All writing leaves something new and good in the writer, but creative writing does it the most.
Creative writing teaches attentiveness to the qualities of a text, to its structure and latent meanings. Such developed linguistic capacity can help us to counter the codes and systems and protocols that increasingly regiment our world. Education — of which creative writing is just one strand — gives its participants material to think with, and ways of reading, thinking and speaking. It helps fashion ‘the country of words’, as Mahmoud Darwish puts it, where we travel and dwell. Without such grounding, what students learn at university becomes no more than a catechism for robots.
(Quoted from “Learning My Lesson,” by Marina Warner. London Review of Books, March 19, 2015, page 8.)
For a brief biography of Marina Warner, click here. For images of or relating to Marina Warner, click here.
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