creativity goes crunch

In the fall I'm teaching a new course in our curriculum, PWR 412: Advanced Creative Writing Workshop. I've taught various creative writing courses at least a half-dozen times before and taken many more as a student. As such, I know the workshop drill as well as anyone. Show up. Share your work. Talk about it. Talk about other peoples' work. Revise your writing. Rinse and repeat.

It's a tried and true method, and what makes it good or bad is the quality of the professor, the commitment of the students, and the general vibe of the course. In my experience, some are just plain nasty--the classic long knives of grad school. Others are tepid or sugary in their praise.

Somehow though, this time around I'm just not feeling it. Maybe it's b/c that model supposes some things about writing and creativity that don't work for me anymore. I also feel though that my students need more direction than that, more direction than write stories and poems then get feedback. So this has me thinking about media mashups and writing machines. Of course it is always the problem of what is interesting to me rather than what is interesting to students. To be honest though, I've never had much luck with the latter inasmuch as students rarely have common applicable interests.  The trick is always to find balance, the middle path.

The result is that I will have students considering the intersection of media and the role of machines in composition. Both of these have obvious historical dimensions, though a workshop is not a place for deep investigation of these histories. Instead, we are looking at how "creativity" moves beyond the conventional genres.

I think there's something telling that the two most common creative writing genres, the short story and the poem, are probably the two least viable genres in terms of the broader culture, and certainly in terms of the marketplace. These genres are common to the classroom b/c they are doable. You can write two or three stories or a dozen poems in a semester. It's the same logic that makes these genres common in intro to lit courses.

So when I say I am interested in how creativity as an activity spins itself out into other modes of communication, some might say I am "tainting" the class with marketplace interests, but i don't think those interests are any less noble than ones that pick genres b/c they are short. And while there is more to the selection of writing poetry than length, there is also more to my interests than trying to link my students' writing interests with some professional future.

Anyway, I guess I'll see what comes of it, as it goes together. Suggestions welcome. BTW, I'm using this Blog It application in Facebook, so I'm curious to see how it turns out.