Resources - Discussion Papers

What are we creating in creative writing?

Ray Misson, University of Melbourne

A keynote address presented at the 2001 AATE/ALEA Joint National Conference

Before trying to answer the question in my title, I want to say something about why I thought it was worth asking the question in the first place?

Creative Writing is something that happens in English and literacy classes right through schooling, from kids in prep making up a story to Year 12 students producing a Writing Folio, and yet, there is not currently a lot that is written about it, at least in a theoretical way. There are books that give ideas for creative writing classes, and the odd article in the journals, usually descriptive of (often excellent) practice, but it’s not something that is talked about very much at all. Certainly, after the furore of the process/genre debates in the eighties, the nineties on the whole were remarkably silent on the matter of creative writing, and that seems to be continuing into the new century.

Now when there is this kind of shift in the questions people are asking, what in a subject they think is worth talking about, it’s always interesting to ask why and what the implications are, particularly when, as I think is the case here, the actual classroom practice hasn’t varied much: there is as much creative writing going on in schools now as there ever was. Asking such questions can help us to break open the boxes we’re currently thinking in, and move through to a new and richer conception of what the subject might be.

You’ll notice too that a number of times through what I am saying here, my strategy is to try to break down some of the binary oppositions that structure our thinking. It’s a simple version of a deconstructive strategy: I try to show that the opposition is not absolute, but the two terms are involved in each other. I think this too is useful in breaking us out of constraining boxes. However, I also think this collapsing of opposites can be done so easily because writing is an art form, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s of the nature of the aesthetic to hold in tension what might be binary opposites in other domains. We’ll return to this notion of writing as an art form a couple of times.

Before going any further, I should say something about how I am defining creative writing. Well, I’m not, or only very loosely. I don’t want to limit it to just fictional writing, or to just personal "confessional" writing, or to "free" writing. In fact, what I want to say is probably true of pretty well all writing. But, because I want to bracket off the debates around different kinds of writing pedagogy to produce classroom genres, I have taken the cowardly way out and used the term "creative writing".

I’ve also been interested for a couple of years now in the aesthetic , creativity and the imagination, and their place in English classes, and so the term "creative writing" is useful for signalling this bundle of concerns.

What I want to do first, is prepare the way by suggesting that some of the oppositions on which we build our understanding of language and literacy are not at all such clear oppositions as they may seem and are constantly collapsing together.

Most definitions of literacy talk about it as having to do with the four macro skills — reading, writing , speaking and listening, and we divide them in terms of mode, written or spoken, or, more interestingly, in terms of reception and production.

This reception/production distinction is not an entirely easy one. Our reception of a text is a productive process. We don’t simply receive what is there: we produce a reading of it. This is most obvious in something like an essay in a literature exam, but it’s true of all reading and listening. It was one of those ideas that we grappled with in the early days of literary theory in the eighties: that there is no pure unimpeded access to a text, but rather every reading of a text produces a new text since we have changed and the context will have changed, even if only by having read the text before. Reading/listening are active processes, and so they are productive processes. You are producing my words for yourself, even as I speak them.

And the production of texts is a receptive process. In the moment we write something, we read it, - in the moment we speak, we hear - we test its effect, its capacity to convey something like what we want conveyed. We recognise its possible impact.

Bakhtin is the person who has theorised this reciprocal interdependence between reception and production most fully and interestingly (albeit in rather different terms) in his work on dialogism. "Dialogue" implies both speaking and listening, reading and writing, reception and production. You can’t have a dialogue unless you both listen and speak: without listening, you just have parallel monologues.

