Translingual Creative Writing: A Non-Anglophone Way for Creative Writing Education
Creators: Quist, Jennifer Lynn
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2023

<p>It is now acknowledged in Creative Writing research that the traditional writing <br>
workshop as developed in United States universities during the 20th century was initially <br>
propagated across the globe as part of a project to secure American soft power, and it remains<br>
ideologically slanted toward Euro-American interests and perspectives. In the twenty-first <br>
century, calls to rework the structures, methods, and metaphors of the workshop have argued for <br>
more collaborative, collective, equitable, diverse, and inclusive programs. Student needs are <br>
complex and intersectional, and to advance reform within the writing workshop monolingual <br>
English must be addressed as an aspect of the cultural hegemony which tends to accompany <br>
what Asao B. Inoue has called the “white racial habitus” of the writing classroom.<br>
Creative Writing that is translingual rather than monolingual is defined broadly as<br>
unfolding where translation and writing become enmeshed, highlighting the inscription of one <br>
language upon another within single texts. It is visible in recent creative turns in Translation <br>
Studies, and in translational turns in Creative Writing. Through translingual Creative Writing, <br>
multilingualism is cultivated as an asset rather than an impediment to expression and creativity. <br>
To this effect, in this study translingual Creative Writing strategies are 1) theorized 2) identified <br>
from existing research and from published fiction and poetry by multilingual writers Xiaolu Guo, <br>
Ha Jin, Stan Lai, and Yoko Tawada, among others, and 3) adapted for classroom use. This is <br>
undertaken in response to Xu Xi’s call for writing workshops to foster excellence and<br>
authenticity in non-Anglophone students’ writing, disrupting rather than equivocating Englishlanguage hegemony.<br>
Following the origins of exemplary translingual writers, the unfolding history of <br>
postsecondary Creative Writing education in China is derived from research and texts not <br>
currently available in English. Rather than uncritically accepting the traditions and ideologies of <br>
iii<br>
US Creative Writing, Chinese scholars received them as an opportunity for cross-cultural <br>
knowledge production. In the same spirit, this study experiments with tempering traditional <br>
workshop metaphors with those of discursive Daoism, suggesting theory and practices to<br>
challenge the Anglocentrism of Creative Writing pedagogies. Not a religion or strictly a classical <br>
philosophical system, discursive Daoism is an analytical framework used with an awareness of <br>
its oversimplification and decontextualization and by which Daoism’s concepts, canon, and <br>
vocabulary may be applied outside its traditional purviews, just as Euro-American philosophies <br>
are routinely extended beyond their original contexts. As drawn primarily from the Zhuangzi, a <br>
discursive Daoism is applied here to exemplary translingual texts and to the writing workshop, <br>
connecting Daoism’s metalanguage for ephemeral concepts such as inspiration, uncertainty, nonknowing, spontaneity, unity, forgetting the self, and the imperfection of language to translingual <br>
Creative Writing.<br>
This analysis yields writing strategies based in collaboration, receptive to technologies of <br>
composition and transcription, and facilitated by instructors who are guides rather than<br>
“masters.” Writing strategies include the superimposition of interlingual metaphors, practices of <br>
what Chantal Wright has called “fictitious ethnography,” homophonic surface translations, <br>
“microscopic” reading of scripts, and question-to-question composition games. What these <br>
strategies share is a defamiliarizing of language followed by its refamiliarization. Through these<br>
processes, the fluidity of language established in Daoism comes to the fore, disclosing to student <br>
writers the possibilities of linguistic transcendence as practiced by exemplary professional <br>
translingual writers.</p>