Can You Teach Creative Writing?

Times are tough at colleges across Canada. The Globe & Mail is reporting this morning on the hundreds of part-time and sessional instructors who are losing jobs they’ve held for years. Many will struggle to find alternate work, because the layoffs are so devastating and pervasive across the whole sector.

I ran into a colleague on Thursday and we exchanged greetings: “We still have a job!” But no one knows what’s coming next, and that’s been a source of stress for all of us for months now.

In that climate, it’s especially pleasant to have some good news to share as our Creative Writing Certificate program launches this September, with enthusiasm from my current set of Creative Nonfiction class members. This is a very fun development at a difficult time for our institution.

And I’ve benefited tremendously from my own Creative Writing program, undertaken over the last four years entirely online. I took my first course, on mystery writing, with Gail Bowen back in 2018, and then I paused for a couple of years to re-build my teaching career before venturing back into classes. I’ve had terrific instructors: another crime fiction course with Sam Wiebe, the author of a west coast hardboiled series; creative nonfiction courses with Alexandra Shimo and Becky Blake; a playwriting seminar last fall with Mark Brownell, which is the most fun I’ve ever had a in synchronous 2.5 hour online class. All of my writing courses have given me a sense of community, even though we are reading and critiquing the work of our peers. I’ve found the instructors have gracefully guided this feedback, ensuring it’s not too bruising.

Not everyone has had such positive experience of writing workshops; some grad programs that I probably shouldn’t name are famous for the vicious criticism. Three separate crime novels I’ve read include characters wounded by writing workshops.

An excellent new collection of essays about teaching Creative Writing in Canada is helping me think through the writing workshop’s promises and pitfalls (David Leach), writing instruction as coaching (Angie Abdou), and MFA programs. It’s expensive; the e-version is much more accessible.

But can you teach creative writing? A perennially debated question.

Some writers, especially those who didn’t go to Iowa, argue that life experience is more valuable than time spent in the hothouse of the academy. Others have pointed out that peer critique is less likely to be valuable to the most gifted writers, who might inspire more jealous competition than support for their craft.

But neither of those criticisms really get at the question of whether writing skills are teachable, and here I would argue that all writers benefit from sustained close reading and feedback, which can be provided in an academic program.

Since my own future’s a bit murky right now, one option I’ve contemplated is applying for MFA programs. But that doesn’t feel like quite the right choice: it’s too much school that’s gotten me into my current employment predicament, so yet more seems unlikely to rescue me.

The market for writing has changed profoundly over the past thirty years, and generative AI isn’t helping. I marvel at the fees that the best writers commanded a century ago: I doubt today’s authors are doing that well, and it’s certainly not feasible for a young writer to imagine that publishing women’s magazine stories and features could help her sustain a career as a poet, as Sylvia Plath once did. (Plath was an extraordinarily successful commercial writer at a very young age, placing poems and stories in Seventeen and Mademoiselle, glossy magazines with long histories that first ceased to publish fiction and poetry and then largely or entirely ceased to publish at all.)

One of the main venues for creative writers in Canada is contests: they offer the prize of publication as well as a cash award. But they also nearly all require a submission fee, and those fees help keep literary journals afloat. This model is worrying.

But I’ve seen class members make enormous strides in both academic writing and creative writing contexts when they use feedback to fuel their writing and commit to an ongoing writing practice. Already, some class members are asking if they can form summer writing groups, which is terrific to see: they don’t want to give up the connections they’ve established.

I have an idea for a community memoir-writing project that could be of particular interest to older adults. I’d like to make it free and accessible (and I’m not above thinking that if some of these older adults might like to leave bequests, if they find the program valuable, that could be a good thing). This year wasn’t quite the right timing, but if a year from now I’m still a fortunate holder of this academic position, I’m going to see if we can give it a go: recruit at local care homes and seniors’ centres and build an online open access course with low technical requirements.

Because everyone can write, and we all have stories to tell. And writing in community, with feedback, can help.