'Despite waves of interest in the work of Christina Stead, one aspect of her writing life has been largely neglected. From September 1943, she taught three series of extended writing workshops in New York and in the process left more than three hundred pages documenting her teaching. The question motivating this paper is: Why should we, as writers and teachers of writing, read her writing workshop notebooks nowadays? This paper will place Stead’s workshop in the context of the development of institutional teaching of novel writing and her emergence as a major writer. It will briefly examine how the notebooks have previously been understood and offer a closer analysis than has been made to date of the notebooks and their content and of the key issues raised by them. In particular, we shall explore her pedagogic focus upon workshop participants developing a rigorous, analytical approach to crafting novels and her extensive use of Georges Polti’s Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations to achieve this. That, in turn, will enable us to assess what the notebooks independently reveal about her beliefs regarding the novel and its purpose. ' (Publication summary)
'This paper brings into dialogue contemporary discourse in creative writing studies about approaches to reading draft fiction with a subjective account of the experience of being read. Through drawing on two key essays on reading strategies in the discipline of creative writing, statements by published authors and my own process, this paper looks at how writers respond to feedback on their writing. Reading of draft creative work occurs in overlapping contexts – in universities, by informal networks of writers and by editors – and social structures such as reading and writing groups support a writer in his or her response to criticism. The changes made to manuscripts as a result of feedback can be significant; this paper looks at the contexts in which such changes are executed. Ultimately, this paper argues that ‘communities of practice’ composed of writers who attended a university creative writing program together and who continued to read each other’s work after graduation utilised and developed strategies initiated in such programs. Such communities have benefits for their members in terms of social support and publication.' (Publication summary)
