Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing

Craft lives inside the artist, and it operates in the mind, not in standards or techniques. Creative writers navigate thresholds in consciousness as they develop their arts practice. Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writingexplores what it is to be an artist as it traces radical, feminist, and culturally embedded traditions in craft. The new term ＂craft consciousness＂ identifies the nexus from which writers explore making processes and practitioner knowledge. Writers, as with all artists, create and reimagine themselves anew, and it is in this perpetual state of becoming that they find ways to enlarge their sense of artistry through an exploration of forms, processes, and mediums beyond the written word.

For writers, this book initiates a reexamination of the mission of creative writing through disrupting patriarchal, racist, colonialist, ableist, and capitalist associations with dominant craft. Drawing from twenty-five interviews with living artists outside of writing and in a host of fields from conceptual art to leatherwork and dance, the book shines a light on how the processes associated with craft are embodied. Craft is an internalized matrix; it need not be commodified for the marketplace or codified in the standards necessitated by institutions of higher education. By redesigning writing workshops and MFA/PhD programs through craft consciousness, new potentials and collaborations emerge, and it becomes more conceivable to imagine dynamic, inclusive relationships between writers, scientists, and other artists.

Ben Ristow is an Associate Professor in Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, USA. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in BOMB, AMBIT, Indiana Review, Southwest Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal and has been noted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and podcasted for Fiction for Driving Across America (BOMB).