Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

Can’tlit: what canadian english departments could (but won’t) learn from the creative writing programs they host
Writing creative writing programs

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.

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 scene of fiction. Palimpsests are undeniably interesting, but are they the appropriate focus for a writer’s education? Before proceeding to evidence on how Canadian creative writing education promotes the head (palimpsests and rhizomes; England and the past) at the expense of the heart (love, humour, and plot), allow me to clarify the terms of debate. John Barth, high priest of both writing programs and, not coincidentally, postmodern fiction, utterly confuses the form and content of minimalism in his claim that “a language’s repertoire of other-than-basic syntactical devices permits its users to articulate other-than-basic thoughts and feelings” before going on to the utterly wrongheaded conclusion that “Dick-and-Jane prose tends to be emotionally and intellectually poorer than Henry James prose” (70—71). Given, amongst other facts, Canada’s preference for making a creative writing education the smaller fraction in an English—creative writing degree, we routinely share Barth’s preference for sesquipedalian pyrotechnics over social-emotional intelligence. Robert Olen Butler, a senior professor in Florida State University’s influential graduate writing program and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, knows, “We are the yearning creatures of this planet.… Every second we yearn for something. And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning” (40). Canada’s national preference for a writing degree split — almost never equally — between writing workshops and English lecture courses combines with our national refusal to serve our own market for terminal degrees in creative writing and with institutional biases for scholarship over creative production to provide writing educations designed to produce clever and textually deft but emotionally underdeveloped writers.

I did the hybrid MA program at the University of New Brunswick and taught for four years in the one at Windsor. At their best, these hybrid programs combine the (crucial) peer learning of graduate-level writing workshops and creative theses with a good grounding in relevant literature. At their worst, the hybrid programs are like a military education that requires a tour of duty in literature seminars, where candidates will write scholarly essays, not stories or poems. Our national preference for argumentation and citation over emotion in creative writing pedagogy is manifest in the oral thesis “defences” required in these half-English MAs. The title and ritual of a defence suggest that a candidate can argue the merit of her collection of poems or stories, not simply present stories or poems that are their own argument. At Columbia, the largest and arguably most influential creative writing MFA program in the United States, a creative writing thesis passes or fails exclusively as a written document. If it passes, the committee then meets with the student at a “thesis conference” to discuss strengths and challenges (“Columbia Writing”; “Writing”). Canadian thesis defences are a clear hangover from the aped scientism of New Criticism (the zombie engine of English). McGurl’s The Program Era warns, “With its penchant for specialized vocabularies and familiarity with the less-travelled regions of the library, literary scholarship is at least partly in sync with the scientism of its wider institutional environment, the research university. Creative writing, by contrast, might seem to have no ties at all to the pursuit of positive knowledge. It is, rather, an experiment — but more accurately, an exercise — in subjectivity” (405).

Canada’s institutional fear of the inner life wants arguments, not poems, and rarely aesthetic arguments at that. English in Canada remains hostile or indifferent to evaluative criticism. This whistle-blowing from the academic snake pit should illustrate the kinds of people and priorities that govern the majority of creative writing educations in Canada. I spent two years as the coordinator of the creative writing program at Dalhousie University from 2008—10. Dal displays the national preference for a colonial ownership of creative writing by an English department to such a degree that the creative writing program had no permanent faculty from 2008 until 2015. During my two (limited-term) years at Dal, the English department professors strenuously debated whether or not they should reduce their teaching load from five courses over eight months to four. Such a reduction was ultimately endorsed by a nearly unanimous majority, but not before it was clarified to all stakeholders, including upper administration and most notably students, that creative writing professors would continue to teach a full third more than their English colleagues. If you wanted to study Russian, German, or Sanskrit at Dal, you could study with a prof who would be there next year and was paid to answer emails in the summer and who could compete for internal research funding, vote on major committees, and so forth. Not so for creative writing, even though, as the Writers’ Union of Canada points out, Canada’s cultural industries provide roughly twice as much GDP as the agricultural and forestry industries (Pre-Budget).

“Nobody Knows Anything”*****

In the past two decades, creative writing in North America has shifted from the untutored ethos of rock and roll to the formal accreditation of a classical music education. Nonetheless, McGurl, Pink, and Fenza compellingly argue that we’re long past debating whether creative writing can be taught (McGurl 24; Pink 27; “Brief History”). Twenty years ago, Canadian visual artists studied their craft at university, but writers largely didn’t. Writers educated in the 1980s like Douglas Coupland, Lisa Moore, and Margaret Christakos actually majored in visual arts, not writing (“Douglas”; Christakos; “Lisa”). Now, graduate writing programs offer mentoring and peer critique (at a time when editors are busy marketing) as well as exposure to visiting authors, experience on literary journals, and financial assistance. Fenza notes, “Academic programs [in creative writing!] have mustered hundreds of millions of dollars to support the study, making, and enjoyment of literature.” In Canada, creative writing should be a bridge between our multimillion-dollar industries in publishing and tertiary education.

