Why literature students should practise life writing

Abstract

This article considers our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called “Life Writing.” We consider the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice—in this instance, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing—as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing, our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and ethical issues that arise from working with literary texts. Such an approach is not with risk. As we discuss in this article, life writing texts can often narrate difficult or traumatic material. However, we want to show how life writing, with its particular focus on actual lives and lived experience, creates a particularly conducive ethical, intellectual, and creative space for learning about and practicing writing.

Keywords

Ethics life writing methodology teaching and learning theory and practice

I’m a Literature student. Why do I have to do a creative task? I don’t like creative writing.

—(anonymous “Life Writing” student).¹

We work in a department of English and Creative Writing and often find ourselves engaged in conversations with colleagues about the difficulties in encouraging creative writing students to read set texts and engage in critical writing tasks. As these students so often tell us—they just want to do creative writing.² An equally fascinating problem in our context is the recalcitrant literature student whose greatest fear or aversion is engaging in and doing creative writing. At a time of shrinking staff numbers and subject offerings, there are sound practical and pedagogical reasons for wanting to combine elements of literature and creative writing into the same subject and degree major.

In this article, we discuss our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called “Life Writing.”³ We offer our experiences as a case study that shows the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice—in our example, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing—as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and ethical issues that arise from working with literary texts. Such an approach is not with risk. As we discuss, life-writing texts can often narrate difficult or traumatic material. However, we also want to show how life writing, with its apparent commitment to actual lives and lived experience, involves choices and constructs on the part of the writer. The “self” in life narrative is at once the author (the lived self) and a textual construct or character in the narrative (the narrated self). These factors also contribute to life writing’s potential as an ethical, intellectual, and creative space for learning about and practicing writing. Encouraging students to think about the differences in the way lives are lived, remembered, constructed, and translated for a readership is an important part of this process. For example, students writing about the self (and teachers assessing this writing) can potentially find some objective distance between evaluating and life and evaluating a representation of that life, and in doing so, develop a more grounded understanding of how life writing genres work.

Literature, creative writing, and life writing: Histories and mandates

As critics such as Paul Dawson have observed, tertiary creative writing in Australia has often been aligned to literary studies—the disciplinary “home” of the creative writing academic is commonly within an English department. This context for creative writing has sometimes been uneasy, with adherents on both sides arguing for the specificity of their respective disciplines. Dawson (2005), however, argues that struggles between “writers and critics” miss the point: “The history of Creative Writing demands that it be seen as a flexible and continually developing set of pedagogical strategies for challenging and reinvigorating Literary Studies” (160). But, although in some cases creative writing courses in Australian universities are located within or aligned to programs of literary studies, it has become a thriving scholarly and pedagogical discipline, and in its own right does so much more than reinvigorate literary studies. As Glover (2012) summarizes “over the past 20 years universities have taken to as a practice and research based discipline” (293). Glover argues that the discipline now has three distinct “preoccupations”: “(1) the pedagogy of creative writing … (2) creative writing’s constitution as an academic discipline and its epistemological status … that is, investigations into the kinds of knowledge creative writing studies produces … (3) the compositional aspects of individual creative practice” (293). Like Dawson, Glover notes that while some creative writing programs exist directly adjacent to literary studies programs, in other examples, creative writing “describes itself as a radical break from literary studies” (294). Creative writing shares strong relationships (whether realized or potential) with many scholarly disciplines including rhetoric and composition, journalism cultural studies and linguistics (Glover, 2012: 294). The discipline is developing and evolving in fascinating ways and its interdisciplinary foundations and potential is just one example of this.

We teach at a middle-sized Australian university. Students in our literature and creative writing majors take subjects from each discipline “stream” to complete a major. However, while the students might be interdisciplinary, the subjects can tend to redraw implied disciplinary boundaries. One of the subjects we offer, however, is “Life Writing,” which can be counted toward both majors. The core aim of our subject is to explore concepts, subgenres, and methods of life writing genres. Locating this as a “hybrid” topic means we also aim to explore these ideas from the different perspectives of the theoretician and the practitioner of life writing. However, rather than seeing these positions as discrete, we create a context for students to understand how practice and theory are linked and interconnected. “Life Writing” represents a pedagogically driven attempt to collapse some of the disciplinary “boundaries” within our degree majors, but it is also a way of harnessing the vital and energetic flexibility released in interdisciplinary spaces.

