The Writing Studio: Making Essays

This engaging and highly practical workbook introduces students and writers to the creative and critical possibilities of the essay form, inviting them to see it as creative, imaginative and practice-led in content and approach. With most viewing the essay in academia as formulaic, impersonal, strictly linear and arguing a series of points evidenced according to certain rubrics, Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low make a case for the form to be more verb than noun, more activity and process than final arrival. Through practical examples, tips, readings, how-to plans for groups, collaborative exercises, publishing initiatives, network resources and ideas to refresh and energise study, this hybrid workbook-manifesto makes critical work creative, and creative work more probing and enlarging. With exciting implications for subjects from creative writing to areas across the humanities, the book incorporates forays into such disciplines as archival studies and history, visual and fine art, philosophy, presentation and rhetorical study and architecture.

Bold and innovative, The Writing Studio is an ethos, an orientation over an instructional manual, using words, language, rhetoric and images to experiment playfully and productively with the essay form. Taking risks and offering surprises, this book chips away at outdated notions of the essay and presses forward with a mode of writing for the modern world.