When New Criticism took its hits, so-called close reading fell out of favor, but writers continued to read closely to figure out how a text works and what decisions authors have made. Francine Prose and others have reclaimed careful attention to the text as reading like a writer. In Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, Sandy Feinstein suggested specific ways that reading provides breadth and depth in a creative writing class. This new conversation checks in 10 years later on what we call writerly reading and explores the role of reading as a crucial part of creative writing pedagogy and practice. The authors here grapple with issues of pleasure, cultural context, and practical application and discuss ways that reading works in different genres and to different ends.

Anna Leahy: In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose talks about reading as part of the way writers learn, perhaps the most important way we learn such things as ‘the love of language’ and ‘a gift of story-telling’ (2007: 1). Of course, a writer must write, but Prose says, ‘For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential.’ (2007: 2). And that ability is cultivated by reading.

Sandy Feinstein: Reading like a writer can be, in the creative writing classroom, an act of reverse engineering: a taking apart of the parts – metaphor, images, meter, sound, noun, verb, adjective, etc. – to build it back together again in a way that works for each individual writer.

Anna Leahy: That's how I watched films when I took a film class in college, with heightened awareness of choices the director and actors had made, and, at times, I still notice a camera angle.