Delightful Jibber-Jabber

Page 3 May–June 2009 Why Teach Creative Writing? Introduction to Focus: The question should be, “Why not teach creative writing?” We don’t need to doubt, question, or defend ourselves. Tom Grimes’s trenchant observation above was the first, almost immediate, response to the call for papers that went out on the subject “Why Teach Creative Writing?” Grimes, the director of the creative writing program at Texas State University, apologized for his prickliness but stood by his statement , as would any professor who senses someone, in asking why one teaches a given subject, might be dubious, to say the least, about said subject. But if we offended anyone in posing that question and establishing this Focus for American Book Review, we’re sorry. Because the impetus behind the question was ABR’s recent attendance at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference, held this year in Chicago, during a not-too-chilly but flu-ridden long weekend in February. They were heady days, it should be said, as we here at ABR got to mingle with our peers from Fiction Collective Two, NewPages.com, Starcherone Books, and the many creative writing programs in the US, Canada, and UK. Surrounded by likeminded Hotel on Michigan Avenue? Well, that’s what we wanted to talk about after AWP ended. The same kind of things that Richard Hugo dealt with in The Triggering Town (1979)—a much cited source in the forthcoming essays. About why creative writing teachers do what they do, knowing that many insist still that creativity of any kind cannot be taught. About what they do when clods like us ask such boneheaded questions. About what methods seem to work.About what joys result. Or what agonies. Whether what might be good for students might not be as good for instructors. And so we sent out the call for papers to a select number of creative writing teachers and program directors. And what we gathered is this rather remarkable number of short essays, far more than expected, from a range of people that demonstrates just how varied the world of creative writing in the university is. Poets and short story writers. Experimental wordsmiths and traditional evokers of scene. From snowy Utah to balmy Mississippi and many points in between. Furthermore, we like to think that this is only the beginning. We hope that those of you who visit ABR online will take this opportunity to add your voice— in assent or dissent—toward those arranged here. So let’s get the conversation started. folk, no one ever wonders why creative writing is taught. The answer seems obvious when one steps into the book fair: Everywhere one looks, there are independent presses; journals small and large; writers ’colonies; and reading series and readers, readers, readers galore. Yet if anAWP member stepped out of the book fair—a rather insular space—she or he might be asked by a security guard or other hotel guest, “What’s this convention about?”As soon as one mentions writers, the layperson expects to hear Stephen King or J. K. Rowling would be delivering the keynote address instead of Charles Baxter or Marilynne Robinson. Of course, anyone with a degree in creative writing, or anyone who ever completed a creative writing course, has put up with this kind of inquiry for some time now. Always it seems there are two worlds of writing: the popular and the literary, and everyone knows that Anne River Siddons and E. Lynn Harris or Elmer Kelton and Anne Rice didn’t have to go to school at Iowa or Hopkins or Houston to learn how to write a good book. And if James Alan McPherson orAnn Beattie are so good, why are her or his books out of print? In other words, why learn how to write when all it might get you is the approbation of the five thousand souls pressed together in the Hilton Responses Delightful Jibber-Jabber Lee K. Abbott I am tempted, given the givens that are my character, to provide the flippant answer: Why not? More seriously, however, I’d like to quote the late John Updike, in particular from his...