True enough, it can’t be taught, in exactly the same way you can’t teach a mathematician how to be a talented mathematician or a historian how to be a talented historian. What you can do is teach people something of the science of maths or the discipline of history; above all, you can help them to learn, to establish their own identities as practitioners.
And that’s what happens on our Creative Writing MAs at Bath Spa University. We create an environment in which writers can learn about their craft, and themselves, and begin to forge an individual identity on the page. And by “we” I don’t just mean the tutors, I mean everyone involved, the students most of all. In the workshops we unite the two activities that were so catastrophically separated in the early days of my teaching career. We read ongoing work, appraise it, make suggestions – in the most supportive and affi rmative sense of the word, we criticise. And week by week the creative work gets done, with the results that you can see in the following pages. Its variety and vitality show that literature can be a living tradition as well as an academic discipline. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some of these pieces grow and develop; others are as new to me as they will be to you. It has been a privilege to be involved with the creativity displayed here, and a joy to think that the frustrations and limitations of my early career have been laid to rest by a generation of writers able to use a university to help them find a voice.
Richard Francis
Professor of Creative Writing