Bakhtin saw this reciprocal "dialogue" as absolutely fundamental to the nature of language, although I want to quote his colleague Voloshinov:

So, the distinction between reception and production is not as clear as we might have thought. It will be no surprise that I would want argue that fundamental to both reception and production is a critical capacity: that has been one of the points of dogma in Australian literacy studies ever since the famous definition of literacy in the Australian Language and Literacy Policy as involving "the integration of speaking, listening and critical thingking with reading and writing" . Less universally received is the view that fundamental to both reception and production of language is imagination (as I argued in the address I gave in Adelaide in 1999). These two terms — "critical capacity" and "imagination" - might be seen to be fairly opposed: critical capacity having to do with objectivity and bringing things into the clear light of reason, with imposing constraints and limits: imagination having to do with emotion, fantasy and moving beyond the rational, being seen as marked by freedom from constraints. However, once again, if we push a little, we will see how thoroughly implicated they are with each other in both reception and production of language.

If we map critical capacity and imagination onto the production/reception distinction, it’s easy to see how they initially line up.

Critical capacity most naturally aligns with reception. One hears an utterance, one reads a text, and one brings it into the light of critical intelligence. Critical Literacy is predicated on analysing representations, developing a critical understanding of how a text is constructing the world, critically understanding what a text is trying to do in positioning its readers.

Imagination most obviously aligns with production. We imagine something, and out of our mind we produce, we create. More than this (and this is what I’m going to be on about in much of what I say here) we imagine ourselves (particularly in school writing) into being the kind of person who writes this kind of text. We imagine and so create a particular kind of world.

However, imagination is also fundamental to reception. When we are reading, if we are reading well, we project ourselves into the text. In fact, we can only make sense of the text through the imagination. To understand, we need to imagine a relationship to the kind of text it is. We imagine what the outcomes of making our own what this text is saying might be.

Equally, a critical capacity is basic to production. Any text is the product of self-critical processes. We exercise critical control to see if the text is being constructed to achieve the effects we want. The words are objectified even as they are spoken or written, and we are constantly making adjustments as we critically judge whether our words strike the right note or not.

So, just to recapitulate, I am making the point that critical and imaginative powers are very closely linked, and while we may think that criticism is linked with reception, and imagination with production, in fact it is important to fill in the other two quadrants of that grid as well, and acknowledge that imagination is involved in reception and a critical capacity in production.

The basis of this is that emotion and reason are in fact very closely linked, but we’ll come to that later.

Having given this background, I want to turn to the question of why there hasn’t been a lot of academic work on writing during the last decade. I think it’s partly to do with the fact that people are generally quite comfortable with current modes of teaching writing. Allan Luke, in his opening plenary address, said that in their research in Queensland schools, they found the teaching of writing, on the whole, unproblematic (although before allowing ourselves to breathe a sigh of relief about that, we might well ask what criteria they were judging against; it could beg the question of what a writing curriculum might be asked to do).

However, I think the lack of attention to writing is also to do with the dominant interests in theorising about literacy education in the nineties, which were predicated firmly on a social view of language acting as the basis for critique — critical literacy. Now, as we’ve seen the critical capacity most obviously aligns with reception, so critical literacy is predominantly a pedagogy of reception — reading and listening. You look at texts and you see how they are constructed, what values are being promoted, what is absent from the text, how it’s trying to position you ideologically, how it’s trying to make you receive it. I think this way of working created an inherent problem in developing a writing pedagogy. To caricature somewhat, if you believe that all texts are ideological (and undoubtedly they are) and if that makes you inclined to see the writer as the enemy who is trying to get you in, and your main interest is in uncovering the ideology in texts, then what a writing pedagogy would seem to be doing is teaching people how to become one of these morally suspect people who write ideologically slanted texts of which we all really ought to be deeply suspicious. It seemed better, on the whole, to pass over writing in silence.

Most critical literacy pedagogy requires an objectifying move. You need to stand back and look at what the text is trying to do to you. Now you can do that on your own writing, and that’s a kind of writing pedagogy that Barbara Kamler has used with terrific results, particularly in her work with ageing women, but I think that it’s worth noting that it turns the piece of writing into a text to be read rather than embedding the critical practice within the productive process. (Barbara’s recent book, Relocating the Personal , is very good. Much of what I’m saying here is a kind of implicit dialogue with it — agreeing/extending/disagreeing - but I didn’t want to turn this address into a book review, so the dialogue will remain implicit. While I’m in bibliographic mode, the other book always referred to when people start talking about Critical Literacy and writing is Romy Clark and Roz Ivanic’s The Politics of Writing . I confess I find it a bit unsatisfying. It covers all the ground that critical literacy books do about how writing operates socially and how all texts are ideological, but, in the end it says virtually nothing about the classroom , i.e. what the implications of all this might be when you’re actually teaching writing, and it says very little about personal/imaginative writing, which is symptomatic of the inability of critical literacy to accommodate the imaginative easily.)

