Haake, Katharine. "Teaching Creative Writing if the Shoe Fits." Colors of a Different Horse.

First I want to record some terms that Haake says she familiarizes her own students with. Some of these terms I've heard of, some I haven't, but I imagine I'll be looking them all up before the dissertation work is done: "I introduced concepts of story and discourse, sequential ordering, temporality, focalization, structure itself. I talked about the narratee, narrative strategy, narrative stance. I taught that writing proceeds from language, which is itself a system of signs, governed by rules and conventions, and not a transparent medium through which we reflect on the world ... What I wanted was that my students would somehow come to view their texts as autonomous literary artifacts, separate from their real selves and subject to analysis" (77-78).

Besides the terms used here, I wanted to point out that Haake feels compelled to have her students separate themselves from their work, which seems to go back to creative writing seeming to stem from the self, rather than an academic work, which can stem from an idea or hypothesis but can be heavily research-laden, or based on previous beliefs (not necessarily those of the author, although (s)he can agree with the research).

Haake said the workshopping method didn't always work in her classes, "and the vast majority was clearly disinterested in teh critical framework I'd provided. Half were in the class because they wanted to 'express themselves'; another half were there for easy credit. At first I just tried to ignore them, convinced that since I was the teacher my own goals and objectives for the course were to be preferred to theirs. But after a few years of that, I started thinking about all the college credit that was being awarded -- for what?" (78-79). This affirms not just a teacher's potential for dismissing theory and criticism as part of creative writing, but also students; it also goes back to teachers perhaps being uncomfortable with this after realizing that the class should have an academic nature, as it is "graded."

"Theory helps us recognize the puppet strings. It helps us analyze not what texts mean, but how they mean, not who we are, but how we are what we believe we are at any given moment, and how, as well, that changes, as it does. This is useful knowledge for writers who, while tehy're occupied with their analysis, might want to clip a string or two, for play or emphasis, or out of curiosity or the tradition of rebellion ...

"You could call theory jargon-laden, or you could call it plain bad writing (which is what people often do when they're plain fed up), but I think the functional principle that sustains the stylistic eccentricities of theory is, again, one of power" (86).

I think my own battles with theory is that the writing is often far too convoluted and jargon-laden, and I work hard to make my writing accessible (probably due to my journalism training), so it's difficult for me to see why "heavy" theory can be associated with empathetic, sometimes even entertaining creative writing.

Finally, some theorists that Laake likes to offer her students. I am familiar with some, and will probably look at them more closely as I do my dissertation work to see why she finds them related to creative writing: "Out of the great mass of theory, I routinely introduce Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, some feminist theory, and a good bit of structuralism" (90).