Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Creative Writing in the Academy

81 Creative Writing in the Academy You’re right. Writers in the university are often neurotics, and undereducated .They’re prima donnas.Their imbalanced juices make them sanguine, choleric, or melancholic, though rarely phlegmatic. I’ve known a terraphage , a coke hound, and one guy who found his calling after water-skiing into a dock piling.Writers are maladjusted,nearsighted,humpbacked fancy dressers, bare-knuckle fighters and ballroom dancers. Writers are moody and vindictive. We’ve got your dog. Creative writing has always been an awkward fit on campus. Scholars hate writers because writers aren’t scholarly; writers resent scholars because scholars impress writers’ “texts” as fodder for their campaigns or, worse, ignore them. Also, scholars are seeing writers’ ex-wives, and while everybody acts like they’re cool with that, they’re not. The act of putting writers in the academy meant, of course, that they needed to be professionalized, the way one professionalizes a cow with an electric prod when it won’t get on the cattle car bound for the packing house. Professional demands have escalated, so now it’s beginning to take a PhD to get hired,where once it was an MFA,and before that,an MA,and before that, a long cold ride on the rails with the hobos. Just because you brand an animal as part of the herd doesn’t mean it won’t gallop off alone for the nearest waterhole at the first opportunity, such as during the first class meeting. College teaching may be the new 82 creative writing in the academy patronage in the arts, but writers will be writers, not provosts, and god knows what they’re telling your kids. They should be teaching in convict settlements or madhouses. Despite all this,properly run creative-writing classes,sheerly by accident, have become the keepers of the flame of true knowledge in academe. O! you future hog cloners,microchip designers,traders in wheat; players of the football with your husky, brawling big shoulders! Come to Introductory Narrative Writing and sing so proud to be alive under the terrible burden of destiny! As a younger man I used to ask students,“Why did you come to college?” expecting to hear them quote Hegel,perhaps: “Education is the art of making man ethical.”What they told me was,“To learn to do my own laundry.” I was deeply hurt. Now I understand they wanted autonomy in whatever form they understood it. What better place to catch up on your intellectual autonomy than in the creative-writing classroom, where an author always owns her own work? The responsibility to make something unique and good is hers alone, as she writes her way to an understanding of the one thing I cannot understand for her. Half my job is asking questions of those who can’t generate questions , in order to model the will to curiosity. I did this recently for a student in an intermediate creative nonfiction class with two pre-reqs. She couldn’t find enough interest in her own topic to be curious about all the paths leading from it to the infinite world, so I did my thing, using my best material. I could play the Copa with this stuff. When I’d generated enough questions and topics to fill a stadium, I stopped, panting, and grinned in triumph. She looked at me for a moment, then said, “So . . . you want me to write about the airport?” Because I’m ambitious for them, because I had a bad cold, because I was irritated at my life’s energy draining from me uselessly, at the next meeting I told them they had to kick it in, this was the real thing, and they must set themselves free. They bent their heads to their doodling in embarrassment for me. They’re all rotten to the core, I decided, don’t have it, or won’t take the one thing that creative writing in the academy has to offer, the chance to see for oneself. creative writing in the academy 83 After class, the young woman brought me her revised stuff, which revealed much hard work and a brilliant developing theme of an immigrant family who’d once worked the earth,living now in the only place they could afford in a new city, under the roar and stink of a Jetway. To celebrate, I stole the chancellor’s car...