Writing Across Cultures’ papers & provocations available online

Sunday, May 08, 2011

Some of the papers, provocations and presentations delivered at the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership’s 2010 symposium ‘Writing Across Cultures’ are now available online in a special issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. (http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue10/content.htm)

        The Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership (aka ‘APWriters’) was formed with the support of the founding editor of TEXT, Nigel Krauth, who heads the Writing Program at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. We are grateful to Assoc Professor Krauth and TEXT’s Special Issues editor, Donna Lee Brien, for the opportunity to publish in this refereed electronic journal, an organ of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), known until recently as the Australian Association of Writing Programs. We are also thankful to Professor Brian Castro and Dr Dominique Wilson at the University of Adelaide who supported the compilation and editing of this Special Issue Number 10 ‘Creative Writing in the Asia-Pacific Region’.

        Participants from 19 countries took part in the ‘Writing Across Cultures’ symposium, hosted by the City University of Hong Kong.  Most who joined this event were from countries in Asia and the Pacific, including many Australians, but we also heard from speakers from senior writing programs in North America and the UK, including Robin Hemley of the Iowa Writing Program, and Andrew Cowan and Jon Cook from the Writing Program at the University of East Anglia.

        As we say in the introduction to this Special Issue, creative has a tenuous presence as a discipline in universities of most other countries outside Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Philippines and Hong Kong. If any reader of this issue knows of creative writing programs that should be listed on our website, please let me know. In some countries, including and especially India, Creative Writing is resisted, partly because it is perceived as another possible form of Western cultural imperialism. You can read more about this in the introduction to this issue of TEXT and go deeper into the matter in papers by Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Kim Cheng Boey and Brian Castro. Each of these writers teaching in universities around our region suggests new approaches to teaching Creative Writing in the Asia-Pacific.

        APWriters’ next event, in Perth this December is being held in conjunction with a symposium hosted by the Westerly Centre at the University of Western Australia. For more information, go to http://www.apwriters.com.

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