Anyway, getting back to our question. What are we creating in creative writing? I don’t think my answer to the question will come as a surprise to any of you. It’s the good poststructuralist answer, the good critical literacy answer: we are creating ourselves. We write ourselves into being. A second answer won’t surprise you either: we are creating a world. By framing whatever we’re looking at in particular ways, we create a particular version of the world (and all worlds are only versions).

Now, I think those answers are basically right, and I guess when I first thought of talking about writing here, I imagined that they are the answers I would triumphantly work towards. However, what I really want to do is take them and look at the ways in which they are right and the ways in which they are misleading, and follow through some of their implications.

Let me give a quotation from Foucault, not just because every self-respecting paper has to have at least one reference to Foucault in it these days, but because he genuinely is behind much of what I’m saying. He is speaking in an interview about the trajectory of his intellectual life:

If you want a summary for an ideal of what writing should achieve, I think that that last sentence could well be your slogan: "…I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before."

We don’t write (just) to express ourselves. Another quotation, this one from Gilles Deleuze (who, among certain groups, is even trendier than Foucault these days):

Within critical theory, there has been a lot of critique of expressivism, the idea that texts are the expression of pre-existent ideas emanating from a pre-existent self, and that to understand the meaning we move back through the text to the originating self. (This is what Barthes was arguing against in "The Death of the Author".) What’s happening with writing is something much more dynamic, much more creative, much more involved in the moment of writing itself.

However, there is another opposition there that I want to put under a question mark and try to collapse: that between expression and creation. While I think it’s strategic to insist on the importance of exploratory writing, that we don’t have texts formed in our heads before we start, the extreme view that the concept and the text come into being at the same moment simply doesn’t accord with our experiences. We all experience ourselves as thinking/feeling beings, and it is out of that experience of ourselves that we write. We write with pre-existent purpose, we write to express things.

What’s remarkable is that, at the same time as that, within the process of expression, we also create. We find ourselves saying more or less than we thought. We are constantly surprising ourselves. There is always (as Derrida has argued in a rather different way) an excess to writing, something other than we intended. It’s not that we discover what we really think, because we have not thought it until we wrote it. So, writing is a complex mesh of simultaneous expressing and creating, and the two things can’t be separated. No-one ever wrote seriously without an expressive purpose. Similarly, I don’t imagine anyone ever wrote (a complex text at least), that was not something different from that initiating expressive purpose, that didn’t produce an excess of meaning. I’ll give an example of this in a minute. (Bakhtin is also interesting on this, with his reflections on the connection between inner speech and outer speech.)

So writing is simultaneously a way of expressing what was thought and of thinking the unthought — to return to Foucault’s terms: "not thinking the same thing as before". I want now to turn to the other element from Foucault, that notion of writing as an experience that transforms the self. I suppose it’s self-evident that if you are thinking differently than you were before, then in some sense you have been transformed. The question seems to me to be how far we can push this, or how far we want to push it.

This is bound up with whatever view you might hold of how human beings are constructed, and this is not the place to get into those questions. It’s also to do with how you conceive the relationship between the individual, experience and language.

In older models, the basic idea was that experience came to the individual and then the individual expressed it in language. These days we see language as much more central to the process than this suggests. The individual can only process experience through language, and experience acts through language and creates a particular kind of individual. If an event happens, it can be seen through various frames, discourses: the stories we tell ourselves about the event will shape the person we are. Of course, we tell ourselves stories in lots of different ways. I lose my car keys and I can turn it into a tragedy, a farce, a sociological study of our dependence on motor vehicles, a psychological study of how stress manifests itself… and in each case I will be creating myself (to myself as much as to others), as a different person. All of those different tellings are in my repertoire, and all the different selves (subjectivities) out of which those tellings would emanate are part of me.

