Add a creative writing course

Home Opinion Add a creative writing course

Hillsdale’s English department, overseeing one of the school’s most popular majors, provides numerous outlets for creativity — for some students, this is a welcome break from the critical emphasis in most of English department course offerings. These resources include visiting writer seminars, a Creative Writing club, occasional creative writing courses, and of course the willingness of many faculty to guide and instruct students in extracurricular writing projects. The journalism program offers Advanced Writing, developing writing skills in areas other than literary criticism.

Nonetheless, in an academic environment in which creative writing major programs are becoming more and more common at four-year colleges, the absence of a creative writing class in Hillsdale’s regular course offerings seems strange, especially in light of the fact that all students are required to take two classes on analyzing literature. I can’t be the only student to wonder why we spend so much time reading and discussing canonical literature, but infrequently scratch the surface of the creative process which gave us these classic works.

I am not suggesting that creative writing should be a part of the core, or even required for English majors. The blowback from purists in the humanities — and from those science majors who already resent having to endure a crucible of writing-heavy core classes — would be prohibitive. And I don’t doubt that creative writing isn’t for everyone, though that admission brings to mind questions like “is biology for everyone?” or “is politics for everyone?” But I digress.

So far, a number of Hillsdale students have taken initiative and written their own novels, notably Chandler Ryd, Mark Keller, and Lincoln Reed, to name a few and unintentionally snub many others. Of all the arts, creative writing is arguably the least reliant on systematic instruction — in contrast to music or visual arts, in which instruction is almost always crucial to developing skills. An extreme proponent of this view is Kay Boyle, who despite having taught creative writing for 16 years, claimed that “all creative-writing programs ought to be abolished by law.”

But Hillsdale’s English department does not eschew instruction in this area, as evidenced by occasional creative writing course offerings. On the question of including a creative writing class in the regular English Department course offerings, Professor of English and Department Chair Michael Jordan (full disclosure: My father) said that there is no serious obstacle aside from staffing and budgetary concerns. As most English professors teach three classes, a creative writing class each semester would take up one-third of one professor’s teaching load, which is a small cost in exchange for the opportunity it would provide to aspiring authors.

If Hillsdale College wants to be more than a safe house for sheltered conservatives in the culture war, it will need to participate in culture, rather than just reinforcing and preserving traditional views in the elect who are lucky enough to study here. As Percy Shelley wrote in 1821, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and writers of fiction hold the same sway. While I’m anything but on board with Hillsdale’s ideological bent, to those of you who are: You will influence more people with art, fiction, music, theatre, and poetry than you will convince with well-constructed arguments informed by the higher things.

In a society as culturally and politically polarized as ours, winning the battle of ideas requires subtlety — for instance, masking your message in arts and literature rather than preaching it to those whose minds are already made up. But instead of engaging and shaping culture in their own way, conservatives have acquired a reputation of doing nothing but harping on conservative issues and grudgingly paying taxes.

Even those who have no interest in creative writing would do well to consider seriously whether learning in greater and greater depth why their parents’ values are correct does anything for the cause of those values outside their own mind. If your ideas are to have consequences, you must do more than vocalize and defend them. And creating art — even amateurishly — may have more consequences than the most skillful dissection of it.