The shame of being 'taught' to be a writer.

I am on 'the programme'  that is the Creative Writing programme

Poor you!

 

Let us take the 'Creative Writing programme' It is the product of the

university system, and worse than that has been stealthily

institutionalised.  So the academics compartmentalise something

else to make a living out of.

The old Shavian aphorism  'those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.' Still stands the passage of time test, and causes us to reflect on whether it is a truism.

When thinking of writers, think of European intellectuals like Sartre and Beauvoir
to the great American writers who didn’t teach, didn’t go to school,
but worked as truck drivers, bartenders, nightwatchmen, stevedores, anything but intellectuals, as they recorded ‘the constant flow of men across a whole continent, the exodus of an entire village to the orchards of California’, and so on. Think Hemingway et al

So somehow the shame of being taught to be a writer, is itself a kind of insult. So who
taught s/he who knows, or pretends that he s/he knows and stands up there at the lectern
hoping that you, who doesn't know, and will accept that you don't know, and give your guardianship up to one who is pretending to know, but is at least content in one respect that he knows the that you  don't know that he doesn't know either.