Teaching Creative Writing in Asia

This book examines the dynamic landscape of creative educations in Asia, exploring the intersection of post-coloniality, translation, and creative educations in one of the world’s most relevant testing grounds for STEM versus STEAM educational debates. Several essays attend to one of today’s most pressing issues in Creative Writing education, and education generally: the convergence of the former educational revolution of Creative Writing in the anglophone world with a defining aspect of the 21st-century—the shift from monolingual to multilingual writers and learners. The essays look at examples from across Asia with specific experience from India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan. Each of the 14 writer-professor contributors has taught Creative Writing substantially in Asia, often creating and directing the first university Creative Writing programs there. This book will be of interest to anyone following global trends within creative writing and those with an interest in education and multilingualism in Asia.

Introduction: A Luxury Any Government Can Afford: English-Language Creative Writing Pedagogies in Twenty-First-Century Asia Darryl Whetter Part 1. The Language… "Speak Good Singlish": An Ang Moh Directs Singapore’s First Creative Writing Master’s Degree, not Quite in Singlish Darryl Whetter Compromised Tongues: That "Wrong" Language for the Creative Writing We Teach in Asia Xu Xi ??? Charisma versus Amnesia: The Rise of Creative Writing in English India Saikat Majumdar The New Creative Writing Classroom of India: The Client-Student, Structures of Privilege and the Spectre of Privatization Nandini Dhar Reframing the Field: Genre and the Rising Twenty-First-Century Multilingual Writer Page Richards Self-Translation from China: Aspects of Creative Writing in English as a Foreign Language Fan Dai and Ling Li Radical Translation: Teaching Poetry Writing in Hong Kong James Shea Part 2. …and the Landscape Another English: Filipinos Write Back Jose Dalisay Jr. The Problem of Memoir in the Philippines: A Possible Solution Robin Hemley Teaching Creative Writing in Taiwan: Or, Taking the Worry Out of the Word "Creative" Robert Anthony Siegel The Non-Fiction Selfie Barrie Sherwood Writing Dance: Mentoring the Voices of Dance Artists across the Asia-Pacific Stephanie Burridge Cosmopolitan Creative Writing Pedagogies: First-Person Plural and Writing/Teaching against Offence Sreedhevi Iyer

Darryl Whetter is the author of four books of fiction and two poetry collections, including the 2020 climate-crisis novel Our Sands. After working as a writing professor at various universities in his native Canada, he was the inaugural director of the first full Creative Writing master’s program in Singapore.