Posted By: Anonymous, 25 June 2009
It was perhaps only appropriate that half-way through this year’s Worlds festival, a coach load of writers found themselves wandering through the beautifully manicured maze at Somerleyton Hall (a visit planned to allow us to follow in W.G. Sebald’s footsteps, who wrote of the hall in "The Rings of Saturn.") Writers are drawn to the labrynthine, of course, enjoying as much the getting momentarily lost in the thicket, as the triumph of finding the centre, or of tracing the way back out. There was no Minotaur for us to encounter at Somerleyton but in some ways, the first two mornings of the writing Salon had given us similar challenges, requiring as much ingenuity as Theseus had shown.
Stepping back a little, the writers for this years’ festival, myself amongst them, began gathering in Norwich from Saturday onwards. The salon itself took on the topic of “Creative Writing.” The writers at UEA this year are, as ever, a diverse cohort, drawn from a pool of connections, recommendations and serendipitity. If, entering the grounds of Somerleyton, we felt like we might be part of some melodramatic murder mystery in a spooky country house, the reality of the conversation that we’ve been having for the last two days is less that of strangers meeting for the first time, but of speakers of a common language recognising their similarities, whilst appreciating their differences.
Tuesday’s opening session covered the hoary question of “Can Creative Writing be taught?” A tabloid favourite whenever the subject is approached, (and rarely changing in tone,whether's its 1998 and or 2007) and perhaps a little bit of a wry in-joke at UEA, with its starry backlist of McEwan, Ishiguro, Tremain and others, ensuring that the answer here, at least, should be “What was the question again?”
George Szirtes began with a personal recollection, of being introduced to the poets, Martin Bell and Peter Porter – as tutors and mentors – at art school in the late 60s. Before the Creative Writing course had been conceived, it seems, those involved in the art of writing, had evolved something not dissimilar, for peer-support, to help newcoming writers. Each day, at each year’s salon, a couple of short papers or provocations are given as a way into the discussion – our ball of string, perhaps, for circumnavigating the maze. As I did last year, I've been asked if I can document a little of our journey.
Geoff Dyer began with a pragmatic reminder that the bulk of any evidence for creative writing tuition comes from the U.S. – and, as correlation to that, but not necessarily as proof of worth, that post-World War II, American writing has been cultural dominant, and that, indeed, many American writers, from post-war G.I.s returning, to such voices of authentic America as Raymond Carver and Thom Jones, have done so not outside the writing programmes and MFAs but encouraged by them. The American debut, even to this day, continues to arrive with a “swaggering confidence.” Later in the debate, as counterweight to this, we were reminded that this, and the luxury of universities teaching creative writing at all, is part of an "imperial surplus", that after the end of the American century, may no longer be either viable or desirable.
At UEA – and indeed at Manchester, where I studied my MA – creative writing grew not out of the English theory department but of English-American studies, though because its early tutors (Bradbury and Wilson at UEA, Michael Schmidt at Manchester) were themselves eminent critics, the sometimes awkward fit of creative writing into the academy, was made a little easier. Dyer wondered whether the profusion of masters courses in creative writing was the cause of an over-production, for instance a poetry-mountain, for which the only possible use, could be as tutors on the profusion of new masters programmes. Generally though, it seemed that creative writing courses were a good thing, and hadn’t, as was often levelled at them by critics, created a homogenisation of style. There are other consequences of the creative writer being on campus, in that writers themselves need to live, to have work to do, benefit perhaps from the disciplines of the job – even if, as was mentioned by a number of writers present, the reason you are there (your creative work) may become the thing you are least able to find time to do. That strange little sub-genre of the campus novel has given us plenty of examples of this contradiction, for instance in Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys” or Francine Prose’s “Blue Angel.”
Robin Hemley, based at Iowa, talked a little about his perspective on the American course, and that he was studying when there was some kind of orthodoxy, from the students as much as the tutors, around the Carver-esque short story. It made me remember that my own decision to take an MA in creative writing had been one borne out of research – who were the tutors? And what was the focus of the course? (In my case, novel writing.) Good writer-teachers everywhere pass on “our uncertainties” not “our insecurities.”
Elsewhere in the world, the formal creative writing masters is a rarity, and where it appears may come with another agenda – such as “Creative writing and gender studies”, a way, perhaps of a funding organisation inserting some social engineering alongside teaching creative writing. In India, it is informal support mechanisms that are found. We were reminded, by UEA’s Chris Bigsby, of the “considerable opposition” to teaching creative writing in British Universities; but in doing so, the contemporary has gained a legitimacy that wasn’t there in the past, with the English syllabus fossilised 30 years or more earlier. When at university he’d asked if he could study Graham Greene alongside the “dead masters,” as Greene was “almost dead.” However, universities themselves have changed considerably over the last twenty years, where the need to earn an institutional income, as well as the expectation that all courses are now approved by the QAA, are opposing tensions that have some influence on the profusion of courses now available.
After our break we listened to Rukmini Nair broaden our discussion to talk about the very role of the institution, and different models that were available. If the American MFA can justify itself through the literature that has come through it, Nair spoke elegantly and persuasively about the need to teach creative writing as vital to our emotional and cultural well-being, and that it should be a given that universities have a role to play in teaching "the imagination." There is an evolutionary need for us to teach creativity - and universities that exist without it are themselves in some sort of crisis; exemplified by those crises of the contemporary age; boredom, anxiety, stress. As the morning moved on, we sensed that the discussion was no longer just situated in the institution, but beginning to move out, and into the real world which we also inhabit.
There was much else that we talked around in this first session – the labyrinth again, providing a few diversionary walks, as well as the occasional dead end, but it felt by the end that we are approaching its centre. Over the next two days the discussion centres on creative writing beyond the institution. Though most of those around the table were to some extent connected to an institution, it was revealing how varied the roles. It is as writers, not as academics, that remained the shared identity. In the labyrinth on Wednesday afternoon I joked about us being “poets in the maze”. Someone should perhaps write something about that.
