ed 366 967 aut7or title institution report no pub date note ... - ERIC

xxiiIntroductionand magazines, writers in women's shelters, the culture of rap and hiphop,electronic mail networks, the culture of writing contests: Rememberingsuch examples indicates just how much creative, linguistic, andsociopolitical energy exists off campus, far from the Registrar's Office,MLA, NCTE, AV?, and CCCC. Remembering may also prevent usfrom making our professional arguments too claustrophobic, too insularandfrom allowing an academic arrogance to overcome us.Moreover, as with boundaries of genre, we might also begin toquestion the boundaries between the Academy and The World OutThereas Richard Hugo did in his The Triggering Town, blowing upthe myth that the University was somehow not a real world. How cancollege teachers draw on the energy of writing and writers in thecommunity? What can college students learn not just from publishedwriters on reading tours but from ordinary working stiffs who alsowrite and publish? How can we use our classrooms to link communityand college?What will ethnographies of extra-academic writing groups add toour pedagogical and theoretical inquiries? What can we learn from the"rhetorics" of community writingbooks such as Kenneth Koch'sWishes. Lies, and Dreams and Rose, Where'd You Get That Red? orNatalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones?Particularly in the contextof Mike Rose's Lives On the Boundary to what degree are basic writingand creative writing important links between the street and the academy?What do we have to offer to these groups and they to us? Who amongus is already inviting rap. hip-hop, performance poetry and other socalledpopular sources of compositional improvisation into our workshop?How does this happen, and what is its effect?What the Thunder SaidInstinctively, teachers of creative writing know the radish they havepulled up is different from other radishes in English studies. But theyhave not always pointed the way with it, and they have even lessfrequently followed the way it points.The essays that follow suggest a uniform alternative "way" only inthe following implicit sense: With all that has taken place culturally,critically technologically, and socially in the late twentieth century wemust reexamine what takes place in creative-writing classrooms, whyit takes place, what exactly "creative writing classrooms" are, and soforth.After tacitly agreeing that fundamental reexamination is necessaryhowever. the essays proceed to collide, connect, overlap. rebound,