It’s part of what teachers should be doing, making students capable of those different tellings, and making them able to discriminate which version they need to and can responsibly tell at a particular time. (This is exactly what Jonothan Neelands was talking about in his plenary address.)

In some ways what I’ve been giving here is a classic account of socially-produced multiple subjectivities, how we are not unified people but can perfectly easily accommodate quite different readings of the same experience, seen through different discourses, how we can live perfectly easily in contradictory responses and beliefs. What interests me more at the moment is the question of what allows them to coexist together, and what it is that activates us into telling one story rather than the other, what actually makes us prefer one possible view, entertain some elements of a second, and reject a third. In other words, I am finding the classic multiple subjectivities theorization rather too limiting, but that’s another story.

There is no doubt that changing the discourse, shifting the perspective can be very powerful, and can have massively beneficial effects, not just socially, but personally. It allows people to see how they might be more powerful in their life worlds. It’s also the premise on which much therapy operates — you tell and retell your story until you arrive at a version that you can live with happily. And there is no doubt that a lot of creative writing can have therapeutic effects. Barbara Kamler has some particularly striking examples of this in her book where people have been transformed by retelling their stories in different ways . Kevin Brophy in his book on creativity talks about the enormous popularity of creative writing programs for adults , and I suspect that the driving purpose of all these people (apart from fame and fortune) is therapeutic, self-transformation.

Note how emotion is bound up in all of this. It is not just a matter of thinking differently, but of feeling differently. Foucault talks about writing as an experience, and "an experience is something that one comes out of transformed" Such transformation is never just a rational matter. In fact, as I foreshadowed, I want to suggest that feeling and reason are closely bound up with each other. Early last year in Queensland, I gave an address in which I tried to demonstrate how you couldn’t divorce the affective from knowledge and skills . A few months later, Ros Arnold from Sydney alerted me to the work of the neurologist Antonio Damasio . What Damasio argues very convincingly from a wealth of neurological evidence is that feeling is bound up with reason, that in fact when the parts of the brain that are concerned with emotion and feeling are damaged, people can’t reason properly either. So when we know things differently, it is inevitably not just intellectual knowing but emotional knowing. Ros Arnold has done some interesting work relating this to empathy — empathic intelligence — and I would argue in fact that empathic intelligence is something that is necessary for (and developed by) creative writing

But all of this is pretty theoretical. What does it mean in practice and what are its implications for education?

What I want to do for the rest of my time is, first of all, give grounding to some of the things I’ve been saying by, perhaps rather self-indulgently, doing some introspection about a piece of writing I did recently, and then finally look in two different ways at how all this might affect what is done in the classroom.

When you’re thinking through a topic like this, you inevitably look to your own practice, and test what you’re saying against it. It would be a bit too ridiculously reflexive to talk about the processes of writing this present talk, but I was thinking about the processes of writing the opening sentence of an article I finished earlier this year that will be published later this year in a book edited by Michele Anstey and Geoff Bull called Crossing the Boundaries . It’s a book that looks at how cultural theory might be valuable in reading children’s and young adult literature, and I was writing a chapter on gay and lesbian theory.

My thinking went something like this. I wanted the piece to be fairly assertive, even a bit confronting, because it’s easy to fall into being apologetic about bringing homosexuality to the attention of people when they might prefer one remained silent about it. I also think it’s not good enough just to treat homosexuality as a social issue. So, from the beginning I wanted to take a strong position. I wanted a fairly arresting opening to establish this, and also partly because I thought it was a chapter that people might think they could pass over, and if they even began to read it, I wanted them to be caught up for a bit.

So the driving force was not so much what I wanted to say, but a kind of feeling, a kind of impact that I wanted to have on the reader. (That’s usually true for me: the general feeling of the piece, the tone I want to strike, always seems to be one of the first considerations there before getting down to the particulars of the points I want to make. You can see why I’m sympathetic to Damasio. I have just never been able to think of argument or academic writing or even administrative writing as unrelated to feeling.)