When the critic inhabits the body of the practitioner (and vice versa), the synergies or complexities of these roles become teachable moments. For students, this can be a confronting as well as rewarding pedagogical model. For example, for English majors, this may be the first time they have been required to assume the position of author in a creative context.⁴ Creative writing students may have already written autobiographically across different writing subjects, but in life writing classes, they are explicitly asked to do so. This context is further complicated by the nature of life writing itself as a disciplinary mode. When we ask university students to write about their own lives we often find ourselves (as teachers) on precarious ethical and moral ground. Even if students are able to negotiate the complex creative and intellectual challenges of crafting a narrative about their life, the personal and emotional challenges of writing a life story can prove very confronting.

The process of reading life narrative texts (the autobiographies and memoirs, for example, that we set for the subject) can also often be a new and complex task for students. Generally speaking, our students arrive in “Life Writing” as inexperienced readers of nonfiction who are more familiar with fiction. Life writing texts represent real people and lived events within a literary text, and in doing so construct a “truth pact” between author and reader.⁵ These texts commonly invite intimacies—closing the distance between reader and text. As Smith (2011) proposes, this intimacy naturally varies between readers: “a common factor is a positive, empathetic, or sympathetic response on the part of readers” (900). Life writing genres have the potential to deepen students’ understanding of narrative perspective and voice and to generate important discussions of memory, subjectivity, and identity. Reading life-writing texts requires students to consider the ways in which “the self” is performative and culturally constructed and to reflect upon the moral and ethical questions that stem from writing relational subjects.

Significantly, life-writing genres (particularly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and most notably in memoir) have been dominated by “difficult” subject matter: sexual abuse, grief, death, war/conflict, cultural displacement, social alienation, and drug and alcohol abuse. These “trauma texts” ask for careful and attentive reading practices and responses (Whitlock and Douglas, 2009). As Douglas and Barnett (2014) note, when students encounter trauma texts in the university classroom they come to witness and commonly to comprehend the deeper politics and potentials of literature. Non-fictional texts can perform different cultural work than fictional texts and non-fictions will impact differently upon our student readers (50–52).

This literary-cultural backdrop provides the context for our teaching. In our “Life Writing” subject, students read a diverse range of life writing texts and are asked to respond critically, creatively, and ethically: these are the three core reading and writing skills which we hope to engender. We argue that this commitment to ethical reading and ethical writing on the part of student and teacher is a significant factor in the success of hybrid literature/creative writing subjects and we will say more on this further in this article. In our subject, students engage in critical (short-answer and essay) writing and as part of their assessment, they write a life-writing piece. We believe that having students write in this way—practicing creative discourse and potentially assuming a less familiar role as a producer (rather than consumer) of literary product—is a vital part of their learning in the subject. Because life writing offers an important interdisciplinary space, forging links between literature and creative writing theories and methods, there are further benefits here. As Jensen and Jolly (2011) propose,

nowhere is [the] interchange between theory and practice more prevalent … than in the discipline of life writing, a field concerned with the forces at work on the borderland between the self and the subject and the performance of that self in a communicable form. (875)

In institutional and professional contexts, life writing practitioners and critics “often remain mutually suspicious and their relationship under theorised” (Jensen and Jolly, 2011: 875). But this is changing rapidly as the boundaries between theory and practice continue to intertwine and even blur. For example, postgraduate creative writing scholarship in Australia conventionally requires candidates to engage in creative work with an accompanying exegesis. Further, many postgraduates are engaging in projects where the creative and critical/exegetical are an integrated text. Generally, creative writers in the academy are required to write scholarly articles to maintain research benchmarks. At this same moment, Literature academics are increasingly engaging in scholarship in which the first-person voice plays a crucial role: “essays, confessions, meditations, memoirs” (Jolly, 2011: 878). Many life writing scholars (notably G. Thomas Couser, Richard Freadman, Nancy K. Miller, and Sidonie Smith) engage in “autocriticism”—academic essays, which depend less on objective address and include first-person accounts and interpretations via the personal (Smith and Watson, 2010: 229–231). And a “sizeable minority” of academics have written memoirs (Jolly, 2011: 878).

