TEXT reviews April 2017

Abstract

www.textjournal.com.au/april17/breen_rev.htm 3/3promise, the great attraction of a creative writing degree in the first place.Here's how to settle. Here's how to feel good about a career in advertising or writing copy in corporate America or churning out poetic vignettes about light fittings for a company who outfits nightclubs and casinos.Here's how to be an academic. Just because all of these pathways occur and that many of them have great rewards doesn't mean the notion of the 'Big W' writer should be distilled. Very few students come into creative writing wanting to be the lovely people who teach them or the modest, sensible people in the case studies provided. They want to be more, even if that ambition is risky, unlikely or even misguided. It is worth noting here that as far as can be gleaned from the biographies, none of the contributors has published a novel. Only one has released a full book of poems. Most have released more pedagogical books and papers than they have booklength creative work and this leaning probably accounts for and in some ways justifies the approach taken -creative writing operating at the edge of something else and not the centre.