Direction for Teachers of Creative Writing

by Dan Lukiv

Abstract

In the hermeneutic phenomenological tradition, I explored through interviews this research question: What, if any, experiences in school encouraged one person to become an adult creative writer? The literature and curriculum guides for language arts address how to teach poetry and fiction writing, providing direction for students and teachers. But do creative writing activities in school stand as examples of lived school experiences that encouraged the participant? As a poet, novelist, and short story writer, I naturally have thoughts and beliefs about what activities or events in school encouraged me to become a creative writer; therefore, I attempted prior to the interviews to bracket out my biases related to those thoughts and beliefs. I worked closely with the participant and my Supervisory Committee members to analyse emerging themes and to reduce researcher bias. Eight themes emerged from the data about what lived school experiences encouraged the participant. Recommendations based on those themes provide direction for educators. This study could serve as a prototype for further research that explores what, if any, school experiences have encouraged other people to become creative writers.

Introduction

I conducted conversational interviews with a successful Canadian poet, whose poetry has appeared in many of Canada's elite literary journals. I call him Arthur to protect his anonymity, and I interviewed him about what, if any, lived school experiences had encouraged him to become a creative writer. I speak of school experiences in terms of elementary and high school as opposed to college and university, and I speak of the creative writer as one who engages in writing poetry, fiction or drama. Indeed, the research produced noteworthy data: School experiences had existed that had encouraged the participant to become a creative writer; therefore, the exploratory nature of this study (McMillan & Schumacher, 1997; Patton, 1987; van Manen, 1990) sought to describe, in the hermeneutic phenomenological sense, themes that emerged from those experiences.

Rather than choosing "from a range of traditional options--surveys, experiments, and the like" (Cohen & Manion, 1994, p. 7), I chose, for this study, "from a comparable range of recent and emerging techniques--accounts, participant observation and personal constructs, for example" (p. 7). I looked at "personal constructs" in terms of phenomenology, in particular, in terms of "the phenomena of experience rather than by external, objective and physically described reality" (p. 20) as found in traditional, quantitative research. My choices stood logically affixed to the phenomenological nature of my research question.

I planned not to conduct a comprehensive literature review of sources that describe first hand school experiences that had encouraged people to become creative writers until I had completed an analysis and interpretation of the data. In my proposal, I referred to this review as a suspended literature review. I did not want to inadvertently bias myself. In view of the hermeneutic phenomenological nature of this study, I was following van Manen's (1990) advice: "If one examines existing human science texts at the very outset then it may be more difficult to suspend one's interpretive understanding of the phenomenon. It is sound practice to attempt to address the phenomenological meaning of a phenomenon on one's own first" (p. 76).

Suspended literature review texts that would support or contradict relevant themes in the lived experience of the participant, I decided, would appear throughout the completed study's conclusions and recommendations sections. This is common qualitative practise. Often, qualitative researchers "present literature discussions and integrate criticism of the literature into the text of a study" (McMillan & Schumacher, 1997, p. 119) rather than present a literature-review-only section "because the traditional format of qualitative research is that of a narrative" (p. 147); however, my suspended literature review revealed no hermeneutic phenomenological studies that relate to my research question.

The exploratory nature (McMillan & Schumacher, 1997) of this qualitative study did not require the existence of a problem. In terms of hermeneutic phenomenology, the study explored and interpreted "how things appear[ed]" (van Manen, 1990, p. 180). The very nature of this kind of study created suspense, or wonder, for me. I hope it creates the same for the reader:

In view of a review of the literature on hermeneutic phenomenology that turned up nothing about creative writing, I believe that my interviewing a participant has enabled me to establish a body of useful direction for teachers. That direction relates to activities in school that may encourage some students to become poets, fiction writers, or dramatists. I discuss that direction and pedagogical implications in my recommendations, but first it is necessary to conduct a review of literature that establishes traditional direction for students and teachers of creative writing.

Click for next page of this article