Thinking Systematically About What We Do

Abstract

Thirty years have passed since I entered my master‘s program in Creative Writing mindful of my father‘s observation that perhaps we were training a few too many writers in this country. By the time I matriculated in my doctoral program five years later, I had mastered what I had learned as an MA student but had yet to understand how poorly who I was as a writer – and writing itself – was served by how I had been trained. Although writing was my life and had been so for half a decade, it still made me feel a bit like a child performing for the friends of her parents. As a doctoral, I discovered theory, especially feminist theory, and though I found it difficult and strange, it gave me a way of understanding how thoroughly I had given my writing over to an inchoate idea of what I thought it was supposed to be. Theory did two things for me that it can still do for our students: