CFP: Creative Writing in Crisis?

We’re excited to announce that the Call for Papers and Presentations for our fall conference is now live! Join us at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia to share your research and pedagogy. This year, we contemplate the question of Creative Writing in Crisis?

Proposals for papers and workshops will be accepted through August 25, 2024.

More details at the link below! Please share with colleagues, students, writers, poets, researchers, theorists, and thinkers. You will find the link to submit below, as well as a PDF flyer you can post at your institution to spread the word: CWSC 24 CFP Flyer.pdf

We hope to see you there,

Audrey T. Heffers, CWSO Chair

Viannah Duncan, CWSO Conference Chair

Alexa Garvoille, Communications

Evan Lavender-Smith, Conference Host

Creative Writing in Crisis?

Friday, November 15 – Sunday, November 17, 2024, Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia

The Endgame special issue of The Chronicle Review (2020) begins, “The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it.” As scholars, students, and practitioners of creative writing, who share offices, hallways, academic buildings, and teaching duties with our friends in literary studies, it is difficult to not feel “the collapse” coming for us, if not upon us, already. Add to the mix the closure of small, independent literary magazines, publishers, and distributors, the explosion of AI in the university and in creative professions, political unrest both on and off the college campus, and we might announce our own “Endgame” crisis.

What does it mean for a field of study to be in crisis? In many ways, creative writing as a discipline is currently in a state of crisis. Questions about the future of humanities, the allocation of funding, and even the advent of AI call into question the place of creative writing, as well as the arts more broadly, within the university. Outside of academia, large language models purport to write, human writers unions win over AI exploitation, and media coverage of genocide twists the language of empathy to turn victors into victims.

However, in other ways, the domain of creative writing is one from which we can respond to and even address crises that students, faculty, and the public face in this rocky political landscape. For instance, how can creative writing be a part of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives? How might the popularity of creative writing courses help English departments, and the humanities overall? How do interdisciplinary approaches help creative writing to thrive?

If creative writing is in crisis, perhaps we may point to why, and to how we can help keep the ship of the field and its art afloat. But if creative writing isn’t in crisis, why does this idea exist in the first place, and how might it be better contextualized in the larger landscape, both within and beyond academia? We seek papers that offer a wide spectrum of voices and perspectives on this theme.