Histories and Historiography in Creative Writing Studies

Alexandria Peary

Mildewed, crumpled, rusty, disintegrated, illegible, stained, fading, land-filled, incinerated, erased, deleted, in a forgotten box, on a dusty shelf, in a filing cabinet, in a basement/attic/rented storage facility, on rapidly obsolete technology. If we imagine what is lost without historical studies of creative writing in the United States, we gain a sense of what could be recovered if historical evidence were not treated as ephemeral. What might be recovered includes countless invention, revision, feedback and publication practices developed by generations of writing teachers and mentors, pieces written by decades of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as techniques used by the self-taught. What might be restored includes information about a plethora of local and national institutions of creative writing, those formal and informal sponsors of imaginative work – the journals, book shops, community writing programs, university writing programs, reading series, conferences, retreats, publishing houses, textbooks, manuals, blogs, trade articles, correspondence, marginalia – and their accounts of start-up, challenges faced, successes and evolution, and perhaps of closing doors. Certainly, what is lost are the teaching practices and craft knowledge of those writers and scholars who came before us and who were similarly committed to creative writing. Members of other academic fields, most notably Composition Studies, share an increasingly well researched history, but practitioners in Creative Writing Studies encounter a past that is largely blank. This void indicates that we continue to operate more from a creative writing position – defined by scholars such as Dianne Donnelly, Katharine Haake and Tim Mayers as disinclined toward theory or scholarship and preferring to focus on the training of individual writers – than a Creative Writing Studies position – 'an emerging field of scholarly inquiry and research' (Donnelly, 2012: 1; Haake, 2006: 188; Mayers, 2009: 217–219). As a scholarly enterprise, Donnelly adds (2012: 6), Creative Writing Studies values 'collecting, compiling and presenting data' – and surely historical research constitutes one form of this information.

In this chapter, I argue for increased historical and historiographical work in creative writing in the United States. The historical research that has an important role in the pedagogy and theory of the present and future of the field calls for studies of individual teachers and scholars, groups, communities, institutions (broadly defined) and texts related to creative writing. Critically, this historical work means expanding beyond the familiar US stories of origin (i.e. the Iowa Writers' Workshop) and examining creative writing both inside and outside of formal school settings. The research advocated for in this chapter is not disciplinary history per se (that is, it is not about the contested territory inside English departments) but rather the second strand of historical research Tim Mayers identified in 'One simple word: From creative writing to creative writing studies' (2009: 222) – that of theoretical historical research which seeks 'to place the past in a different light' in ways distinct from the hermeneutics of literary studies. Historiography – or the study of historical method that involves critical perspectives on how histories are framed, researched, narrated and distributed – has an important role in the epistemology of our field and the establishment of terministic screens that suit creative writing. Essentially, historiography addresses questions of how to write history by investigating scope, definition, the construction of categories, methods, stance, ethics, subjectivity, reflexivity and the constructed nature of discourse (including the discourse of history).

History increases disciplinary knowledge whereas historiography deepens knowledge practices while also monitoring and safeguarding those practices. Scholars of historiography have long been interested in fact and methodology, tracking how shifts between humanism, positivism, relativism, presentism and objectivism across Western thought influenced historical accounts (Clark, 2004: 17–25; Collingwood, 1946; Higham, 1965). As Elizabeth Clark says (2004: 19) in discussing historian Michael Oakeshott's contention that the past can never be fully reclaimed but only inferred, 'history is not "out there," but is something that historians create'. While a historical study might examine 20th-century correspondence courses in creative writing, veteran participation at the literary journal 0-Dark-Thirty or community creative writing groups for transgender youth, a historiographical work would explore the ways in which archival research can be conducted on university creative writing programs or examine the discourse used in historical accounts of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Historiography can serve as the subject of a publication (examining a research practice) or be used as a research method during the writing process (the scholar looking into creative writing correspondence courses would apply a historiographical awareness to her work). It's fairly commonplace for an academic discipline to practice both history and historiographic research, as evinced in publications such as the Journal of the History of Biology and Journal of the History of Dentistry, along with the Journal of Art Historiography, Historiography in Mass Communication and the Journal of Modern Art History and Historiography.

Historiography, as an epistemological and critical apparatus, is an opportunity to think carefully and collectively on how creative writers want to approach scholarly activity. Rather than a matter of placing the cart before the horse, starting conversations about historiography now in the nascent field of Creative Writing Studies makes a good deal of sense. Indeed, there are real advantages to establishing historiography during disciplinary groundbreaking moments. Chiefly, historiography entails conversations about epistemology that can be deeply impactful in the growth of a field of study, since the methods by which a field conducts its research (historical or...