The opening gesture came to me from a number of sources. The experience it’s drawing on is other writing, and there’s a quite complex intertextuality going on. There is a fantastic moment at the very end of Jonathon Dollimore’s book Sexual Dissidence. It’s a very long, heavily theoretical and quite difficult book, but he ends it with these sentences:

I remember the first time I read that almost having my breath taken away by that sudden emergence of the personal into the academic. Memory of this moment coalesced with an article by Bronwyn Davies in a journal to which I also contributed on Sexualities and Schooling. Bronwyn started her article, entitled "The Discourse of Love":

O.K. so I had "love" as the place to start. But what to say about it. A third element came in. I have been reading Deborah Britzman and her book Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Towards a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. I won’t go on to explain what she says about it, but she has a discussion around a sentence from Samuel Delany, - she relates it to education — "Why speak of what’s uncomfortable to speak of?" . I had been thinking about difficulty and not taking the line of least resistance in class, but actually confronting the uncomfortable, the difficult — I’ll come back to this later. So, the article now starts:

It’s hard to talk about love in a classroom.

(Originally, it was ‘It’s difficult to talk about love in a classroom’, but ‘hard’ was more aesthetically pleasing.) That seemed to me pretty good Then I thought, "Oh, shit, I’ve got to say why." So the demands of writing, the genre, if you like, led me to articulate some reasons. I then felt the need for a parallel structure, "It’s hard to talk about desire in a classroom." In the end, the opening became a kind of academic prose poem.

So, out of a need to write something on a topic I’d promised, a desire to hit a particular note, bits of reading I had done and phrases I had picked up, my combinative imagination, my rational and critical capacities, the demands of the genre, my sense of aesthetics, I produced this piece of writing, and thought things that I had not thought before.

But, with regard to the other aspect of our Foucault quote, did I come out of it transformed? I remember thinking as I was writing it that I was creating a writing position, a sense of myself, that was rather unlike anything I had done before and that I didn’t know I was capable of. Certainly I thought, I couldn’t have written this two years ago. The confidence to write it came out of changes that have happened in my life over that time. So, in a complex mesh with other experience, the experience of writing did transform me, create a new self, at least through the recognition of a new self. If you ask, did my friends and family notice any difference, the answer is almost certainly no. But then, writing the article was only a small part of my life, and the rest was either going on in similar ways as always or other changes were happening there. I think one of the problems with multiple subjectivities talk is that people rarely acknowledge the multiplicity of the subject positions we take up in a day, the myriad selves we call on , and the complexity of the relations between them, which make it’s unlikely that you will ever write some single thing that changes you personally in a way that anyone else would notice. All that one can hope for is accretion towards some beneficial change.

Which brings me to the classroom.

The first thing that needs to be said, as a kind of preface, is that, so far I’ve been talking about writing done outside the classroom for some purpose — authentic writing if you like. I think we’ve got to accept that very little of the writing done in literacy classes is really authentic, except insofar as it’s an authentic school task. Most of the writing is at best a rehearsal for authenticity. I like the drama metpahor in that phrase because it suggests the taking on of the particular writer identity. Teachers are setting up situations in which students can practice, take on the role of being a particular kind of writer in a particular kind of situation.

What ought we to be creating in creative writing? Why is creative writing important?

Some would say that one reason for its importance is that it provides an open space for students to reflect on their personal lives and come to terms with their experience — the therapeutic answer. My initial reaction is to reject this out of hand because it seems so uncritical, but I don’t want to be unfair. There is no doubt that this opportunity to recreate something of their experience and come to terms with it is valuable for some kids, perhaps at some time valuable for all kids. And it’s particularly valuable if the teacher intervenes and asks the kids to think through other frameworks, get different perspectives, think differently than before.

