1.

A triumvirate of practice, research and pedagogy defines Creative Writing as a subject in universities around the world. Writing is first and foremost a studio art, like its siblings – music, drama, dance, visual arts, and so on. The teaching of the arts and attendant critical understanding about how to communicate the intricacies of specific disciplines followed on the heels of their introduction into the academy at all levels. Although the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in the US is still, to some extent, thought of as primarily a practice-based (studio) degree, Masters and Doctoral study, generally, moved the discipline on to another plane because here the concept of Creative Writing as research began to be interrogated most vigorously. The movement of ideas between practice, research and pedagogy has now come full circle. Definitions of research and about the production of the type and forms of knowledge Creative Writing generates have begun to filter down to affect how Creative Writing is taught at undergraduate level in many institutions.

Witness the number of books published in recent years about the discipline. Likewise, research-led debates that in earlier times found their way occasionally into The Writer's Chronicle, the long-established organ of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and slightly more so perhaps into Writing in Education, the publication of the UK's National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), are now able to be carried on regularly in independent specialist journals such as New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Newer organisations have also developed their own international journals with tertiary education focuses, such as TEXT: the Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP, founded 1996), published biannually.