Pedagogy in practice: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting

Jake Huntley, Steve Waters, Clare Hynes, Andrea Holland

Moderated by Yan Ge

Wednesday 25 November

2.30-5.45pm

Microsoft Teams

Lecturers from across UEA’s Creative Writing programme discuss their experience of course design, assessment and benchmarking. This is followed by walking through a series of teaching exercises for different areas of creative writing – from design to delivery and assessment/feedback.

Andrea Holland is a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing. Her collections include Borrowed (Smith/Doorstop) and Broadcasting (Gatehouse Press) which won the Norfolk Commission for Poetry in 2013. Andrea represents UEA at the European Association of Creative Writing Programs and sits on the Executive Board. She is a member of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) Higher Education Committee and contributed to the development of the QAA benchmark statement for creative writing in 2015.

Jake Huntley is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and received his PhD in 2007. He has written fiction for various magazines, journals and anthologies as well as Radio 4. His critical work principally explores non-mimetic or genre fiction from a Deleuzian perspective and he has also written on JG Ballard, William Hope Hodgson, John Wyndham and the Saw films. Jake teaches literature and creative writing on the undergraduate programme and is the current Convenor of the English Literature with Creative Writing BA.

Claire Hynes writes fiction, non-fiction, memoir and theatre monologues. Her writing has appeared in the Bath Short Story Award Anthology, Lighthouse literary journal, Tangled Roots anthology and Wasifiri journal of international contemporary writing. Her theatre monologues have been performed at the Contact Theatre in Manchester. Claire was a winner of the Commonword monologue writing competition in 2016, and she was listed for the Bath Short Story Award in 2014 and commended in the Words and Women ‘about’ monologue competition in 2016. Claire is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing programme at UEA and she was awarded a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from UEA in 2012. She is a lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing.

Steve Waters is a playwright who works for stage, radio and screen; he is also very involved in the new playwriting scene and has written about the pedagogy of playwriting, the nature of plays and been a participant in shaping arts policy in this area; he has been described as ‘one of the UK’s most accomplished political playwrights’. Steve teaches at undergraduate and post-graduate level, convenes the UEA MA in Creative Writing: Scriptwriting programme, and supervises four Creative/Critical PhDs.

Yan Ge is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English. She is the author of thirteen books in Chinese, including six novels. Yan started to write in English in 2016. Since then, her writing has been published in The New York Times, the TLS, Brick and elsewhere.

Teaching Creative Writing Series Overview

Creative writers teach in schools, universities and the community, on retreats, in theatres and in workshops. Teaching is often a key part of a writer’s career, and there are rich possibilities creative arts education across a huge range of contexts. But how do you teach creative writing? Can you? This series offers anyone considering teaching creative writing as part of their career development the opportunity to look in detail at the theory and practice of creative writing pedagogy in a variety of institutional and community settings.

The series will address the historical principles and contemporary critiques of creative writing pedagogy, and how these are responding to wider institutional and societal developments. It will consider in detail the theory and practice of employing these pedagogical skills both within and outside higher education. Attendees will be invited to reflect on future possibilities and challenges for the development of creative writing teaching, enabling a deeper awareness and knowledge of creative writing as a subject of study, a future career, and a creative practice.

Students are not expected to attend all the sessions, but the series has been designed to allow for an arc of learning from theoretical principles to practical engagement.

The sessions will take place online via Microsoft Teams, once a month for the 2020/21 academic year.

Registrations are closed

TCW | Pedagogy in practice: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting