Giving it to the students

A deeply-thought article by Rachel Cusk in yesterday's Guardian Review, considering the value of teaching creative writing - not only for students, but also in relation to the creative well-being of teacher-writers and our culture in general.

With searing insight she identifies the impulse which sends students flocking to courses:

Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language; the student feels a need to assert a 'true' self through the language system, perhaps for the reason that this same system, so intrinsic to every personal and social network, has given rise to a 'false' self

and her article is steeped in a need to honour that. Market-driven publishers, she points out, do not always do so - publication is not always 'an assurance of quality', and this justifies the need for the kind of academic haven for writing which painting and music have always enjoyed:

academic institutions offer a shelter for literary values, and for those who wish to practise them

But what of the writer-teacher? With unerring precision, she puts her finger on a conundrum here:

the role of teacher, like that of parent, effectively ends what might be called creative unself-consciousness. The teacher/parent is under pressure to surrender, as the phrase goes, the inner child, to displace it into actual children, to become scheduled and reliable in order to leave the child irresponsible and free. For a writer, who may have fought every social compulsion to "grow up", whose inner world has been constellated around avoiding that surrender, this is an interesting predicament. Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority. So the writer is giving to others the service he might customarily have given himself.

Some writers will be creatively diminished by this, she says, others made bigger, enriched, and in a perhaps politic gesture, she leaves it there, so it's a conundrum that remains unaddressed in the article. Yet I suspect it's one that's crucial to the whole subject: more than once have I given up teaching creative writing for the sake of my own writing self, and thus the sake of my own writing - exciting as I do find teaching, exhilarating and stimulating as the writing community of a university can be - and I can't remember the number of times other teacher writers have said to me - or announced at readings - that if they had my opportunity (a partner prepared to foot the bills) they'd do it too. Cusk rather brushes aside the need for money that leads published writers into teaching, listing it as only one reason alongside possible others. Last September I heard a complaint (in a workshop discussion at a two-day celebration of the 60th anniversary of Stand Magazine) that, while it is now essentially the academy that funds literary writers, writers - especially poets - seem reluctant to acknowledge their academic affiliations in their  biographies; on the contrary, they were taking the money and running. Other reasons that bring writers to the academy, says Cusk, are an interest in the subject and a desire for social participation, and (again in contrast to the Stand complaint) a desire (of which she rightly seems not to approve) for the professional profile that attachment to an institution confers, and for the way it can 'ward off the suspicion of amateurism and the insecurity of creative freedom'.

It occurs to me that every reason Cusk lists is essentially selfish: she doesn't include a love of teaching for its own sake, or a desire to bring other writers forth into the world. I'm pretty sure from this article, and her previous piece for the Guardian, that Rachel Cusk has these last qualities and is one of those brilliant and committed teachers of creative writing, but the overall view of creative writing teaching she provides is, in spite of her project of defence, less heartening.

Is it possible that those writers most able to divest themselves of their self-oriented writing identities for their students are the ones who find it most difficult to keep going at both?  And if it is, what does it mean for students, for the academy, and for literature? I'd call it more than 'interesting.'

Oh, and I should of course refer you to Marcel Theroux's pretty honest guest post on this blog for Faber Academy.

Faber Academy discussion on Creative Writing: Marcel Theroux's view

I am pleased to publish today a contribution to this debate from Marcel Theroux, co-tutor of the upcoming Faber Academy course, Getting Started. Marcel is the author of four acclaimed novels including Far North (Faber) and is a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award (2002).

Thursday's very thoughtful piece by his fellow course leader Sue Gee brought a very lively response and several issues have emerged. Marcel now cuts to the chase:

I share the ambivalence that many people feel about the Creative Writing industry.

Arts coverage in the conventional media is shrinking; publishers are panicking about the future, digital sales and the end of the book; bookshops and libraries are threatened - and yet there's a mini-boom in courses in creative writing.