Life writing aims to make the productive relationship (and indeed tensions) between literature and creative writing more visible. Our observations suggest that conversations about the relationship between reading and writing and the role of ethics in these processes are happening readily (and robustly) between life writing practitioners and theoreticians and this is supported by the aforementioned scholarship of Jolly (2011) and others. Further, we have found that students are often very “switched on” to the methodologies of life writing when we initially meet them. We are living at a time when people are asked to define themselves and their identities on a daily basis—whether within administration or bureaucracy or in social media. Students are often more equipped than they think to articulate narratives of the self and this is a good basis for building creative writing skills.

So, we take up Jolly’s (2011) mandate to consider the ways that a grassroots, undergraduate life writing subject might rejuvenate “tired institutionally bruised English departments in a period of exceptional pressure on the humanities in Higher Education” (878). Of course, we do not see this as a literary studies-centered model or problem. This is not a simple question of what literary studies students can learn from “dabbling” in creative writing. Glover’s (2012) questioning of the interdisciplinary potential of creative writing and of creative writing’s focus on and consciousness of method and reflection is important here (295). This is evolving disciplinary knowledge that might be shared across reading and writing-rich disciplines. Glover (2012) notes:

There are methods aplenty to borrow and adapt from our companion disciplines—ways of reading texts, of constructing interactions between multiple agents, of representing the culture and practices of identifiable groups, and so on—but it is unclear yet how creative writing studies might take these up and to what effect. (299)

McCaw (2011) offers an aligned commentary in his discussion of how the traditional discipline of “close reading” common to literary and creative writing studies needs to be expanded to take students beyond the page: contextual or cultural analysis is just as vital to reading as textual analysis (25). Clode (2014) considers the value of creative writing students engaging with great writing and literary traditions that go beyond the traditional canon and consider different methods of reading (308). This is a view shared by Harper (2008, 2010) who sees creative writing as a “set of activities,” which may lead to a final product, but the process is also of vital importance (2010: 28). Just as writers may be largely writing unfinished or unstructured works they should also be drawing on “unstructured knowledge” to inform their work (2008: 25). Doloughan (2012) asks “how can Creative Writing curricula take account of different reading practices and/or differing human and epistemological dispositions while providing opportunities for enhanced (creative) practice?” (184). So, the arguments here are about an alignment of creative life writing methods with real-world contexts and issues and methods and alternative texts and methods of reading to those which dominate literary studies. Thinking pedagogically we want to consider how such approaches may present opportunities to expand students’ repertoire of skills and knowledge through exposing them to methods in life writing theory and practice. How can we forge mutually beneficial relationships between these discourses? And how can life writing offer an ethical (skills and knowledge) framework for reading and writing lives?

Life writing and the 21st-century classroom

Our subject “Life Writing” can be counted toward both an English (Literature) major and a creative writing major in the Bachelor of Arts degree. “Life Writing” is also a compulsory subject in our small, specialist creative writing degree: the Bachelor of Creative Arts. Perhaps the largest student cohort we teach, however, is the Education major. These students are training to be primary, middle, and high-school teachers and commonly take English and creative writing subjects as part of their BA program. “Life Writing” attracts around 150–180 students biannually (as it is offered), making it one of our most popular upper-level subjects.

Our understanding of these particular student populations—their knowledge, skills, and their education goals—provides us with some mandates for teaching. It is probably fair to say that only a small number of the students are what we might term serious, committed creative writers who want to pursue a career in writing. Such students are to some extent self-identified, often belonging to the Bachelor of Creative Arts and working in those classes dedicated to this cohort. Many are intrigued by the idea of creative writing and are keen to try a subject or two (as a support to their teaching degree). Others are compelled to enroll in creative or hybrid subjects because of limited offerings or their own timetabling requirements.

Many of the students who enroll in “Life Writing” do not necessarily expect that it will have a creative piece as part of its assessment.⁶ So, we do hear some rumblings when students (mostly from high-achieving literature students) realize they will have to write a creative writing piece. These students are resistant: their apprehension ranges from anxiety about creative writing (a fear they are not “creative enough”), concerns about personal exposure, and fear that a poor result in this assignment might adversely affect their overall grade in the subject. As Freiman (2001) suggests, “some students are nervous about … imaginative writing exercises … wondering whether writing generated in this way constitutes ‘real’ writing, especially in an English subject” (2001: n.pag.). These are all concerns that we must actively address with positivity and a clear sense of what we want students to learn and demonstrate when they undertake a creative life writing task.

