Stephanie Vanderslice, Teaching Creative Writing: The Essential Guide, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024 (paperback edition), 175 p.

Abstract

Since its inception in the early 20th century and until the 1990s Creative Writing was taught largely without much evidence of pedagogic investigation. This has changed in recent years, with the emergence of Creative Writing Studies, which seeks to scrutinize the practices passed down through what Kelly Ritter called the lore of Creative Writing. In her short book Teaching Creative Writing: The Essential Guide, Stephanie Vanderslice seeks to add to this emerging body of research by providing especially beginner teachers with a quick list of tips for thinking of how to approach the subject. The book is divided into thirteen short chapters that touch upon a wide array of topics relating to the field, as well as three appendixes and adopts a very relaxed tone, with the narrative voice often addressing the reader directly, as if a conversation were taking place. With respect to the target reader themselves, not only is the text very much aimed at young individuals who practice within the US education system, but Vanderslice clearly assumes that they are also writers first and teachers second. The advice provided also leans heavily on the author’s personal experience in the classroom rather than on research data (though this does exist in the text). Nevertheless, such data is scarce in the field as it is, and this book does contain a lot of interesting details and perspectives that would be very useful for anyone just starting out, even (or especially) in an educational system like the Romanian one, where there is no tradition of teaching creative writing and, therefore, no local lore to rely on.