However, "personal" writing is not something to build a writing curriculum on. The classroom is not the confessional or the psychiatrist’s couch, and, thankfully, most kids don’t have enough new traumas (as opposed to ongoing traumas) in their lives to provide interesting material for more than a major therapeutic piece every now and then. Besides there is a fundamental ethical problem with getting kids to expose their personal lives in their writing, and it’s not something any teacher should ask. The words "Just write how you feel" should be banned from all classrooms, for all sorts of reasons.

The writing curriculum is valuable because it is a place where

Any writing curriculum should be based on an understanding that each act of writing does give a partial view of the world, which is a fundamental understanding in critical literacy, that in framing the world in language we cut out other perspectives. But this needs to be seen as a potential strength. We can’t understand anything if it’s not framed in certain ways: framing is not just a way of limiting but a way of understanding . We can’t achieve anything, make our writing matter, unless we frame experience in a way that makes sense of it. One of the favourite critical literacy questions, because of a suspicion of the partiality of framing, is "what views are absent from this text." It’s a valuable question, but a more valuable one when writing is "Do the views as represented in this text allow me to understand or achieve what I want?" And, of course, "Is what I want to achieve worth achieving?’

Alternatively, rather than the absence question, I prefer the consequences question: "O.K. this is what the text is saying: imagine the consequences if this view were carried through. Tell me a story about it." So, rather than suspicion, we go into productive mode. We imagine how things might really operate in the world, albeit reminding ourselves that it is only one version of how things might operate in one world.

I think a writing curriculum should help students understand themselves, but understand themselves as huge potential. By getting them to write in different ways, imagine different stories that might be told about the same event, they come to understand the possibilities within themselves. There needs to be at least a basic understanding that they can operate in different discourses, create themselves as different people and relate to their world in different ways. The basic notion of multiple subjectivities isn’t a hard concept to get. There actually was a wonderful teaching opportunity for this during Wimbledon, although it was a fairly extreme case: I’m of course referring to Goran Ivanisevic, who, you undoubtedly know, has two contradictory Gorans inside of him. This isn’t particularly notable or postmodern. The notion of there being warring selves within the person has a long history particularly in Christian thought, right down through Walt Disney cartoons, where moral dilemmas were often projected as an angelic and a devilish version of Donald Duck or whoever it was arguing with each other. What was interesting and a bit postmodern about Goran Ivanisevic though, was that there was Emergency Goran, this third figure who he could call on to mediate between the other two. That’s a wonderful writing opportunity. Create the three Gorans in dialogue, or giving their view of the same event. Or create three versions of yourself including an Emergency one.

Such an exercise, actually, can have a therapeutic outcome. While I don’t think students should be required to expose their own emotional issues in a classroom, they can be given the opportunity to do it through narrative. They can consider their own concerns safely through projecting them into other actions and other characters.

I also think that writing classes should be about the art of writing. In curriculum documents, because of the broad uses of language, writing/literature is always hived off into a separate Learning Area or Field of Study called English. But a natural place for writing/literature is in the Arts Learning Area, and I actually think we could learn a lot from looking at some of the Arts curriculum and asking what it can suggest for English. Arts curricula usually are less sophisticated in their notions of social context and their theorization of what the study is aiming at, but they do often have a more detailed sense of the process of developing the work, the craft, the technique, and also of the processes in the classroom. E.g. the kind of work I did on my opening sentence, articulating my intentions, the influences, the materials out of which it was made - the process - would not be unusual in Visual Arts classes if I were talking about developing a painting or a collage. Students are asked to keep visual diaries. Jonothan Neelands in his address related Drama and English in various ways, but I think the normal reflective debriefing session at the end of a drama activity is something English teachers could learn from. We set writing tasks that can take as much imaginative commitment as a drama improvisation, but we often don’t feel any responsibility for bringing the students down from it and giving them a chance to talk it through.

All this takes work on the part of the teacher, and I want to finish by stressing this, because I think there is at times a temptation to see the creative writing part of the curriculum as the friendly, open part where the kids can disport themselves freely. But a writing curriculum such as I’ve been suggesting where kids are learning about how writing leads to new ways of thinking and new selves won’t just happen. It takes a lot of setting up, and can be met with resistance.

