Taken As Read?: Creative Writers and the Trouble with Reading

This is a practice-based discussion paper aiming to initiate a discussion among creative writing teachers, especially teachers who are practising writers themselves, on the complexities of reading as a tool of our discipline. It argues that the writing workshop group is the heart of the teaching of creative writing, and calls for careful observation of communication within workshop groups – between student and student, and between student and group leader. It encourages close self-observation of the act of reading and the ways in which it is articulated, urging teachers to open this discussion, with the aim of emboldening students, from their own experience. The analysis of reading practice into strategies and agendas is offered as a demonstration of the subtleties involved, and as a stimulus, maybe a provocation, for creative writing educators to investigate this central issue, self-reflectively, and as part of the ongoing conversation of their workshop groups.