Voices through Hong Kong and New Grounds for the MFA

 

The MFA in Hong Kong offers the widening community of writers and scholars unique perspectives on the history and landscape of Creative Writing programmes internationally. Breaking ground in 2009 as the first postgraduate Master’s programme in creative writing in English in Hong Kong and the region, the MFA at HKU encountered and continues to honor new directions and paradigms for the MFA. All participants in the MFA, including the lecturers, visiting writers, and writers, offer fresh perspectives and needs for what constitutes the “MFA” in Creative Writing in Hong Kong, outside the original North American model. This talk will focus, therefore, on how emerging Hong Kong writers are helping us all to reinvent the arc of the MFA in contemporary contexts; it will also touch briefly upon the writers’ complex sensory experiences and cross-cultural experiences of craft, whether of time or tense, for instance, in Chinese and English. It will finally lead into the questions of new support that all Creative Writing programmes at a university can offer in Hong Kong and Asia to writers in English, whether in genre, publishing, or representation.