An Opportunity to Teach

This Fall I’ll be teaching creative writing at Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana. I’ll be teaching one course’ENG 3232 Intermediate Fiction’each Wednesday and Friday afternoon for eight weeks. In this course I’ll have seven or eight students who’ve completed Introduction to Creative Writing and are either Creative Writing minors (Grace currently does not offer a Creative Writing major) or students highly motivated to write fiction.

My goal with this class is for me and my students to walk away more skilled in our craft. This will happen through their writing, and through our conversations about their writing. Beyond this, what do I want these students to know when they leave this class? Are there “guiding principles” I want them to remember? Are there ways I want them to think about Creative Writing?

Yes. Here are a few:

• Why humans are creative.
• The criticality of being a reading writer.
• The craft of writing fiction as a skill.
• The establishment of a writing practice.
• The value of metawriting.
• The contract your work creates with the reader.

I look forward to establishing a community of writers with these students over these upcoming eight weeks. And I know that while I may fixate on what I’m offering them, what I’ll remember after the class ends is what they offered me.