Connecting Pedagogy and Practice

Teaching creative writing is as much about cultivating imagination as it is about understanding how writers think. In the postgraduate module Creative Writing in the Classroom, students explore this intersection through practice-based learning and engagement with writers.

This semester, students met and learned from two published authors, Rahul Singh, author, and editor of Ikigai (2021), and Rachel Tey, whose novel Finding Chopin (2025) was shortlisted for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2025. Both shared valuable insights into the writing life, the editorial process, and the challenges of bringing stories from draft to publication.

The class also attended the launch of Ready to Fly: The Incredible First Flight of Robert Shun Wong (2025), written by Evelyn Sue Wong and illustrated by Sarah Ang, co-hosted by the Canadian Embassy and the Singapore Book Council. The event offered students a deeper understanding of biographies where history, imagination, and visual storytelling were connected.

Together, these experiences reinforced that creative writing is best learned through immersion when students encounter writing not only as readers and teachers, but as participants in the larger literary community.