The performative textbook: writing Playing with Words

Abstract

If you can’t write, then teach writing. If you can’t teach writing, write a book on how to teach writing. This paper explores the idea of a performative creative writing textbook, first by discussing how we wrote Playing with Words, a creative writing textbook that experiments with the discourse of textbook writing, written in several voices which dialogue with one another and with the reader in order to create an interactive reading and writing experience; secondly by examining other performative creative textbooks whose pedagogy is their practice and how they perform their premise; finally this paper argues that such performative textbooks are creative writing acts that should be counted as non-traditional research outputs