Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side - creative writing in universities

Creative writing is a popular and profitable academic discipline, but its place in the academy is contentious. Its evolution as a (generally unassessed and extra–curricular) part of English Studies and its current estrangement from critical thought in English Literature have resulted in a discipline culture that is ‘wild’ and ‘other’ and that sits uneasily in humanities. Creative writing has also inherited cultural expectations from community writing classes, which include notions of therapy, empowerment, personal development and vocational study. These expectations can cloud the intentions and outcomes of discipline engagement for faculty, students and the outside world. Using William Perry's stages of development and the UK National Association of Writers in Education benchmark statement, an excellent case can be made for how creative writing provides its students with ‘graduateness’. However, discipline reasoning methods, definitions of research and the deep embedding of creative writing faculty into the academy are on–going project.