Shenandoah Professor Releases Edited Collection on Creative Writing Research

By Jace Gibson ’26

Jon Udelson, Ph.D., associate professor of English, director of writing, and honors program co-director at Shenandoah University, has released a new book titled “Seeking Our Places: Innovations in Creative Writing Studies Research, Methodologies, and Practice.” The work is an edited collection, featuring 17 chapters and compiling the work of 24 authors, with Dr. Udelson serving as lead editor. “Seeking Our Places” is a methods collection in creative writing studies that offers keen insights and ideas on how research in the field can be thought about.

After attending a creative writing studies conference and starting to do some research and writing in that area, it dawned on me that the field was either repeating a lot of the work of rhetoric and composition, an established discipline in comparison to the still-young field of creative writing studies, or could benefit from drawing more from it. Creative writing studies had a couple of books and articles that touched on the idea of methodology, but many of them were based in practice-led research and the idea that we study creative writing as a way to write better. Yes, this is true. But we can also look at creative writing as a social phenomenon, or situated activity that tells us something about who we are as writers and peoples. Rhetoric and composition had been asking these bigger questions about writing more broadly for decades, and I hoped that this collection could get at some of that for creative writing in particular.”

Jon Udelson, Ph.D.

“Seeking Our Places” is the product of four years of cumulative research, work and theory-crafting, and is co-edited by Ben Ristow, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of writing and rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith University and a long-time friend of Udelson’s. It features chapters on storytelling and community, transgender studies, queer studies, new materialism, qualitative research methods at new sites of inquiry, quantitative research, assessment, professional and technical writing, artificial intelligence, and more, all inflected through the act of creative writing, and the treatment of creative writing as not only an action, but also as a cultural phenomenon.

The book is available for purchase at peterlang.com in hardcover, paperback or e-book variants.