Review of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing

The core message of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing is that teachers and students need to maintain communication in order for the teaching to be most effective, and the author gives numerous examples of how to do this throughout. The personal components of the teacher-student relationship cannot be neglected if students are to develop fully as writers.

Carl Vandermeulen is based at the University of Wisconsin and has taught writing, photography, and teacher education. His book is another in the series New Writing Viewpoints, edited by Graeme Harper, and aimed at teachers and researchers.

In the introduction Vandermeulen explains why he wrote Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing. He taught a poetry class that he thought would be successful, but failed miserably because there was a mismatch between his role as teacher and evaluator in that particular class, and his previous role as something quite different, an advisor and advocate. The clash of the personal with the impersonal produced a situation where not only the writing work suffered, but the relationships were strained. Vandermeulen advocates the advice of Tom C Hunley who teaches creative writing at Western Kentucky University, and whom he cites: that ‘introductory courses need to focus on fundamental – and personal – kinds of growth that enable the process of writing and of becoming a writer’ (x, which cites Hunley 2007).

 

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