And yet, why ask the students to write a creative piece? We could probably (more securely) sit back and teach life writing through an analysis of primary and secondary sources. Creative writing students would be unlikely to complain about such a model; they are used to taking literature-only subjects as part of their degree. Indeed, creative writing majors have the importance of twining reading and research emphasized throughout their degrees. Engaging with primary texts and theories has commonly been accepted as a way to equip students with skills as writers.⁷ However, as McCaw (2011), Glover (2012), and others have argued, this view is rapidly changing with the expansion of aforementioned interdisciplinary methods for informing creative practice.

Writers and critics have explored the general pay off for a “closer integration” of literature and creative writing teaching. For example, Woods (2002) argues that students exposed to a range of different reading and writing models and practice through an integrated teaching model are better equipped with a vital skills for a changing world (n.pag). Freiman (2001) also focuses on skill transfer in suggesting that “bringing creative writing into the classroom shifts the focus to literary praxis, so that the student becomes the writer” (n.pag.). Increasingly, there is also scholarship on the value of literature students engaging in creative practice—particularly now that the creative writing has come to mark its own territory.⁸ Various studies consider the ways that creative writing can be employed to open up discussion of otherwise difficult literary texts (see, for example, Bloom, 1998; Cummins, 2009; Everett, 2005; Greene, 1995; Kucan, 2007; Mills, 2008). But these studies are more focused on the benefits for improving literary analysis than the potential of a mutually beneficial relationship between creative reading and writing.

There are a variety of positive outcomes when literature majors engage in methods of life writing, perhaps the most obvious of which is that practice “flips” the reader to become the writer and in turn shifts their perspective and understanding of what it means to read and write in non-fictional forms. As Bloom (1998) writes, “To be a producer as well as a consumer of texts enables—no, obliges—the writer to understand works of literature from the inside out” (57). Life writing practice teaches a particular set of non-fictional writing skills which might be useful in a range of real-world settings such as creating profiles for employment or addressing selection criteria; being able to engage reflexively in a range of everyday writing contexts such as on-line communication forums and so forth. But more specifically—there are particular technical skill transfers in non-fiction writing: where students may be able to practice first-person narration, consider subjectivity and narrating the self, and also the ethics of writing relational subjects. An ethical writer should become a more attuned ethical reader (and of course, this should be a cyclical process, something we say more about later).

Ethical reading and ethical writing

In “Life Writing” students spend roughly the first half of the semester engaged in reading and learning about some of the subgenres of life writing. In choosing texts (which include Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus), we are conscious that we are introducing “difficult” material and there are ethics at stake here too. As Douglas and Barnett (2014) argued, “we teach traumatic literatures because we believe in the role that literature has played and can play in triggering debate and shaping social and political consciousness …” (66). However,

When we teach literatures of trauma we risk exploiting the subject—objectifying the suffering of others, packaging suffering for consumption, opening the subjects up to unethical or disrespectful treatment. We chance misunderstanding and appropriation. And we risk alienating, (re)traumatizing, and otherwise complicating the lives of often young students by assigning the material. To borrow [Leigh] Gilmore’s question, What are we asking of students and how do we prepare them for it? (Douglas and Barnett, 2014: 52)

One of the most important strategies we share with the students in these first few weeks is the issue of ethical reading. Much has been written in life writing scholarship about ethical writing: Couser’s (2004) excellent Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing focuses primarily on relational life writing and the need for ethical care when writing the lives of those close to us while Eakin’s (2004) edited collection The Ethics of Life Writing offers case studies of ethical issues arising from life writing practice. In relation to creative writing more generally, however, Cosgrove (2009) observes that students often fail to perceive an ethics of practice:

Medicine, journalism, law: these are courses that require students to take classes in ethics. They are compulsory subjects in areas where, upon graduation, students are trained to work with “real” human subjects. It may sound outlandish, but what about creative writing: should creative writers be expected to study the ethical implications of their craft? (134)⁹

Of course, some of the “real lives” at stake in life writing are not only those of the author and their subjects. As Smith and Watson (2010) argue, in life writing:

