A Bit About Me

Writing, reading and teaching have been a part of my life since I first composed in my father's leftover student blue books and spent summers entertaining myself across the hall while he taught summer school at Hudson Valley Community College.  My mother carried library cards at no less than five libraries in the Capital District (Albany and surrounding areas) where I grew up, and I often belonged to several summer reading clubs  at a time (more clubs, more prizes, right?).  I took my first creative writing courses at these libraries and at the local state university, continuing on when I got to Connecticut College, where I majored in developmental psych and minored in English.

I pursued an MFA in fiction writing from George Mason University in the early nineties, where I also discovered my passion for teaching college students and met my husband, writer John Vanderslice (not to be confused with the indie songster of the same name).  These discoveries led me to a Ph.D. with a creative dissertation at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where I began to examine the intersections between composition and creative writing pedagogy.  My first published article, written during this time, is a critique of the unqualified acceptance of John Gardner's The Art of Fiction in the creative writing canon.

After arriving in the newly-minted Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas, these interests were piqued and encouraged by my position in an independent writing program, and my experiences meeting Wendy Bishop, who proved an unforgettable mentor, Tracey Chevalier, who got me interested in creative writing pedagogy in the UK, and Kelly Ritter, whose influential work on teaching preparation in creative writing programs attracted my attention and led to a collaboration with an astute critic and kindred spirit.

In addition to Can It Really Be Taught: Resisting Lore in the Teaching of Creative Writing (Heinemann, Boynton-Cook), co-edited with Kelly Ritter, my essays on the teaching of creative writing have been included in books and journals such as New Writing: An International Journal of Creative Writing Theory and Practice(I'm also an associate editor, send me stuff!), Profession, Teaching Creative Writing (Continuum), Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project (Multilingual Matters) and The Creative Writing Handbook ( Edinburgh University Press) aa well as others in-press. My fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in Writing On-the-Edge, So-to-Speak, Other Mothering and many others.

Right now I'm working on a book on the teaching of creative writing in the UK (did a six week study tour in 2006 that included 8 universities), essays, always essays, and an historical novel.

  (The shawl I'm showing off here was knitted from Scottish wool by my good friend, writer and knitter Monda Fason.)