In academia, especially at writing universities such as the UI, a debate lingers over whether writing, particularly creative writing, can be taught. Is writing based on talent, something that can be honed but not truly taught? Or is it something that anyone can learn?
A panel of writers from the UI International Writing Program will seek to answer these questions in a discussion Friday in Iowa City Public Library Meeting Room A, 123 S. Linn St., from noon to 1:30 p.m.
For the various writers on the panel, teaching writing happens in different ways and for different reasons.
“People who want to write have to write,” Venezuelan author Fedosy Santaella said.
Santaella, who teaches part of a two-year university course in Caracas, said that the basics of writing are important for everyone to learn.
Dung Kai-cheung, a fiction writer from Hong Kong, asserts that all writers learn writing even if they don’t take courses, so there’s no reason to assume that writing can’t be taught.
“Of course I think writing can be taught, or else I wouldn’t have anything to do,” he joked. “While many great writers may not have attended a course on writing, they certainly have gone through a period of learning the craft of writing. The difference is that many writers may not learn it by themselves, but that’s no reason we cannot help people to learn it through teaching.”
On the other hand, some believe that writing can only be taught when the student has a gift for it. Kathy White of New Zealand said it’s difficult to teach writing to people who don’t possess a natural talent in the craft.
“I’m not sure that you can actually teach writing,” she said. “You can have people who have skills, but if they’re not organized skills, if they’re not managing to draw everything together, you can teach people the basics of writing.”
White, who teaches writing in short courses and also works as a librarian, said one may be able to teach writing to all people, but talent is the most important factor in determining whether a writer will be successful.
“When you’re teaching, you get such a mixture of people,” White said. “You really don’t know until you get somebody just how much is there that you can help them develop. You can teach guidelines, but you can’t actually teach a talent.”
Yasser Abdel-Latif, a writer from Egypt, asserts that writing cannot be taught at all if people don’t have that talent.
“Writing cannot be taught,” he said. “In my workshops, I always select the people I teach based on some previous text. They must have a minimum of talent to be accepted in my workshop.”
For Mabrouck Rachedi, teaching writing isn’t just something that can be done, it is something that needs to be done.
He teaches writing in his native France on a community level, as opposed to at universities. He specializes in teaching writing not to aspiring literary giants but to working-class people.
“They want to learn,” Rachedi said. “In some towns, they have nobody to teach them.”
He said his community-based workshops give people a new perspective on writing and allow them to capture their experiences in a meaningful way. Dung agrees.
“Writing is a way of understanding yourself,” he said. “To write, you have to have a deep understanding, you have to go through this process of sorting out what you think and what you feel so as to write it down. It’s also a good way of understanding your relationships with other people.”