Camping Out

derek beaulieu

I have been teaching creative writing as part of my pedagogical practice for about five years—in private high schools, public high schools, universities and, most recently, at a summer camp for high-school age teenagers interested in creative writing.

For the week of July 10–16, 2011 I am teaching “Thriving under Pressure” each morning to ten high-school age students for Wordsworth 2011 at Bragg Creek’s Kamp Kiwanis. It is from that summer camp that I write this entry, and from where I’ve most recently seen how ‘experimental’ practice can intersect with student-level expectations of how poetry and prose work. Click here to read more…

_____________________________

Curiosity and Community

by Betsy Warland

A confession: I rarely read blogs. In this respect, I’m atypically typical. Recently, I read a statistic that only a small fraction of all the millions of blogs are read with any consistency. So, why are you reading this post? Obligation? Information? Curiosity?

Why, in turn you might wonder, am I writing this post? Was I asked to write a post? Yes (and I consider it an honour). Was I tempted because it’s “a place” we’ve never had in which to air our ideas and observations? Yes. Am I curious to see what you are curious about? Yes.
READ MORE…
_____________________________

by Tom Wayman

In my talk welcoming delegates on the first night of the CCWWP founding convention at the University of Calgary last October, I touched on why over the years I have found multi-institutional organizations of post-secondary and community creative writing instructors extremely useful and inspiring for my own teaching and writing. Of course I mentioned the U.S.-based Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and how helpful I’ve found its conferences and publications since its founding in 1967. But I also mentioned how valuable the long-standing annual gathering of representatives of B.C. post-secondary writing programs has been for me: a gathering, I discovered at the CCWWP conference, that B.C. writing teachers were amazed to learn did not have an equivalent in other provinces, and of which non-B.C. writing teachers in many cases were unaware.
READ MORE…

_____________________________

Saloning In The Twenty-First Century

By Clem Martini

What kind of influence can a blog on the CCWWP website be expected to have on creative writing or how creative writing is taught in Canada? In my opinion, this blog and the conversations held here could make a world of difference. To host a ‘salon’ once meant to gather together some of the keener intellects of the time in one room to debate and discuss issues related to the arts, literature and politics. These gatherings ended up having a huge impact upon society at the time. There is a current stream of thought that sees these conversations held in the salons of France and Italy as generating and honing some of the most profound political, philosophical and literary ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I see this blog as an extension of that earlier impulse. This is not merely an electronic bulletin board on which electronic memos are tacked, but rather a forum in which views, opinions and options can be articulated, tested and promoted.

READ MORE…