Writing Creative Writing

Essays from the Field

Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Tysdal, Priscila Uppal, Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Tysdal, Priscila Uppal

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781459741713
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

Essential and engaging essays about the joys and challenges of creative writing and teaching creative writing by a host of Canada's leading writers. Writing Creative Writing is filled with thoughtful and entertaining essays on the joys and challenges of creative writing, the complexities of the creative writing classroom, the place of writing programs in the twenty-first century, and exciting strategies and exercises for writing and teaching different genres. Written by a host of Canada's leading writers, including Christian Bök, Catherine Bush, Suzette Mayr, Yvette Nolan, Judith Thompson, and thom vernon, this book is the first of its kind and destined to be a milestone for every creative writing student, teacher, aspirant, and professional.

Can’tLit: What Canadian English Departments Could (but Won’t) Learn from the Creative Writing Programs They Host*

Say It Ain’t So

English writer Philip Hensher fulfills a writer’s first duty — truth-telling — when writing novels about the idiocy of invading Afghanistan in The Mulberry Empire or the challenges of monogamy in King of the Badgers, and again as a creative writing professor willing to blow the whistle on how vehemently some English departments and professors hate writers, writing, and writing educations. Profiled in the Guardian, Hensher laments, “I learnt that there are people employed by English literature departments who hate literature and would put a stop to it if they could. They talk about literature being subversive and questioning of authority, but once they have admitted creative writing into a department they find that it can’t be controlled and they don’t like it” (Wroe). Despite this palpable hatred, Canada’s pedagogical spécialité de la maison is to house creative writing programs in university English departments — “the enemies of literature,” according to Hensher (King 365). Examples from Canadian university programs, professorial hiring, national research funding, and my own decade of work as a Canadian creative writing professor demonstrate a similar “hatred” between Canadian professors of English and the creative writing programs under their majority rule. This national preference for having those who write about writing managing the educations of those who write has negative aesthetic, political, and economic consequences in and beyond Canadian education.

Canada’s art historians and musicologists don’t design and manage the education of our visual artists and composers, but English profs (who have rarely published books of poetry or fiction themselves) routinely control the educations of our writers, and with obvious costs to national and personal truth-telling. As indicated in the table below, the number of graduate writing programs in Canada doubled within the 2000s, yet various factors within the Canadian academy (not the internationally popular discipline of creative writing), find most Canadian writing programs more devoted to the head than the heart and managed, not coincidentally, by English departments. Our writing grads are much more likely to be versed in Elizabethan celibacy or Victorian diarists than what William Faulkner so rightly describes as “the human heart in conflict with itself.” I’ve taught writing for a decade now at four Canadian universities and am worried that — with English professors predominantly calling the shots — few Canadian creative writing programs teach or even entertain core writerly skills like social-emotional intelligence, revealing, engaged and accurate dialogue, dramatic tension, comedy, and, most notably, plot.

English-Language Master’s Writing Programs in Canada
Pre-2000	Post-2000
MA in English and Creative Writing
University of Calgary	University of Toronto
Concordia University	University of Regina
University of Manitoba
University of New Brunswick
University of Windsor
MFA in Creative Writing
University of British Columbia	University of Victoria
	University of Guelph
	University of Saskatchewan
	King’s University (creative non-fiction only)

In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov writes, “Let us worship the spine and its tingle.… The study of the sociological or political impact of literature [is] for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature, for those who do not experience the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades” (64). Canadian creative writing programs rarely share Nabokov’s devotion to a spinal “tingle.” The current practices of our writing programs and funding agencies generally ask writers to be scholars who simply drop the footnotes, while graduate creative writing education in all major anglophone countries of comparison values the unique fusion of personal and cultural truth available to the creative writer and her reader.

(Why Don’t We) “Follow the Money”(?)

Canada’s globally unique lack of interest in the exponentially growing market for a creative writing education hurts Canada intellectually, culturally, and economically. Canada’s English departments ignore what Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing rightly describes as creative writing’s “insatiable student demand — that simultaneously progressive and consumerist value” (94). McGurl’s bar graph about the growth of creative writing education in the United States shows a supplier’s dream: an exponentially growing market (25). The Victorianists and Miltonists who run the majority of Canada’s writing programs disregard not just the Canadian and global demand for a creative writing education in particular, but also creative education in general. Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future observes, “In the US, the number of graphic designers has increased tenfold in a decade; graphic designers outnumber chemical engineers by four to one. Since 1970, the US has 30% more people earning a living as writers…. Some 240 US universities have established creative writing MFA programs, up from fewer than twenty two decades ago” (55). The well-documented efficacy of arts funding should find Canadian creative writing grads who are creative problem solvers and polyvocal ­communicators with varied employment opportunities. The Canadian Conference of the Arts (CCA) observes that approximately $9 billion of (tri-level) government spending in culture yields, according to the Conference Board of Canada, roughly $85 billion or “7.4% of Canada’s total real GDP” (4). Analyzing figures from Statistics Canada and the Canadian Auto Workers union, the CCA counts more full-time Canadian artists (140,000) than autoworkers (135,000) (Useful 3). It also observes that “the percentage of artists who are self-employed is six times the self-employment rate in the overall labour force” (Useful 4).** More specifically, Statistics Canada counts, “Total ­operating ­revenues for the [Canadian] book publishing ­industry amounted to $2.0 billion in 2010” (Book Publishing 4).

