When a former creative writing tutor wrote an article criticising his students, all hell broke loose. Why did this particular piece hit such a chord with the writing community? We spoke to an ex-student from the same school – and want to hear your views
Writer Ryan Boudinot caused a furore last week with an essay laying into creative writing courses. He had recently quit teaching on an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program in the US, and felt that gave him the freedom to spell out a few home truths. His essay for The Stranger magazine provoked internet outrage, including Twitter attacks and defences, blog posts against the piece and open letters asking the magazine to pull it.
“The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it,” he wrote. Though his piece was blunt and cruel at times, it wasn’t exactly news: creative writing programmes have been analysed – and criticised – to exhaustion. Indeed, they recently became the butt of Lena Dunham’s comedy, when she depicted the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop in a less-than-flattering light in her TV show Girls.
Not long ago Toni Morrison pointed out that “it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play. When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that.’”
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“The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it,” he wrote. Though his piece was blunt and cruel at times, it wasn’t exactly news: creative writing programmes have been analysed – and criticised – to exhaustion. Indeed, they recently became the butt of Lena Dunham’s comedy, when she depicted the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop in a less-than-flattering light in her TV show Girls.
Not long ago Toni Morrison pointed out that “it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play. When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that.’”
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1 comment:
Fascinating. What sensitive little creatures they are over there!
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