CREATIVE WRITING

…is a LIVE ongoing experiment with LANGUAGE since antiquity!

(Creative) writers are people who… well, this is a very complicated matter, and tomorrow we’re going to explore some of the diverse and even contradictory ways to understand what exactly creative writers do. But, right off the bat, here are some ideas to chew on…

Creative Writers Are… people who very self-consciously craft language into art such as fiction and poetry; they are artists of words; people who “re-say” the world afresh with every generation; people who keep the language alive; people who save their own lives through language; who dig playing with language for its own sake (like hopelessly stunted children still learning to talk).

these professionals were basically self-trained and solitary. Or, as with the Modernists in the early to mid-20 th century, they found each other in enclaves such as the bistros and bars of Paris to share their work with other writers in a ferment of ideas… And booze. Oops. I’m probably not supposed to say that. And booze. “Creative Writing” as a university discipline is a path many writers take these days to become professional word artists. It used to be…

The novelist Ernest Hemingway famously learned to write by hanging out with friends in Europe, but also by drawing on his experience as a journalist. In the later mid-century, in America, however, writers were increasingly supporting themselves by teaching English in universities.

And a bunch of teachers at the University of Iowa, wanting to find a space for sharing and discussing their own work, hatched the “writer’s workshop.” They basically carved out a social space in colleges where writers could find each other, interact, share their work with each other, and yack about writing. Today, the university creative writing workshop is one of THE places where writers congregate.

“Creative Writing” has sometimes had a contested and rather dubious place in English Studies, however. It’s not always considered as “academic” as other disciplines within English Studies, or is considered a “soft” discipline. Creative writers—the people who write literature— have sometimes been in conflict with those who STUDY literature or THEORIZE about literature or see writing as a means to some end other than itself.

As you’ll probably learn before you get out this thing called Governor’s School… “English Studies” is a complex of discipline bound by a variety of tensions, all exerting a pull on each other!

In any case, creative writing is now both a continually evolving, mysterious engagement with language— and a major discipline or course of study. Students are flocking to creative writing programs all across the country!

More soon.Stay tuned!