There are some really tough questions that need to be asked about them - particularly by the students.  Is it a route to publication? (No - but I have yet to meet anyone who accepts this in their heart, and the concomitant truth that publication is not the answer to all their hopes and prayers.)  Would my teacher be here if she or he had sold the film rights to their latest novel? (Probably not - and that's assuming your creative writing teacher can even get published.)  Are these courses a money-making wheeze for the institutions who run them? (Undoubtedly.)  Might I be better served by renting a cabin in the woods for two weeks and sitting there in front of a computer, or, better still, a typewriter? (Perhaps.)  What do I want to get out of this? (Harder to say...)

In Tokyo, a few years ago, I went along to a haiku club. They are popular in Japan. They met in a park, under the guidance of a teacher who assigned them specific kige - words like maple leaf, dew, and nightingale which evoke a specific season and are intrinsic to the form.  The students then spent and hour or two wandering around the park and writing half a dozen haiku.  After that, they had lunch, read the poems aloud, and their teacher made suggestions about how they might be improved.

Was it a route to publication? (No.)  Was it a money-making wheeze for the teacher? (Kind of - but not exactly on a par with hedge funds.)  Might the students have been better served by renting a cabin in the woods for two weeks? (I doubt it, but they would have probably written a lot more haiku.)  What were they getting out of it?

Well, you'd have to ask them, but I wrote a couple of haiku when I was with them, and I loved the whole experience. Oddly, the deepest pleasure of writing the poems was an ego-less one.   It's the feeling of being an instrument of the words themselves, of recognizing that maple leaf, dew and nightingale have their own loveliness and it requires no authorial genius to make them beautiful.  There's also something instructive about the conciseness of the form - it's what gives each one its poignance and gravity.

There is also a more egotistical thrill of knowing that, whatever the gulf in talent between me and Basho, Issa and Onitsura - haiku masters of the past - we are all just people with pens trying to describe the harvest moon or cherry blossom in 17 syllables.  It's a strange thing about writing - that there really is no special equipment or secret knowledge that separates the amateur from the professional. And whether or not I've improved as a haiku writer, I read the poems with a new appreciation for the difficulty of the form.

But I think probably the most uplifting thing of all is this: last week one of my haiku got picked for the Richard and Judy Haiku Club, and now Ridley Scott has just made a huge offer for the film rights! Cancel my classes! In your face everyone!

Thank you to Marcel!  Once again, readers, your own views and questions are more than welcome, and in a later post Sue and Marcel will tackle the issues raised. You can also discuss the issues on Twitter on #whywrite.

Happy New Year, links and an upcoming discussion

Happy New Year to my readers!

A couple of links:

Over on my other blog, a discussion by my reading group (and my own views) of The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Cultural highlights of the year on the The Faber blog, including my own recommendation of The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist (Oneworld Publications), which I can't recommend highly enough.

And advance notice of the fact that beginning on 6th January, I'm delighted to say, this blog will host a Faber Academy discussion on the crucial question, Why Creative Writing? with contributions from novelists Sue Gee and Marcel Theroux, directors of an upcoming Faber Academy course for new writers. Should be very interesting, and a chance to ask some fundamental questions not always addressed on the web.

Just Doing It

Anne Enright is another established writer adding weight to the argument (a good one, in my opinion) that writing can't be taught in any crude sense, that you learn how to do it by, well, doing it.

Writing is learned from the inside out; it is not a subject like geography, that can be doled out in parcels of information. Writing is a discipline and, as with any discipline, whether spiritual or physical, the doing is everything. No one can do it for you.

Nevertheless, she still refers to her 'teachers' (Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury), and suggests that the role they played (at UEA) was a nurturing one:

The job of the teacher in these hazy, dangerous circumstances, is to feed the student and to keep her safe. Angela Carter did the first, with a scattering of photocopies, musings and anecdotes (she never mentioned my work, I think) and Malcolm Bradbury did the second, by smiling a lot, and liking books, and keeping quiet (I don't think he ever mentioned my work either. I might be wrong). The other students did mention my work; they had various opinions about it, but that was fine, because Malcolm was there to like us all, and keep us safe.