Words like “craft” and “style” have long been absent from composition classrooms and scholarship. As a result, freshmen writers have been led to produce texts that lack authorial presence (see Gordon Harvey’s “Presence in the Essay”). To remedy this lack of soul in student writing, Wendy Bishop aims to claim creative nonfiction as a primary mode of reflection, speculation, and exploration in first-year writing pedagogy. In mingling reflective writing with descriptive writing, we invite our students to essay their own lives. “In doing so,” writes Bishop, “we never arrive at the end of things but agree to linger thoughtfully, painfully, ecstatically, along the way, in the company of others, in the agency of our words” (267).

Points of Fascination

“Containment and teachability resulted in an eviscerated type of essay, not personal writing (too easy, too dangerous), not professional writing (too challenging), but school writing and research papers” (266).

“I argue that we all need to essay our lives. In doing so, we never arrive at the end of things but agree to linger thoughtfully, painfully, ecstatically, along the way, in the company of others, in the agency of our words” (267).

 “How do we teach the pleasures of essay writing and the civic possibilities of prose literatures? how do we create courses that allow writers to define interesting topics of reflection, and how do we create classroom cultures within which the essay needs to be written? We treat the student essayists as we treat ourselves, as essayists and authors of creative nonfiction” (271).

“We need to get serious about creating new, fused pedagogies, ones that include rhetoric, composition, creative writing, and literature as partners in instruction. We particularly need these for undergraduate essayists. We must understand that ‘creative’ is already in the composition classroom. And finally, in order to write well, for us and with us, students have to believe that we believe they can succeed” (273).