This semester, I am on sabbatical, working on revisions to A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing that will become the second edition. My manuscript is due to Bloomsbury on January 15, so I need to stick to my schedule, but I’ve had a good week of writing (even though Labor Day cut it short), so this morning I got a little distracted.
This week a student wrote me out of the blue with a question about the book, which he’s using for a class at a school in Minnesota. Maybe that’s what led me to search on the book, or that led me to a post I wrote several years ago about a review on a site that no longer exists and that led me to search for more reviews. In any case, when I searched on the book title and my name, a lot of hits came up, mostly to my site or to Amazon.
But as I scrolled through the list, I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Many of the links were to eBay, which wasn’t surprising, but looking closer, I noticed these were eBay listings from different countries, as identified by the address: ebay.ie or ebay.uk, etc. Ireland and the United Kingdom, even Australia, were hardly surprising, since my publisher is Bloomsbury, and before that was Macmillan International Higher Ed. (The imprint is Red Globe Press, which got sold to Bloomsbury a few years back.)
I’ve known that the book is sold internationally, and that the UK, Australia, and New Zealand were part of their distribution. What was more interesting was to see copies showing up on eBay in Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, and France, even Germany, Finland, and several Slavic and Eastern European countries. What this tells me is that there are copies in these countries that have been purchased and are now being sold used, which would suggest that the textbook has been adopted beyond the English-speaking world.
That’s interesting for me to know as I dig into revisions of the book for the next edition. I’ve been planning to add more examples and references to authors, and had already planned to include more international authors. The truly global market for the book reinforces that decision and justifies referencing more writers who wrote in languages other than English (in translation, of course). That makes me happy since besides teaching creative writing, I taught World Literature for many years. I know these writers, and I’m glad to present creative writing from a truly global perspective, and not privilege American and English writers over other traditions around the world.
I’m sure I’ll rely on English-language writers quite a bit when looking for examples, since that will be the easiest, yet bringing in other writers whose work is known and translated into English expands the horizons of what is creative writing that I can think about and talk about in the book. This goes along well with other changes I’ve been contemplating for the second edition, including inclusive writing pedagogy and an anti-racist approach to the workshop.
Kendall Dunkelberg 