!  They’re ridiculous!  I see no reason to force students to spend a fortune on a book that will be used as little more than a reference.  (Really, does anyone actually buy these things for the exercises?  Can’t you come up with your own?)

So I turned to the good ol’ MLA Handbook.  It has most of the necessary information the Young Scholars need (anything else they can get off Purdue OWL), and at a more or less reasonable price.

My Freshman Year, by “Rebekah Nathan,” is a book I’m looking forward to teaching, even though I’ve never met anyone who actually likes it—including me.  I read it through in pretty much a single sitting, and found it quite frustrating and annoying and depressing.  At the same time I think the author does raise some interesting questions about the culture of students at a university, and I hope that the Scholars—who will probably dislike this book as much as me or anyone else—can use it as a starting point for reflecting on their own college experience.  (Next semester I might add Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, another book I didn’t much care for, to the list to go along with Nathan.  The YSs could then mount a defense of their generation and its use of technology). 

We’ll also be using one book I like very much.  Fifty Years of the Texas Observer, edited by Char Miller, is an excellent collection of well-written, short essays about the place we live.  I always enjoy teaching this book, and it seems to go over pretty well.

For my multi-genre creative writing class, I chose the following books:

§  Addonizio, Kim.  Ordinary Genius.  New York: Norton, 2009.
§  Casares, Oscar.  Brownsville.  Boston: Back Bay Books, 2003.
§  Fountain, Carrie.  Burn Lake.  New York, Penguin, 2010.
§  Singleton, George.  Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds.  Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books, 2009.
§  White, Lowell Mick.  Long Time Ago Good.  College Station: Slough Press, 2009.

Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius does a terrific job of de-mystifying poetry.  It’s great—a generous and open discussion of how poems get made.  I talked a bit with Kim last spring at AWP, and told her how I used her book.  “That’s what the book is for,” she said.  Well, yeah!  I use it in my prison classes, too…I think the world of this book.

Oscar Casares’s Brownsville is a wonderful story collection set in an area of our state—our nation—that is often overlooked.  It’s great when I get a Young Scholar from the Valley who says, “I didn’t know you could write about Brownsville!”  It’s almost even better when a YS from the suburbs of Dallas says the same thing.  It’s a book full of revelations.

Last spring I had my book order almost ready to send out—had everything except the poetry selection—when I went to Carrie Fountain’s reading in Austin.  By the second poem I knew I wanted to teach her book, Burn Lake—a collection of very tight, well-observed poems about New Mexico.  This is going to be fun.

George Singleton’s Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds is a cool collection of aphorisms about the writing process.  It’s funny, too, with charming little drawings to illustrate the points he makes.  The advice is good, the presentation effective.  I’ve listed this as “Recommended” in semesters past, and have now kicked it up to “Required.”

Oh.  Yeah.  And we’re covering one of my books, too, Long Time Ago Good.  At first I worried a little about the morality of requiring my own book, but I came to the conclusion that it was more or less okay.  This is the second semester I’ve used it.  I try to walk the Scholars through the stories, pointing out the decisions I made at different stages of composition.  It works, I think.

 
Stuff to look for:

Kim Addonizio’s website. 

Oscar Casares’s website

George Singleton’s website

Purdue University Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL)—a great resource for teachers and students

Carrie Fountain’s website
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