British novelist Russell Celyn recently visited South Africa. SHAUN DE WAAL reports
THE best way to teach creative writing, says Russell Celyn Jones, is to teach people to read well.
The British novelist, critic and teacher visited South Africa this month to advise institutions such as the University of the Western Cape on setting up creative-writing courses. Celyn Jones himself studied at the famous writers’ school at the University of Iowa, and lectures at the University of East Anglia, where Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson set up Britain’s best-known such school 20 years ago.
Once pooh-poohed as barely above craft classes like basketweaving, writing workshops are now in demand around the world, and more and more universities are developing them. In a country like South Africa, where education has many disparities to overcome, such courses could be the seedbeds of a new literary culture.
“You may not turn out writers for many years,” says Celyn Jones, “but you’ll increase their reading ability.” And you’ll encourage a literary culture, he says. Only one or two class members may actually go on to be professional fiction writers, but others may become journalists, critics or other kinds of media people.
He sees creative-writing courses as most useful when part of a conventional literature department teaching the usual analytic skills.
Celyn Jones believes that autobiography and regionalism are often starting points for literary projects, so it’s not surprising to find that his own latest novel, An Interference of Light (published by Penguin) is set in Wales, where he grew up, and is based in part on reminiscences of his father’s.
The novel, which deals with a painful quarrymen’s strike in the 1930s, shows a community undergoing radical change, its way of life destroyed by the greed of a powerful aristocrat. It also focuses on one man’s divided loyalties – his allegiances to different sides, as well as his own sexual ambivalence. The novel contrasts two narrative streams, the 1930s strike, and the time, 20 years later, when the narrator returns to Wales.
So does teaching creative writing make the actual writing of fiction any easier?
Celyn Jones quotes actor Anthony Hopkins: “Analysis is paralysis.” One can, he says, know too much, and the duty to read bad manuscripts while teaching can be hard on one’s own work. But he clearly hasn’t got to the stage reached by novelist Rose Tremain, his predecessor at East Anglia, who felt she had to stop teaching creative writing after some six or seven years. Whether it be fiction, reviewing or scriptwriting, says Celyn Jones, “Writing is all I can do.”