October/November 1989 
Teaching Creative Writing: A Feminist Critique: Introduction
AWP Editor
What follows is the substance of talks presented for a panel at the Philadelphia meeting of AWP. The panel grew out of our shared dissatisfaction with the methods by which we ourselves had been taught creative writing.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry III: As If...
John Haines
I would like to thank the editors of AWP Chronicle for reprinting Joseph Epstein's essay "Who Killed Poetry?" I happen to agree essentially with everything he has to say; but even if one does not agree with all that he says, nor especially like the way that he says it, it is important that he has brought into the open, and more prominently than anyone heretofore, a good deal that many of us have felt and thought at one time or another, even when we have not said so aloud.
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Congress Passes New Policy to Restrict NEA & NEH Funding
AWP Editor
As this issue of the AWP Chronicle went to press, Congress submitted a bill for appropriations for the Department of the Interior; the bill was signed and approved by President Bush. The Department of the Interior administers to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Throughout the spring, summer, and fall the role of public funding of the arts had been hotly contested and debated, based primarily on the NEA's recent funding of works by artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.
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Teaching Creative Writing: A Feminist Critique: Claiming Our Own Authority
Katharine Haake
At the San Francisco AWP Meeting (1988), there was talk about the Death of the Author. No such being, we were being told, existed anymore, having been replaced while we were busy at our personal computers by some dried-out construct of discourse or, in more recognizable moments, by our old friend the Reader, on whom the play of meaning of the text now endlessly inscribed itself anew.
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Teaching Creative Writing: A Feminist Critique: Causing Each Tentative Voice to Speak
Sandra Alcosser
First, I want to congratulate Francois Camoin for having the grace and intellectual curiosity to gather this democracy of voices at AWP in Philadelphia. I suppose we're here, in part, to expand his proposition from last year's meeting: critical theory should sometimes be taught by writers to writer.
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Shadow Counterpoint
Charles Baxter
It's evening, summer, a party out on the back lawn, but most of the guests have left. A few of them are still sitting out there, listlessly slapping at mosquitoes and watching, with a kind of tired irony, the occasional green flares of the fireflies. I've gone inside for another beer and stand at the kitchen window, listening. They're talking about a friend we all know whose life, through a series of romantic miscalculations, has become; story, narratable, funny and calamitous.
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry III: Not for Specialists
Jordan Smith
The last intelligent general reader I encountered of the sort Mr. Epstein invokes (neither poet nor professor, but one who feels the responsibility to know about books "that attempt to convey something about the way we live now") had on his shelves not only recent works of history, biography, and fiction, but also several volumes of poetry from this year's lists. Is one exception enough to suggest the partiality of Mr. Epstein's argument?
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The State of the Art: Contemporary Poetry III: The Poetic Ministry
Jonathan Holden
In "Who Killed Poetry?" Joseph Epstein discussed what he finds to be the sad influence of modernism and of academe upon American poetry.
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Teaching Creative Writing: A Feminist Critique: Valuing the Community of Undergraduate Creative Writing
Wendy Bishop
I have many concerns about how we teach creative writing, especially to female or other marginalized university students. But I'm especially concerned with undergraduate creative writing instruction in our universities. These undergraduate classes grow every year in number but not, I'm afraid, in pedagogical sophistication. Like their counterparts in composition classes, undergraduate creative writing students range from "basic" to "expert" as readers and writers.
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