Honouring Students: What can a successful creative writing honours program offer?

This paper explores the turf of creative writing honours students. When they begin, do honours students have a clear idea of what they want? For example, how ready are they to be independent and to be judged by professional standards? Do they no longer need intensive literary study? How connected is their work with possible career pathways once they graduate? This paper investigates these questions within the context of the mercurial nature of undergraduate and postgraduate programs of creative writing around Australia and the concomitant debates about the vexed relationship between literary criticism and creative writing as well as the nature of research. It acknowledges the diversity of approaches and highlights some that this writer has found useful.