CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley
Southern Illinois University Press, 310 pages

reviewed by Lynn Levin

We live in an era of border crossings. In marriage, family, race, gender, and geographical boundaries, our world is more than ever about blending, bridging, transforming, and migrating. Frontiers are shifting in literature, too: the move is on toward hybrid and blurred genres—prose poems, flash fiction, videos, and other experiments in expression. Into this climate of mixing and crossing, comes Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley (SIU Press, 2015). The book details the many ways in which creative writing instructors are crossing boundaries: for example, using compositional strategies in the creative writing classroom. The twelve essays in this book are rich in theory, research, practical ideas, and in-the-trenches know-how. The contributors are academics who are also poets and writers. They all specialize in teaching creative writing, composition, and/or literary studies. Many of the essays captivate with inspired ideas. A few, aiming for the scholarly, rely a little too much on academic jargon and buzzwords. All in all, I found a raft of useful crossover and new-generation ideas for teaching creative writing and, as a by-product, some new ideas for teaching composition as well.