There is also an ethics of readership. As readers, we may feel uneasy about reading narratives of radical suffering difference, of self-disclosure. What is ethically involved for the reader in engaging, for example, a narrative of profound suffering? How is your own ethical sense differently addressed in such a life narrative from the way it would be in, say, a novel? What difference is there in the kind of story that is told? In your assessment of the narrator? (241)

There are a range of considerations here but perhaps the most pressing in our context is a duty of care to students. How can we support students to read life writing (some of which represents trauma—for instance, childhood trauma, social injustice, grief, mental health) without it impacting negatively upon them? How should we facilitate students’ ethical approach to the text (its author and subjects). On the first point, we are mindful of Leigh Gilmore’s work on teaching life writing, particularly that which represents difficult subject matter. Gilmore (2008) writes:

Are there unique risks in teaching materials that represent violence and suffering? … What are we asking of them [students] when they undertake this challenge, and how do we prepare them for it? … How can we make our vocabulary better able to describe a student’s entry into historical consciousness without making it indistinguishable from trauma?

… when trauma crosses the threshold of the classroom … other memories and experiences of trauma are already present among us … we should talk as if someone who has experienced trauma is in the room. (368–369)

So, we need to set the scene for this encounter: introducing our content and opening up the lines of communication as early as possible for students who might need further information or support before proceeding with the reading. Students should know something about what they will encounter when they read a life writing text that depicts trauma.

A lot has been written recently about so-called “trigger warnings,” particularly in the context of tertiary education. The “trigger warning” emerges from psychology, where it is linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, and the potential of phenomena or experiences to “trigger” a traumatic relapse in suffers. However, the term has also gained currency online, where it is used to signal that following content is recognized by its author as potentially “disturbing” or “traumatizing.” Indeed, initially targeted to survivors of rape and violence, and specific to feminist online communities and blogs, Cosslett (2013) argues the term has been diluted as its usage has broadened in social media. Cosslett notes it has become a kind of “shorthand for ‘anything you might not like’, and to many has taken on the unpleasant connotation of providing a means for the oversensitive internet language police to vet content.” Recent debates over the usage of “trigger warnings” have also focused on the emergence of the term into tertiary settings, where it has occasionally been incorporated into syllabus material as a way of indicating to students that confronting and potentially “triggering” material will be under discussion. While administrators argue that such moves are to protect students and to instate agency, a growing chorus of critics argue that the “trigger warning,” particularly in an educational setting, is an indication of extreme political correctness and akin in some cases to intellectual censorship or a threat to academic freedom (Jarvie, 2014; Smith, 2014). Given that life writing in particular is a field in which narratives of survival and the traumatic experiences that impel this are a staple (and particularly popular) genre, these debates are especially pertinent. Moreover, when we ask students to mine their own lives for material, we acknowledge that students might choose to respond to a cultural fixation with traumatic stories and feel impelled (if not compelled) to identify or release similar stories from their own lives. While such narration is ideally cathartic, it is also potentially fraught: the classroom is not a clinic.

Such difficult negotiations with personal life is something we are mindful of. We need to make sure that the classroom is a safe space. A student who expresses strong reluctance to read or respond to certain material, and who presents a valid case for not doing so, must have their position considered. Of course, authors of traumatic narrative deserve recognition and witnessing for their story. The ethical contract of the life narrative reader is a complex one. Should we read only those lives that please and reassure us? Can we only handle traumatic narration from subjects to whom we are sympathetic? In our experience, such exemptions from reading happen rarely, but we must be open to this possibility. However, we also want to encourage students to confront new ideas and to be challenged by what they read. This is a key part of the university experience—particularly in the Humanities. So, we have found that the best method for finding this balance is appropriately scaffolding the subject’s content: in e-mails to students prior to the commencement of class, in subject materials, and in introductory lectures and tutorials. It is important that students know something specific about the subject content, but it is also important that we communicate with students individually and directly. Appropriately structured material enables students to feel empowered in their encounters with unsettling and difficult material.

