Part I: Lets Go!
Writing is an action
Chapter 1 Lets Begin the Journey 3
Chapter 2 Free Writing 15
Chapter 3 Response Writing 29
Chapter 4 Film Review 55
Part II: Writing from Our Hearts
Writing is an art
Chapter 5 Memoir First Draft 65
Chapter 6 Memoir Final Draft 87
Chapter 7 Report113
Chapter 8 Imaginative Writing 141
Part III: Coming Home
Writing brings us home
Chapter 9 Re-creating Our Stories in Chinese 163
Chapter 10 Public Reading 173
Chapter 11 The Story Goes On 179
內容試閱:
I write with great pleasure and pride to applaud for the publication of Li Huas
Writing Stories from Our Hearts: A Guide to the Art of Creative Nonfiction. It marks the
fi rst of such guidebooks in English as a foreign language in mainland China.
I came to know Li Huas play The Mighty Hand while I was doing research on
creative writing as a Fulbright scholar at University of Iowa in 2013. I was both surprised
and thrilled to find someone who had been teaching creative writing since 2006, three
years before I did at Sun Yat-sen University.
I wrote to her immediately. It was not until after a while that she responded.
Although I put creative writing in the subject of my email message, Li Hua did a bit of
a research on me before confi rming that she actually had a colleague in southern China.
After all, creative writing in English as a foreign language was few and far between in
the country. She was the fi rst person with an MFA in the field to offer a creative writing
course in a mainland university, and I was very likely the second one, followed by Shan
Xiaoming at China University of Petroleum in 20141.
Li Huas passion for creative writing was contagious when we met in early 2014. We
talked about how we were touched by the stories our students wrote, and how frustrated
we were because few people understood the point and power of creative writing in the
department of English in China. It felt like meeting an old friend, not only because of her
1 It was not until last year that I found a few more like-minded teachers in a number of other universities. They
came to teach creative writing either because they had been exposed to creative writing courses outside
China or because of their love for the writing of literature. A couple of them, Xiao Xingzhen at Xiamen
University and Sui Gang at Beijing International Studies University, actually taught creative writing on and o_
since the late 1990s.
Preface
VI
英语非虚构创意写作教程 写 出 心 灵 深 处 的 故 事
warm personality, but also because we spoke the same language when it came to creative
writing.
Li Hua is ahead of me again in writing a textbook. While mine has been going slow,
hers came out fi rst in 2014. I felt the same passion for creative writing in the book like I
saw in Li Hua in our fi rst meeting. As the title of the book suggests, she wrote from her
heart, and she helped her students to do the same.
This guidebook works very well for beginners in that Li Hua writes as a teacher who
knows exactly how to encourage students who are either unwilling to write, or too scared
to write, or have no clue how to get started. She writes as a friend who opens her heart to
the reader through her own writing, and demonstrates how her students open up through
writing at different stages. She showcases her students works and how they have been
improved through workshops and revisions.
Li Hua writes in a friendly and encouraging tone not usually found in a guidebook
that is, more often than not, matter of fact. The sincerity in her tone deserves and demands
attention, and inspires and commands the reader to get started with writing.
I congratulate Li Hua and her students on the publication of this textbook. Written
from the heart, the book will touch the hearts of many students.
I thank Li Hua for pioneering both in teaching and textbook writing, and for letting
me see what I can contribute respectively.
Fan Dai
Sun Yat-sen University