Investigative Creative Writing - Teaching and Practice - Mark Spitzer

Investigative Creative Writing - Teaching and Practice - Mark Spitzer

8. How to Sell a Creative Writing Program Based on the Question "Why Study Creative Writing?"

Investigative Creative Writing - Teaching and Practice - Mark Spitzer

Mark Spitzer [+-]
University of Central Arkansas
Mark Spitzer is Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of 18 books, ranging from memoirs to novels to literary translations and collections of poetry. He is the editor of the award-winning Toad Suck Review (toadsuckreview.org), a professor of creative writing, an authority on the notorious gar fish (See River Monsters, alligator gar episode), and the world expert on the poetry of Jean Genet. Other recent titles include the poetry collection, Inflammatosis: Polemic Poetry, Incendiary Prose, and Other Extremes of Love and War (Six Gallery Press, 2018); the young adult and children’s literature title, The Crabby Old Gar (Subversive Muse Press, 2018); the novel, Viva Arletty! Our Lady of the Egrets (Six Gallery Press, 2017); the nonfiction work, Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2017); the literary translation The Genet Translations: Poetry and Posthumous Plays (Polemic Press, 2015), and the memoir, After the Octopus (Black Mountain Press, 2014).

Description

First published in the Australian anthology Writing for the Curious: Why Study Writing? (Kishor Vaidya, ed.), this chapter flashes back on how I marketed the idea of an MFA program in creative writing first to my college and finally to the state department of Higher Education. Arguments by pedagogy specialist Stephen Healey, first published in The Writer’s Chronicle, are employed, and the importance of predicting job opportunities via the collection of data is stressed. Excerpts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Institute of Education Sciences, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the MFA proposal I authored are offered as effective examples of how to package talking points in order to transform programmatic visions into tangible realities.

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Citation

Spitzer, Mark. 8. How to Sell a Creative Writing Program Based on the Question "Why Study Creative Writing?". Investigative Creative Writing - Teaching and Practice. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 89-100 Jan 2020. ISBN 9781781797181. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=34897. Date accessed: 16 Jul 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.34897. Jan 2020

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