In addition to our national preference for graduate writing degrees that must pay obeisance to codpiece poetry or radical textuality, crucial state institutions like SSHRC also prefer a junior writer’s scholarly potential, not her creative output. In Muriella Pent, Russell Smith’s satire of the culture of culture, an application form for a Toronto artistic residency overtly states “DO NOT ATTACH A WRITING SAMPLE” (106), and “Please note that support materials in the form of writing samples are no longer a part of the application process” (108). This same preference for explanations over art is funny in Canadian satire yet sad in public policy. The very real SSHRC does fund master’s and PhD students (including creative writing students), yet its application similarly forbids a writing sample (“Eligibility”; Chaumont). SSHRC applicants submit a bibliography, but not a writing sample. SSHRC could be a significant patron of the Canadian arts. In 2008—09, SSHRC doled out more than $300 million in grants and fellowships to graduate students, faculty, institutions, and research projects, yet very little of that money went to storytellers and their traffic in social-emotional intelligence. The searchable awards database at the SSHRC site finds fewer than 5 fiction projects out of 121 projects in its Research/Creation Grants in the Fine Arts program for faculty (“Research/Creation”). Even the slash in the program title (always the hybrids!) shows our national refusal to respect art as art: English scholars and art historians could apply to this program in addition to other SSHRC standard research grants that would fund writing about novels but not the writing of novels. Write, and SSHRC had half a biennial program for you; write about, and it has several. I served on a SSHRC Research/Creation jury in 2015—16, and nearly all the projects recommended for funding were exclusively scholarly and not creative or artistic (“Insight”). The same jury that was tasked with evaluating proposals for plays and novels also had proposals for exclusively scholarly articles or books on Shakespeare and Byzantine art in the same competition. The latter, not the former, received almost all the recommendations for funding. Not funding stories means not funding characters and, arguably, emotions and the inner life.

The political fallout of Canada’s creative writing hostage-taking extends beyond where and what is studied by whom and includes, perhaps most significantly, what is written. Our national preference for arguments over art-making risks a hyper-rational ghettoization of graduate creative writing material. For almost half a century Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” has called for “in place of a hermeneutics … an erotics of art,” yet we keep steeping our writing students in hermeneutics, not aesthetics (7). University-trained (American) writer Sandra Cisneros states overtly that when she wrote her breakthrough novel The House on Mango Street she consciously used “a child’s voice, a girl’s voice” as an explicitly “anti-academic voice” (xv). The marginalization of emotional complexity within so-called humanities disciplines can additionally distance the marginal voices many profs claim to serve.

“Ugly with an Explanation”******

Canada’s disregard for emotional complexity creates a creative writing pedagogy that denies students literature’s fundamental work with empathy. Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Be Near Me has the best, and shortest, definition of education I’ve ever read: “managed revelation” (32). Too often in Canada, a creative writing education involves conscripted decorum or endless reading lists from somewhere else, whether it be England, the past, or the developing world instead of “managed revelation” (32). Days after 9/11, Ian McEwan published a Guardian article that hinges on literature’s stimulation of empathy: “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality” (“Only Love”). Aesthetic theoreticians and cognitive psychologists also recognize the ways in which literature, especially narrative literature, allow us to expand our minds by thinking like others. In a section of his The Art Instinct called “The Uses of Fiction,” Denis Dutton argues that “of all the arts, [fiction] is the best suited to portray the mundane imaginative structures of memory, immediate perception, planning, calculation, and decision-making, both as we experience them ourselves and as we understand others to be experiencing them. But storytelling is also capable of taking us beyond the ordinary, and therein lies its mind-expanding capacity. To understand, intellectually and emotionally, the mind of another is a distinct ability that emerges … [an] evolved adaptation” (119). Dutton goes on to conclude, “Fiction provides us, then, with templates, mental maps for emotional life” (122). Cognitive psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley summarizes human conversation as “verbal grooming” and suggests, “The primary function of conversation is to maintain relationships — a large number of relationships — and to maintain intimacy in relationships” (86; emphasis added).

The empathy-rich medium of fiction is not simply a font of emotion, but also intelligence. Creativity scholar and educational psychologist Howard Gardner observes that “many people with IQs of 160 work for people with IQs of 100.… In the day-to-day world no intelligence is more important than the interpersonal” (qtd. in Goleman 41). A national creative writing education that privileges literary analysis over literary production shuns interpersonal intelligence. George Eliot claims, “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.… Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men” (qtd. in Cooke 144). One can hear the phrase “rhizomatic poetics” in any Canadian university English department (including those that offer creative writing); one rarely hears the word “empathy” (or the excitement that attends to rhizomatism). We adore the fragmentary but disparage feelings. Harvard psychology PhD Daniel Goleman calls social-emotional intelligence “a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect” (36). In a land of methodology, thesis defences, bibliographies, and “uncreative writing,” the crucial “meta-ability” of emotional intelligence fostered by literature is not meeting its maximum audience.

“The Great Generosities”

As a university discipline, creative writing should be a thinking and communication tool, and it deserves a place at every institute of higher learning. Unacceptably, however, writing in Canada is managed (and sometimes even taught) by profs who have never published creative writing or have not published it in decades. Not even Canada would short-change its music or fine arts students in this way, yet we’ll appoint unqualified English profs to direct or even teach story writing. Fenza knows: “In addition to advancing the art of literature, creative writing workshops exercise and strengthen the resourcefulness of the human will, and it is the exercise of will not over others, but for others, as stories and poems are made as gifts for readers and listeners.” Henry James also attends to the “great generosities” of writing: “We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities” (86). In Canada, university after university has created a writing education that cheats its paying students of the great generosities of social-emotional intelligence.

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