Madam, – I came away from reading Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's review of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing'by Mark McGurl (Weekend Review, April 18th) wondering what creative writing course Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad attended; or, for the matter of that, what poetry workshop gave us Wordsworth and Keats? Creative writing has become an industry; the courses and workshops can be beneficial, but it would be misleading to attribute to them virtues of imagination and creative discovery which they cannot attain.
If Ken Kesey and some others mentioned in her review did not have to begin with an ability to structure a decent sentence and the imagination to create characters and stories, all the creative writing courses in the world wouldn’t have made them good writers.
The real danger is that we will come to depend upon and recognise only the creative writing course and its attendant certificate as the measure of a "genuine" writer. Apart from anything else,this could have the effect of creating soi-disantelites whose adherents may not necessarily be talented, but who can wave a piece of parchment about to "prove" themselves writers.
Creative writing courses, inside or outside third-level institutions, can not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. A good course, with qualified tutors, can guide and direct, and, with luck, even bring participants back to the discipline of reading. But the proliferation in this country (for instance) of novel-writing courses, poetry courses and workshops is by no means an indication that we have an army of literary talent waiting in the wings.
As a facilitator of a writing course for many years in a third- level institution, I believe that only those who have a seed of literary creativity within them already can benefit to any degree from a creative writing course – though there is a sufficient number of fast-track courses willing to sell the old lie that “anyone” can be a writer.
But the question remains – how did a single novel or verse get written before the advent of the creative writing course? Did Rupert Brooke, Erich Maria Remarque, Francis Ledwidge and the rest conduct inter-trench creative writing classes between bouts of shelling? – Yours, etc,