Teaching "Writing Fiction"

First off, I should say that I came into graduate school as a "creative writer," writing poetry. And I've written poetry and fiction, and I still have some notion of doing so seriously...maybe, but my attention for the last decade has been in rhetoric and theory. During that time, I've taught creative writing probably five or six times, though not in a few years. Reading over the texts I might use, I am reminded again of the general antipathy writers seem to feel toward theory. Now I've met many writers who don't feel this way, but this general sense does seem to come out in texts (e.g. Gardner's Art of Fiction).

Despite coming into the field through creative writing, I never had this reaction to theory. I suppose b/c my intertest in poetics was in how language functioned--

• as a cultural, historical, and technological mechanism imbued with ideological power


• as a rhetorico-aesthetic practice that is beautiful, persuasive, instructive, etc.


• as an embodied-material, evolutionary, non-"human"/unconscious adaptation, a human quality akin to beaver dams, spider webs, beehives, anthills, etc.

It is this last that continues to interest me the most as unexplored territory. The danger is to "naturalize" language in some form of naive realism (again this is what Massumi discusses). However, beyond that is the investigation of language/writing as materiality constituitive of thought/consciousness, rather than ancillary to it.

In my opinion, the best writers--philosophers, poets, novelists--of the last century have recognized and explored this issue through stream of conscious, surrealism, drug-use, experimental and aleatory methods, meditation, and other means. I suppose if there is a thread running through my work of the last dozen years or so, it is thinking about how these explorations impact teaching writing, particularly in the context of new media.

Anyway, I'm going to have to figure out a way to present this all to students.