A new piece by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks, “The Glory of the Bad Idea,” is published as the first 75th Anniversary essay for the series, The Kenyon Review Credos:

Whatever we do on the page, those of us who are both writers and teachers of beginning creative writing generally find ourselves emphasizing orthodoxies in the classroom: that someone or something should change. That characters should be round, or that stories need characters at all. That desire + obstacle = conflict = plot. We want students to get a grip on what a “literary” short story is, and then we want to help them write one with only the minimum required amount of pain and suffering.

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Finish reading this essay and others at The Kenyon Review Online.