home : USU press : books

Keywords in Creative Writing
Bishop and Starkey
236 pages

Published: 2006

ISBN 978-0-87421-629-5
paper $22.95

ISBN 978-0-87421-533-5
e-Book $16.00

The late Wendy Bishop was an internationally recognized figure in the fields of creative writing instruction, rhetoric and composition, as well as a widely published poet and literary author. She passed away in late 2003, before finishing work on Keywords in Creative Writing.

David Starkey is the author of Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations and several collections of poems, most recently David Starkey's Greatest Hits, and coeditor with Wendy Bishop, of In Praise of Pedagogy, and of other collections. He teaches at Santa Barbara City College and in the MFA program at Antioch University-Los Angeles. He is also a playwright whose work has been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

Keywords in Creative Writing

An Insider's Guide for New Composition Teachers

Wendy Bishop and David Starkey

Wendy Bishop and David Starkey have created a remarkable resource volume for creative writing students and other writers just getting started. In two- to ten-page discussions, these authors introduce forty-one central concepts in the fields of creative writing and writing instruction, with discussions that are accessible yet grounded in scholarship and years of experience.

Keywords in Creative Writing provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties. This approach makes the book ideal for the college classroom, and unique in the field, combining the pragmatic accessibility of popular writer's handbooks, with a wider, more scholarly vision of theory and research.

Also by Wendy Bishop - Teaching Lives

What Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary for Culture and Society did for cultural studies and M.H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms did for literary criticism, Keywords in Creative Writing will do for its field. David Starkey and the late Wendy Bishop have created a portable classic. Keywords in Creative Writing concisely explains crucial terms and concepts related to the writing process, types of writing, theory, teaching, creative writing as an academic subject, and the business of publishing. The book is both practical and inspired.

—Hans Ostrom, Professor of English, University of Puget Sound

Wendy Bishop once said that books about writing should be fun to read, and this, David's Starkey's heroic effort to see their collaborative Keywords in Creative Writing through to its posthumous conclusion, is that—and much, much more.

Creative writers may not have known how much they've needed this book, but now that it's available, they'll find themselves wondering how they lived without it. Packed full of information, the book collects a wide range of brief, accessible, and timely definition essays on such disparate and essential topics as creativity, genre, and shmoozing. Taken together, these essays constitute a useful introduction and practical guide to what writers need to know, not just in the university and its creative writing programs, but also in the larger world of publishing and writing.

Anyone who has ever thought about creative writing—from novice first time writers to seasoned professionals—will find this book an invaluable resource. Use it in your writing group, your classroom, your study. Everything you need to know is in it—and it's fun to read, to boot.

—Katherine Haake, author of What Our Speech Disrupts and other works