Teaching Lore: Creative Writers and the University

Abstract

[The] highly commercialized teaching of creative writing, the teaching of it in myriads of separated little vacuums, is in its own shabby way big business and really has only remotely to do with the work of English de partments. Yet it does seem to govern academic practice. Many colleges and universities seal themselves off from this plague outside their walls and have nothing whatsoever to do with creative writing. ... I myself have come to believe that creative writing courses have a valuable and inevitable place in the context of the normal work of a department of English. Certainly writing can no more be taught than painting or any skill in any art, but it can be taught as much.