Gilmore (2008) notes that other settings have “rituals and procedures for listening and talking” about trauma and the same should happen in the classroom (369). So, we model and teach students to handle life writing texts with an ethics of care: always remembering that these texts stem from and connect back to lived experience. We spend time discussing and mapping what we think ethical reading and writing might involve in life writing theory and practice. We open this discussion with students prior to the commencement of teaching (in our on-line learning space), in our subject outlines, and during introductory lectures and tutorials. This is a conversation we develop and evolve over the semester; student engagement and input in these conversations is vital to the development of these ideas and our understanding of how this ethics plays out in practice. Some of the questions and considerations we raise are:

Ethical reading

A respectful consideration of the text. Always keep in mind you are working with someone’s life story.

A willingness to accept the narrator and narrative into your world.¹⁰ Going back to the earlier point about the ways in which life writing texts encourage intimacy between text and reader: as Smith (2011) suggests, this intimacy might involve an “emotional or intellectual closeness,” “acceptance of the protagonists’ outlook” (902).

Deployment of critical/interpretive skills to consider texts and their meanings broadly (textually, contextually, theoretically).

And of course the same issues are relevant to the students’ own life writing. We aim for a direct transfer of these reading skills to the writing task. So, we foreground a set of principles for ethical life writing (which are anchored in the readings the students complete in the earlier section of the subject) and we frame this within the exegetical paradigm of creative writing: the students’ life writing is a creative submission accompanied by a self-reflexive but well-researched critical analysis.

Ethical life writing

A consideration of the implications of bringing a life narrative to people’s attention.

Writing with sensitivity to your subjects.

Taking care with language (gender, class, race, etc).

Writing with an open acknowledgement of your method.

A commitment to completing appropriate background research.

Writing with consideration/respect for secondary critics (even if you disagree with them).

Acknowledgement (even implicitly) of any biases you might bring to your research/writing.

Consideration of the ways that your research might be interpreted (that you might not have intended).

Argue your case strongly, but be sensitive to alternative positions.

The creative life writing task is introduced to the students in the subject material and discussed in the introductory lectures and tutorials and throughout the semester. The parameters are broad:

Write a 1000 word creative piece in the style of one of the subgenres we have read during this semester (memoir, autobiography of childhood, biography, diary, or graphic memoir). The life writing piece must demonstrate an understanding of the subgenre within its form and subject. The creative piece should be accompanied by a 1000-word exegetical response which must engage directly with secondary material and reflect back on the creative piece.

A critical commentary is an important and now expected part of this type of exercise. As Jolly (2011) notes:

Students and assessors alike find this hybrid form difficult to grasp or measure. Yet in this odd form of technical self-criticism, we see a nascent example of “critical creative” life writing, which, when done well, demonstrates the student’s ability to intellectualise their art. (884)¹¹

There are other potential skill/knowledge transfers here too, perhaps the most notable of which is students’ ability to understand and locate their own reading and writing within the appropriate literary traditions and genres.

In scaffolding this assessment, we set aside time in tutorials during the early weeks of the semester for students to ask questions and to break into small groups to discuss their creative plan. Students can share their work in progress with their small-group members, but this is not a requirement of the task: this is not a creative writing “workshop.” Instead, we facilitate a free-form approach and discussion that is just as likely to be about process as it is about product. We remain conscious of the fact that many students are unfamiliar with producing work identified as life writing and that it is potentially confronting to disclose personal experience in the classroom. When framing small-group discussion, we remind students about the importance of responding ethically to what their peers have shared and we instate this in a practical sense by actively going back to the ethical frameworks discussed and developed with students earlier in the semester.

Even though students were given broad parameters for writing this piece, the subjects they wrote about were often similar. Their life writing was commonly about family: younger students wrote about their parents, siblings, or romantic relationships; mature-aged students most often wrote about relationships or children. In doing so, students reminded us of the socio-cultural field in which life writing exists: critics, scholars, and practitioners alike have frequently (and sometimes more or less pejoratively) remarked on the shape of contemporary life writing as defined and shaped by a confessional impulse and personal disclosure. Making the personal public is a defining mandate of life writing practice and an ethical kernel for its discussion and reception. However, despite our urging that life stories, while inevitably personal, do not necessarily have to be traumatic or confessional—students frequently wrote highly intimate narratives, indeed, often expressing their sense that this kind of disclosure was a generic expectation of the form.

