When everyone's an author

The only books students want to read are their own, writes Rosemary Neill in The Australian, February 09, 2008

WHEN Michael Wilding set up the University of Sydney's first creative writing course in the late 1980s, his motives weren't entirely high-minded.

As the emeritus professor and novelist confessed recently in Review: "The respectable and the serious were gradually being excised from the university ... (and) I decided to take advantage of the general collapse of tradition. So I proposed a creative writing course." Wilding also recalled how "the traditional Australian universities were deeply suspicious of creative writing and creative writers in those years".

Two decades on, universities across the nation, from traditional sandstone campuses with cashmere-soft lawns to brutalist high-rise towers with a strong vocational bent, are awash with wannabe writers. According to a guide produced by the Australian Association of Writing Programs, in 2006, 33 of the nation's 38 universities offered creative writing courses, with some attracting hundreds of undergraduate and postgraduate students.
At the University of Technology, Sydney last year, 278 undergraduates and 205 postgraduates studied various forms of creative writing. At the University of Melbourne, two first-year, semester-long courses in creative writing attracted a total of 620 enrolments (some students did both courses). Although few comparative figures are available, John Dale, director of the UTS Centre for New Writing, estimates that nationally, writing students may well outnumber those studying traditional literature.

"Creative writing courses are spreading while traditional English literature courses are declining," Dale tells Review.
In a recent article, Dale wrote: "Creative writing as an area of study is booming in Australia ... Australian universities now offer more than 70 of these courses. There are numerous mature-age students willing to pay universities $100-plus an hour to sit in a postgraduate writing class."
The creative writing boom throws up striking paradoxes. It seems students have an insatiable appetite for expressing themselves in print at a time when mainstream publishing opportunities have diminished.
Many of the bigger publishers don't produce as many literary novels as they once did. The vast majority have axed their poetry lists, while the short story is an endangered form.
And while the under-25s are often perceived as a generation of reluctant readers, more interested in the Ten Network's Big Brother than in the Orwellian version, unprecedented numbers of them apparently want to be writers.

Former creative writing teacher Terri-Anne White, who now runs the University of Western Australia Press, reveals that when she asked her writing undergraduates to bring in a book that meant a lot to them, most brought in works by Colleen McCullough, Bryce Courtenay or other habitues of the bestseller lists.
White didn't judge them for this: "For me, it was much bigger than thinking about anything literary. For me, it was about jumping in at the deep end and thinking about how a sentence might be formed."

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