The Young Creative Writer in the Classroom

Abstract

MY REMIARKS TODAY will center upon the activity of writing in the classroommore specifically what gets termed writing. don't like the term, but at least it identifies the area. Mostly I'm concerned with the young people who might be performing this activity, the young or potential Creative Writers. Three questions: How do you recognize them? Do you really want them? What do you do with them? When was approached to speak, was told that a general theme of these meetings was to be something like Building Bridges. Thus, suppose, was to take the role of an engineer blueprinting the bridge from untrained to trained creativity, a kind of mental Oakland-Bav bridge. It's a neat idea . . . in any sense of that word. And there are people attempting Newtonian models which will simulate creative activity, thus making it infinitely replicable. But am not one of those people. In fact, if find out where one of these people lives, will break into that person's house with great stealth in the dark of night and bust up his or her model. Which means will be arrested . . . jailed. So that can sit down in my cell and write about the whole experience-in the manner of these days. Now these references to criminal or asocial behavior, even though they might seem so, are not glib. Creativity is a lovely word: musical, shining. It has a nimbus around it. It has angel hair. We all want it. I just wish were creative. How many times have heard that. You're so lucky to be creative. Nobody's against Heavens no-heresy! Stuff the class room full of it! Let it spill out the door into the corridor. Hey, Joe. Bring me some more creativity. Unfortunately, perhaps, think we have to ultimately recognize that as a popular and fairly naive view. It's the view arrived at on the heels of having just seen Michelangelo's David or having just heard Beethoven's Erocia, or having just read Frost's Stopping by Woods. Get these people! Bring them into our classroom! Yes! Instruct, apprentice others like them! But it's a view which neglects not only artists of all darker works, but the shadowed and disjunctive daily lives behind the makers of even these works above. On innumerable occasions Lesley Frost would have gladly given you her father for your classroom. And, once having him, even Monday through Friday, have little doubt but that most of you would think again. make reference to disruptive living and behavior. For disruptive could sub-