In our responses to these creative assignments, it was therefore even more crucial to ensure the process was a safe and valuable learning experience for the students. Considering an initial reluctance of many students to engage in life writing practice, we needed to develop a response style that would enable us to comment on their skill development, knowledge of genre—all the while ensuring the students did not feel personally judged. We also needed to respond adequately to their concerns that they were being judged on their skill as creative writers. Jolly (2011) suggests “criticising a life story is as sensitive a job as writing one” (878) and in responding to the students’ creative submission, we needed to engage an ethics of care similar to which students had developed in regards to their own practice. She explains:

This is not because autobiographically inspired writing can’t theoretically be assessed in the same way as any other, but because in practice it can be difficult to respond to a student’s representation of painful experience with a third class mark because it was poorly written. (2011: 883)

In other words: we needed to respond (and assess) ethically. In a discussion about teaching creative writing, Freiman (2001) writes: “informal discussion with colleagues about the subject highlighted for me the perception that teaching creative writing was a somewhat risky business, because one would have to deal with students ‘dark side’ in their writing” (n.pag.). Students who produce fiction are no less invested in an assessment of their writing than students who produce non-fiction, and topics in either genre can range to the “dark” and confronting. However, a perception that it is the “life” and not the “representation” that is being judged in an autobiographical mode can hard to dismantle. Indeed, the complexity of responding to life writing simply aesthetically is part of what we discuss in our classes: when students inhabit the position of “author,” then, they experience not only the inherent difficulty in crafting an adequate representation of a lived experience but the ethical and personal dilemmas that attend this articulation for “publication.”

It is a common misconception that creativity is “unmeasurable and unquantifiable by academic assessment standards” (Freiman, 2001). Criterion-based assessment indicates standards to students and teachers and marking rubrics might also be useful benchmarks for feedback. In light of these issues, we developed a marking rubric for marking these creative life writing pieces (see Appendix 1). Our aim was to remove anxiety (on the part of teachers and students) about subjectivity in marking these pieces, and address any concerns that students might feel personally judged by the feedback and grade offered. The rubric criteria reflected a more objective, evidenced-based evaluation of the extent to which students had demonstrated the required skills and knowledge set for the task. The open-ended comment allowed for us to offer more individualized feedback in which we could comment on the more subjective, less easily quantified elements of the assignment (for instance, what talent-show judges might refer to as “the wow factor”). It also provided a space to acknowledge any particular challenges or difficulties the students may have encountered in their particular piece and to generally offer encouragement.

In our case study, students responded very positively to this approach. Having the rubric provided up front gave students something to work toward and allowed us to transparently communicate our aims for the assessment. We worked with the students closely on this assessment piece throughout the semester—aiming to show the students how all of the reading and (critical) writing they did prior had equipped them with the skills and knowledge that they needed to complete the creative piece. The students produced a very broad range of life writing pieces.

The creative assignments were generally of high quality; the average grade for this assignment was 75%. Over this short task, most students were able to see and articulate the relationship between the theory and their practice and it is our belief that this was a direct consequence of the strong relationship that we established between these elements from the start of the subject. For example, students demonstrated a deep ethical conscience: almost all students demonstrated an ethical approach and/or discussed ethics in their exegetical component. Secondary sources were central in the students’ reading of the early primary texts. But the pivotal learning moment was asking students to show their knowledge of these genres through practice; most students scored highly on the criterion: “demonstrates an understanding of appropriate conventions in chosen subgenre through creative practice.” And one of the most fascinating outcomes of this task was that the reluctant Literature students most often received grades for the creative task which were consistent with their other assignment grades for this subject.

Conclusion

Questions might remain regarding the usefulness of teaching literature and creative writing within the same subject. And however much we might advocate the usefulness of our methods, some colleagues will remain reluctant to engage in this sort of cross-disciplinary work. But as resources shrink and student numbers grow, this is an offering which might provide a practical solution.

Not all students (perhaps not even many students) who study life writing will ever become professional writers. But, ideally, all who do study it will develop practical and creative skills and knowledge as they do—and these skills and knowledge will closely align with the graduate outcomes of Creative Arts and Education degrees. When we teach life writing, we would like to see students develop and demonstrate particular methods for reading and writing life narratives. But this isn’t our only objective. The marriage of theory and practice gives students a foundation (reading primary and secondary sources) and an experiential context (through writing a creative piece the students learn what it is like to be read). We ask them to acknowledge and articulate what makes non-fiction genres different to fictional forms and to recognize the diversity within non-fiction forms. Life writing theory and practice has the capacity to reveal to students the wide interstices between truth and fiction and the interdependence of memory and imagination in the craft of nonfiction. Through these activities, we encourage students to build and show an ethical consciousness in which they respect the reading and writing processes. Ultimately, we hope that our reflections in this article might be deployed more widely within other hybrid literature/creative writing offerings and that we can encourage an embrace of the energetic possibility in interdisciplinary conjunctions of theory and praxis.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Kylie Cardell is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Flinders University. She is the author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary (2014) and, with Kate Douglas, editor of Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth (2015).

