Blind spots: what creative writing doesn’t know

Abstract

The Creative Writing program at the University of East Anglia – the longest established in the UK and the first of its kind outside the USA – was founded in part as a reaction against a Theory-driven conception of Literary Studies that was felt to be indifferent to questions of aesthetic value and the authority of authorship. In this article I trace the history of Creative Writing at UEA and outline my understanding of the nature of the relationship between creative and critical practice in order to examine questions of knowledge that hinge on the following three questions: What does Literary Studies know? What does Creative Writing know that’s different? What might Literary Studies know that Creative Writing doesn’t need to know? The answers to these questions, I suggest, may offer an argument against the incursion into the Creative Writing workshop of pedagogical approaches that derive from Literary Studies and are blind to the importance of ‘non-knowing’ in creative practice.