No Factories, Please — We’re Writers

Abstract

Good writers make better readers. Good readers make better writers. These were the ideas that gave birth to the Warwick Writing Programme; many years on, they are still our guiding principles. I am writing this essay to propose a third: if they are to give their best to their students, teachers of writing must be able to move (and move with ease) between academic and literary cultures. Though they may be willing and even happy to conform to university regulations, they can never forget the ways in which those regulations stifle free expression and impede the workings of the imagination. They know from their own travels between the two cultures that there is more than one way of doing things: this insight informs every aspect of their work.