De-boning the fish: Indexing Routledge’s Teaching Creative Writing in Asia as abecedarian memoir

ABSTRACT This essay of creative nonfiction tells the story – one intellectual, professional, personal, and cultural – of the author having recently edited a ground-breaking anthology of Creative Writing pedagogy. While the Routledge anthology is formal scholarship, its editor and contributor here writes creative nonfiction to (a) more personally reflect on some of the massive cultural issues involved in the creation and direction of many of the first CW programmes in Asia (e.g. in a master’s degree conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London to students at Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts), through (b) a textual dialogue with some of the highlights from the Routledge anthology’s index. As a starting point, and one not shared in the 2021 anthology itself, this essay shares the ‘dirty little secret’ that while indices are, by definition, often one of the last components written for a book, a book’s internal cartography would be improved if an index could be written earlier. As both this essay and the anthology point out, creative nonfiction is a multiply apt genre for this inquiry, given its (i) popularity, (ii) easy transfer to social media sharing and (iii) greater licence, in anglophone publishing, to play with form.