Marshall Moore Interview About His New Book The Place and the Writer by Klaudia Hanssen
Image found on Amazon via https://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-Writer-Research-Creative-Writing/dp/1350127159
Dr Marshall Moore is the course leader and senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Falmouth University. He has written several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (2018). Alongside Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong (2015).
In his new book that he published with Sam Meekings, they are challenging the general idea behind how creative writing is taught internationally, by focussing on how cultural beliefs and assumptions about writing affect the teaching process. I spoke to Marshall about organising and working with the authors in the book.
How did you get involved in being an editor for The Place and the Writer and what made you decide to work on this project?
MM: I met my co-editor Sam Meekings at the Great Writing Conference in London several years ago, and we both realized right away that we have similar backgrounds: novelists who went into academia and who also have had significant experience in the publishing industry. We tend to have similar views on things. The idea came up in conversation: I thought it would be interesting to do a book like this, to see how writing pedagogy works in other parts of the world and not just the US, UK, and Australia. He was into it. So were the editors at Bloomsbury.
How long was The Place and the Writer in the works? Were there any difficulties that were caused by the pandemic, or did everything more or less fall into its place naturally?
MM: I seem to remember dinosaurs walking by when we started talking about it. The Earth had just cooled. It’s taken a few years because projects like this often do when there are busy academics involved. The pandemic didn’t help matters, either: it knocked the publication date back by at least 6 months!
How did you come about approaching the authors attached to this project? And what did this process look like?
MM: Some of them we already knew, either personally or as researchers whose books we’d read. There were a lot of Google searches too, to find scholars in various countries. Lot of emails, some of which went unanswered. Fortunately, there was enough interest that we ended up with a really eclectic but informative book featuring voices that have generally been left out of this discussion.
What made you choose the authors that were featured The Place and the Writer? Why them and not someone else in their field or an author from a different country or region?
MM: It’s not a very large field in the first place, and it’s concentrated in the UK, the US, and Australia. Once you’re outside of those three countries, there are relatively few places where you can study creative writing as an academic subject. In many places, there are only one or two universities that even offer it at all, and there’s also the language issue. A secondary issue is that not everyone wants to do this kind of academic writing, which is what kept certain other countries off our list. And some people were just too busy. I don’t want to make it sound like we had to take who we could get. That’s just how a book like this comes together.
Was there a certain criterion that you had to go by when deciding who the right and most suitable authors for The Place and the Writer would be?
MM: They had to be teaching creative writing at a university, and they had to have an interest in the topic. And they had to reply to their email!
In The Place and the Writer the books still maintains a coherency even though each of the chapters was written by different authors. Were the authors given a guide on how they should write their piece(s) for the book or were they given more freedom in how they could approach writing?
MM: That’s interesting—I'm glad you noticed that. Actually, no, we didn’t give them a guide, apart from the standard style guide the publisher offered. But they knew what the topic was, and of course they are all very experienced academic writers and researchers. And we’re pretty good editors, if I do say so myself...
Do you feel like there will be a follow up to The Place and the Writer, about how creative writing is taught in countries that were not featured or talked about in this book?
MM: We’re hoping so. We’ve talked about doing a 10th-anniversary edition when the time comes in order to revisit the topic and to see how the situation has progressed. If we’re able to do that, we might want to add a couple of countries we weren’t able to include the first time. I’ve since discovered creative writing programs in Iran, Russia, and a few other interesting places, and I’d enjoy being able to make contact with those scholars.
You can order The Place and the Writer at Bloomsbury: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-place-and-the-writer-9781350127166/