7 - ‘Jump to the Skies’: Critical and Creative Responses to Creativewriting – Theory and Practice

Summary

All the time you’re in here something is supposed to be going on: you’re not just sitting there, you’re not receptacles, little vessels into which I pour something: our insights are mutual.

Why do we teach creative writing in higher education? Since the late 1990s, many prominent contemporary British and Irish writers have engaged in creative writing teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, some we might hazard primarily for economic reasons. Unlike our U.S. counterparts, however, many British writers, particularly poets, have not themselves been a ‘product’ of the creative writing workshop. In this essay, I will think specifically about the role of the writer as writing tutor, emphasizing the importance of process-based teaching and thinking through the need for teachers to clarify in their own minds their expectations of the discipline, of themselves and of their students. Drawing on the history of creative writing teaching and psychoanalytic theory, I wish to reflect on the kinds of creative writing teaching that might take place in the classroom; I also want to explore the particular kind of ‘holding’ space that the writing workshop represents and the numerous, often complex, negotiations that must take place between tutor and student. It’s my intention as well to touch on some of the connections between the relationship of the writer, the text and creative activity, and to examine the mutual insights that the relationship between creative and critical modes might provide – as a way of reconsidering both how we write and read literature, and how we teach it. I would argue, too, that despite often being housed together, the teaching of creative writing and critical reading and writing, though helpful to each other (and certainly sisterly and conversant), at times gives rise to unease about the nature of the dialogue that may evolve. Increasingly, my sense is that through the professionalization of the teaching experience – not a wholly bad thing, but one that has its limitations – creative writing has been too easily subsumed into literary studies at undergraduate level, without a comprehensive debate about its function in the academy.