Explorations in Creative Writing

Kevin Brophy

This is a book for anyone who has ever tried to write a poem, a story, or an account of their life (nearly everyone?).

Opinion

'Should appeal to lovers of reading and writing alike.' (Readings Books & Music Monthly, Sept 2003)

‘Kevin Brophy’s, Explorations in Creative Writing, is not a writing guide or how-to book for aspiring authors, rather it’s a reflection of the writing process itself.’ (Campus Review, 17/09/03)

About this Title

‘These essays, stories and fragments are about how writing gets done. They are also about how being a writer colours the experience of reading, talking, teaching—of living.’

Much more than a primer for aspiring authors, this book transports the reader through the dilemmas of becoming a real writer. Novelist and poet Kevin Brophy eloquently reflects on the processes of writing, of teaching and studying writing. Peppered with Brophy’s personal experiences and private thoughts, often humorous, always sentient, this is an original, highly readable text for any person interested in creative writing.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART ONE: READING WRITING
Looking at Sophie
Literacy: what is it for?
The sentence in time
Medieval thinking and the novelisation of the poem
Writing, therapy, and the office at the end of the psyche
Night writing: a reading of Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'
Poetry: what kind of behaviour is that?
Praise, blame and Gender: divisions in the body of poetry
PART TWO: MAKING WRITING
I don't like the Beast but I want the story
Impromptu: a writer's sketchbook
The Swimmer
Autobiography of a story
Yawp! Sounding local, sounding ugly
Making poems and making poems work
Making poetry from prose: the complicated case of the prose poem
Why I am a poet
PART THREE: TALKING WRITING
A poetry workshop: description is feeling
Taming the contemporary
You can read these
Fiction and research: a view from the classroom
Before the beginning: introducing a short story
The bedroom door, the cathedral, and Islam

Works cited
Index

About the Author

Kevin Brophy is the author of three novels and three collections of poetry. He co-ordinates the creative writing program in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne. His latest book of poetry is Portrait in Skin. Melbourne University Press published his pioneering work, Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing in 1998.

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978-0-522-85056-7