I mentioned Deborah Britzman’s work before. She starts off her book with a quotation from Anna Freud, who writes:

Education is not always a wonderfully benign process, but interferes with preconceptions, naturalised understandings, a desire for an easy life. And teachers have to decide what they want to achieve and how they need to interfere to achieve it. There is a great temptation to take the easy way, as Allan Luke was saying, to set up a pleasant, socially supportive environment where the kids are entertained but nothing much is happening intellectually, no real demands are being made. Frederick Leung, Dean of Education at HKU, give a paper last year on a big international study of mathematics education. He was describing a similar incident to the one Allan told in Maths. He was in a maths class in London and this teacher had the kids playing all these wonderful games, and everyone was having a good time, but Frederick gradually realised the kids weren’t learning anything, and when at the end he asked the teacher what they were meant to be learning, she couldn’t tell him. He actually quoted in contrast the Confucian saying, ‘The roots of education are bitter, but the flower is sweet." Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that we should go to Confucian style education, but I do think we need to take seriously the evidence that greater intellectual demands should be made. If we don’t, governments are quite capable of imposing what they see as greater intellectual quality, and we’ll finish up with the empty kind of rigour that is there in the English system.

I think it’s particularly easy with creative writing to talk oneself into not intervening, not requiring the students to do things differently, not setting strict enough parameters for the tasks. But they won’t learn much that way.

Another aspect of education that Britzman talks about is the way it represses certain things, makes certain things unable to be spoken about. It constructs knowledge in certain ways that repress uncomfortable complications. The aim of education is to create community, but to do it, it must inevitably repress difference. It’s a very complicated argument that I haven’t got time to develop here. Taking some inspiration from the work of Maxine Greene, she suggests that the arts are a way of making the repressed return in education, of imagining different relationships, of expressing repressed alternative knowledges . Through imaginative creation, we can recover the complexity of feeling and being that education tends to bleach out. This too calls for a difficult pedagogy, but one which in the end is also a pedagogy of possibility, of hope. Perhaps it’s even a way of talking about love in the classroom.

I want to round off with another quotation from Foucault which suggests one of the sources of difficulty teachers have to contend with:

Writing, as a private productive space where we can work out our ways of changing is vitally important. The trick for teachers is to create the space, interfere in productive ways, but not become the ideological traffic police. All we can do is try.

Writing is an art, and it has struck me while writing this paper that, within English, we are in danger of enacting in miniature what’s happening across the school curriculum in underplaying the significance of the Arts. The Arts Learning Area is the Cinderella of the curriculum, but it’s stuck absolutely in the kitchen and there’s not a fairy godmother, let alone a prince in sight. The last thing we would want to do strategically or politically if we were concerned to promote creative writing is to relate it to the Arts: it would be the death knell. Governments promote English because of language’s functional importance as a foundation for all community activity and leaning. Creative writing sneaks in under the umbrella. The Arts have no umbrella, so they are constantly downgraded in comparison with English, Maths, Science, Technology, - the "useful" things. Within English, I think there is a parallel tendency at the moment to underplay the importance of the aesthetic/artistic side of reading and writing. What we desperately need (and maybe we could create an alliance with teachers in the Arts to produce it) is a powerful, overwhelming rationale for the importance of the arts, including writing, in human life, and we need the political will to promote it. Until we do, I think there will be a genuine question as to whether we really are leading literate lives.

References

Britzman, D. (1998). Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Towards a Psychoanalytical Inquiry of Learning. Albany, SUNY Press.

Brophy, K. (1998). Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.

Clark, R. and R. Ivanic (1997). The Politics of Writing. London, Routledge.

Damasio, A. (1996). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London, Macmillan.

Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York, Harcourt Brace and Company.

Davies, B. (1999). "The Discourse of Love." Melbourne Studies in Education. 40(2): 41-57.

DEET (1991). Australia's Language: the Australian Language and Literacy Policy. Canberra, Australian Government Publication Service.

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