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I teach creative writing to undergraduates in a writing program at the University of Central Arkansas which features creative writing as a strand within a writing degree that also includes rhetoric and linguistics. There is no doubt that, as the article illustrates, there has been a significant rise in interest in undergraduate creative writing programs in the past ten years. What has perhaps not caught up with this rise is the body of research and knowledge on how these students may best be taught (see Kelly Ritter's article in the November '01 issue of College English for data on this). Many are still taught predominantly through the Iowa Workshop model, a model that was established for and works well with older graduate students -- many of whom who were significantly older (courtesy of the GI bill) when the method took hold, than our undergraduates today. Today's undergraduates, especially "traditional" undergraduates, are a somewhat different animal, requiring different techniques in addition to the workshop method. The emphasis on reading at this level is certainly part of an overall "pedagogy" that should be supported, like so many of us, I must constantly remind my students that in order to be writers they must first be readers. But this is an uphill battle.

Professor Fenza's articulates the position of creative writers in the academy well, as always; his article/speech "Creative Writing and Its Discontents" remains, in my mind, the most lucid and reasoned defense of creative writing programs in Academia yet published. But graduate programs and their effects on creative writing in academia and in America remain the primary focus of his defense and many like-minded arguments. As undergraduates clamor for creative writing courses programs, I think it's time we take the responsibility to offer them courses and workshops supported by sounder pedagogy: something more, or at least an enhanced version of the default pedagogy most of us (this writer included) absorbed in our own graduate programs. Steps have been made in this direction, with a small number of articles appearing in the Associated Writing Program's Chronicle, College English and CCC, in edited collections such as Bishop and Ostrum's Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy, and in the few classes in the teaching of creative writing cropping up here and there. But still, these are the exceptions rather than the rule; much research and reflection remains to be done. I believe we owe it to our students.

: -- Stephanie Vanderslice, Assistant Professor (posted 3/11, 2:55 p.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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