Canada’s creative writing graduates may in fact be more employable than those Canadian English majors conscripted into professionalized anglophilia, yet they are continually given short shrift by the Moby Dick experts and other scholars of non-Canadian literature who manage their educations. The University of Windsor has one of Canada’s older master’s programs in creative writing. Its creative writing undergrads (and/or undergraduate English majors) are required to take one credit of either American or Canadian literature (compared to several of English literature). Can any reader imagine a Portuguese university allowing its literature majors to substitute a Spanish literature course for the national literature? In February of 2012, I did a Canada Council–sponsored reading at Nipissing University. Chatting with a student, I asked which of her literature courses were most stimulating for the novel she was sketching now and hoped to work on significantly following graduation (“A Conversation with”). She replied that her two remaining English courses, Restoration Drama and Prairie Realism, did not really pertain to her novel about a contemporary Canadian woman coming of age in a city. This student’s education is not good value for her or her country.

“Only in Canada, eh? Pity”***

The uninformed or hostile managers of Canada’s creative writing programs who ignore student demand, the cost-effectiveness of arts spending, and the enormity of Canada’s book industry do so at national cost (despite their ­government funding). As demonstrated in Figure 1, Canada lags behind almost all Western countries in the number of PhD graduates aged twenty-five to twenty-nine per 100,000 people (Public Education 16). Canada’s low per capita completion of PhDs is shameful considering our global record for the highest per capita undergraduate enrollment (Grossman). The institutional disregard for creative writing and/or the study of Canadian literature (including that produced by creative writing grads) is illustrated by the national lack of interest in capitalizing on our high interest in undergraduate education in general and our ballooning interest in creative writing masters’ degrees in particular. Notably, the doubling of master’s creative writing programs in Canada has not been met here — as it has in other anglophone countries — with attendant changes in the number of Canadian doctoral programs in creative writing. A database at the Australian Association of Writing Programs lists 10 PhD programmes in CW (Australian). Despite Canada’s ballooning number of creative writing master’s programs and, as noted below, federal scholarship funding for creative writing PhD students, Canada has just three creative writing doctoral programs (and only two in English). Why does Australia — with 85 percent of our anglophone population and a highly comparable post-colonial history — have five times the number of anglophone creative writing PhD programs?

The United States also shames our doctoral creative writing offerings. AWP Executive Director David Fenza counts thirty-six creative writing PhD programs (“A Brief History”). In round numbers, the United States has ten times Canada’s population yet twenty times the number of creative writing PhD programs. America’s commitment to what Fenza calls “the art of writing as essential to a good education” has resulted, he claims, in “the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen” (“A Brief History”). Notably, this American patronage has evolved in an educational marketplace of both state-funded and privately funded universities. Unlike Canadian universities, American, Australian, and United Kingdom universities do not ignore the staggering student demand for graduate creative writing educations.

Reprinted with permission of author, the Canadian Federation of Students (Public Education 16).

Unchecked discipline hostility appears to be one reason Canadian universities have not responded to the frankly insistent market for more Canadian creative writing PhD programs. In Harper’s, American author and semi-reluctant writing professor Lynn Freed refers to graduate creative writing programs as “the cash cow of the humanities” (69). Fenza, too, knows that “creative writing classes have become among the most popular classes in the humanities.” Amazingly (and at national cost), Canadian Humanities programs are uninterested in this cash cow. If the Canadian English professors who ignore the student demand for creative writing PhDs (to say nothing of the intellectual and cultural opportunities they afford) were wasting their own money, I’d be more forgiving. However, their cart-before-the-horse sales strategy insists on marketing a product students don’t want to buy. McGurl contrasts the rapid growth of graduate creative writing with the minimal growth of graduate English degrees: “In 2003–04 there was a total of 591 US institutions offering either an MA (428) or a PhD (143) in English literature. In 1991–92 that number had been 549. This represents an increase of 7 percent, as compared to a 39 percent increase in the number of creative writing programs over the same period” (414). Countries with an abundance of creative writing PhD programs (such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia) have much higher general completion rates for PhDs per capita (Public Education 16). As noted below, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) is theoretically just as willing to fund a PhD thesis that is a Canadian novel instead of a disquisition about a Canadian novel. In the single most popular TED Talk ever, on the lack of creativity in schools, Sir Ken Robinson claims that “every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.… And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance” (Robinson). Canada’s English professors perpetually hierarchize English literature over Canadian literature and all literature over creative writing.

Dick and Jane vs. the Palimpsest

Others who have taught in one of Canada’s hybrid English–creative writing programs**** have surely experienced that moment when a student, usually in third year and drunk on theory, discovers the word palimpsest and then writes a palimpsestic poem or sc...