Kate Douglas is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Flinders University. She is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (Rutgers, 2010) and the co-author (with Anna Poletti) of the forthcoming Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (Palgrave 2016).

Appendix 1

References

Bloom

(1998) Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration, Logan: Utah State UP.

Clode

(2014) This essay mixes styles: Is person and scholarly. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 11(2): 307–316.

Cosgrove

(2009) WRIT101: Ethics of representation for creative writers. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 9(1): 134–141.

Cosslett RJ (2013) Why I don’t agree with trigger warnings. New Statesman, 29 January 2013. Available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2013/01/why-i-dont-agree-trigger-warnings (accessed 4 August 2013).

Couser

(2004) Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Cummins

(2009) Tell me a story: Effective use of creative writing assignments in college literature courses. Currents in Teaching and Learning 1(2): 42–49.

Dawson

(2005) Creative Writing and the New Humanities, London, New York: Routledge.

Doloughan

(2012) Transforming texts: Learning to become a (creative) writer through reading. New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 9(2): 182–203.

Douglas

Barnett

(2014) Teaching traumatic life narratives: Affect, witnessing and ethics. Antipodes 28(2): 51–68.

10.

Eakin PJ (ed) (2004) The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

11.

Everett

(2005) Creative writing and English. Cambridge Quarterly 34(3): 231–242.

12.

Freiman M (2001) Crossing the boundaries of the discipline: A post-colonial approach to teaching creative writing in the University. TEXT 5(2). Available at: http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct01/freiman.htm (accessed 19 August 2013).

13.

Gilmore

(2008) What do we teach when we teach trauma? In: Fuchs

Howes

(eds) Teaching Life Writing Texts, New York: MLA (Options for Teaching Series), pp. 367–375.

14.

Glover

(2012) Creative writing studies, authorship, and the ghosts of romanticism. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 9(3): 292–301.

15.

Greene

(1995) Reinventing the literary text: Student writers at work. In: Young

Fulwiler

(eds) When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading, Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, pp. 177–190.

16.

Harper G (2008) On critical responsive understanding. English Subject Centre Online Newsletter, Issue 15. Available at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newissue15 (accessed 10 June 2015).

17.

Harper

(2010) On Creative Writing, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

18.

Jarvie J (2014) Trigger Happy: The “trigger warning” has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped? New Republic 3 March. Available at: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116842/trigger-warnings-have-spread-blogs-college-classes-thats-bad (accessed 19 November 2014).

19.

Jensen

Jolly

(2011) Introduction: Life writing and critical practice. Literature Compass 8(12): 875–877.

20.

Jolly

(2011) Life writing as critical creative practice. Literature Compass 8(12): 878–889.

21.

Kucan

(2007) ‘I' poems: Invitations for students to deepen literary understanding. Reading Teacher 60(6): 518–525.

22.

McCaw

(2011) Close reading, writing and culture. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 8(1): 25–34.

23.

Mills

(2008) Mind the gap: Teaching Othello through creative responses. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 8(1): 154–159.

24.

Smith

Watson

(2010) Reading autobiography: a guide for interpreting life narratives, 2nd edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

25.

Smith M (2014) Should literature come with trigger warnings? The Conversation 22 May. Available at: http://theconversation.com/should-literature-come-with-trigger-warnings-27075 (accessed 19 November 2014).

26.

Smith

(2011) I love you but I’ve never met you: Autobiographical intimacy and voice. Literature Compass 8(12): 900–910.

27.

Whitlock

Douglas

(2009) Trauma Texts, London: Routledge.

28.

Woods C (2002) A program evolves: relocating writing, relocating literary studies. TEXT 6(2). Available at: http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct02/woods.htm (accessed 19 August 2013).