The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Academy as open space Wishes I wish that the discipline of creative writing saw itself even more as a natural landbridge to afar wider community of readers and writers. It should never become a drawbridge pulled high between academy and community. It is not in its nature. Writing in the community is not some worthy cause, neither is it some Claude Glass reflection of real life from which to compose. It is away of life for many people who become writers, or wish to become writers but do not have financial or social resources to support them. Maybe more courses could be taught outside campus, as they are in adult and worker education programmes. Maybe more university writing workshops could take place in malls, community centres and places where people work and live. Maybe some mountains need moving. If a university will not go to the community, then the community could request space within the university. I suspect many institutions will be flattered to be asked. Community projects within writing courses area small and necessary means universities can use to make these first steps. I wish it were more clearly understood that, in someways, higher education needs creative writing more than creative writing needs higher education. Colleges want student fees for one they wish to answer student demand for another. However, higher education also desires the social, cultural and political relevance, and understanding, that writing and writers bring to higher education. These matters are priceless, for they have more to do with the outside reputation of an institution than in its ability to make money. Money culture recognizes no currency but its own . . . art offers an exchange in kind, says the novelist Jeanette Winterson. Reputation, of course, at bottom, is a kind of currency. Reputation is the wisest long-term investment, whether fora writer or an institution of learning. Reputation begins locally and grows globally it must start within the local community, and writers are effective ambassadors to – and of – that community. I wish this were something writers and universities were learning and understanding about each other. I wish we allowed ourselves to recognise that all good writers are creative, that even, say, textbooks of philosophy or zoology, when written clearly and entertainingly, with an eye on the audience, are acts of creative writing. On a good day, we can call ourselves – or overhear ourselves called – creative. 248 Creative writing I have come to believe, reluctantly, that creative is an abused word, abused to the point where it has become divisive. Imaginative writing is at once more concise but more exclusive than creative writing. But do we really mean that some writers are creative and the rest of them are uncreative? Isn’t the difference between creative and non-creative at this level largely the difference between good, thoughtful writing and bad, thoughtless writing I see no division in the integrity of practice between our best novelists and poets and the best of our scientists or social scientists. Sometimes they are the same person. I wish we had greater freedom to create university degrees that in their turn created Renaissance people, and that did not encourage suspicion about our capacity for being good at more than one pursuit in our lives. The freedoms and opportunities of ‘self-inclusive scholarship (see Chapter Seven ) ought to be extended to our students. Writing Across the Disciplines is a hugely important movement a lot of the energy for it came from people who cared about writing. Creative Writing Across the Disciplines seems a natural step the interdisciplinary energy and focus might come from the discipline of creative writing. The spectre of specialisation has now crept into many school curricula, and creativity is also under threat there. It is now as important for creative practice to be reintroduced in high schools as it is in universities. To this end, I wish writers could make themselves even more active on the borders between knowledge systems in universities and high schools. I see a division in many writers and would- be writers between desire and achievement, between promise and execution. Artistic insecurity emerges from that friction, and feeds the desire to keep the creative writing territory free of competitors from other nonliterary fields, and even from younger writers. Our job is to close the fault line between a writer’s perfectly natural velleity and their desired action. However, in doing this excellent work, I wish that writers would make an even greater effort to open our educational work to people from nontraditional literary backgrounds, such as science and business, and not reinforce prejudices born of mistrust or insecurity. Taking creative nonfiction teaching into science and business is the obvious way to get inside their respective Troys if that is where one wishes to create and challenge audiences. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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