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Creative writing is not merely the practice of writing. It is as well a mode of literary study where literature is defined as an activity of judgment, of deciding for oneself among possibilites, and study is defined as attending to something more than the evidence of one’s approach.
At its best creative writing is an initiation into what the late Michael Oakeshott referred to as the conversation of mankind.
Young writers, that is, are urged to add their voice to an uninterrupted continuity of literary speech and make every sentence palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllabes and so give for readers a chance to join the writer in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of the human possibility.
Unless literature is open to new voices it is a museum where everything is hushed and the lesson of creative writing’s history is that if the writers do not attend to literature, no one will.
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