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 Writing explores 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.