April 2008

A while ago I wrote about the swelling tide of creative writing students in our universities. The gist of that piece was that the universities are peddling disillusionment. But if my experience of drama students is any guide, ravening hordes of creative writers may not after all threaten society, and some creative writing students might get some real satisfaction and benefit from their degree.

Australia has a few vocational courses in drama and a lot more which bill themselves as non-vocational. These offer drama as part of an arts or humanities degree. In the advance publicity, and at enrolment, students are sternly advised that the course is not designed to train for the profession, though it makes a good basis for future training. (Even about that there are grounds for scepticism.) Some students listen and nod and continue to believe that in a few short years they will grace the stage or screen or even (O comble de joie) get a gig in a comedy series. Most of these give up the idea after a year or so. A handful keep the faith, and some of them do get jobs – often, I note, those who drop out.

So what of the others, the other 98% who graduate with a degree in drama? Why did they enrol, and what do they get out of it? Many years ago now I conducted a survey of second year students and came up with a surprise result: self-development. But in survey work, every discovery is a new puzzle. What did “self-development” mean? Were we back to the seventies?

I began to understand some years later when teaching a graduate class in non-fiction writing and a course in speech. In both classes, but especially in speech, there was an extraordinary level of commitment and energy, far more than in the conventional subjects I had been teaching. Students obviously valued these courses highly, in spite of the fact, about which we were upfront, that none of them planned to become full-time orators or authors. They valued the skills they were acquiring for their usefulness in a range of future jobs, in editing their workplace’s house magazine, or making those ‘presentations’ which are now de rigeur in business. So far so bread-and-butter – that’s the basis on which they were offered. But the special energy they brought to the work suggested a deeper and more personal investment.

It took quite a while before I realised what was happening. In both courses, part of the requirement was to talk or write about their personal experiences. They were not invited to explore them in groups, an activity I regard as quasi-therapeutic hogwash, but to turn them into formal public communications in which something more than ‘sincerity’ was required. And they did, especially in speech, with seriousness and passion and humour and sometimes very movingly. What they said mattered to them, and to the listening group and after a while I realised why.

It mattered so much there and then because there had not been such a space in their education since middle school – the era of ‘What I did on my holidays’. Overwhelmingly, when their education had called for the personal it had been for their personal opinion about issues. What we had done in the speech and writing options was to give students a chance to consider their lives and to articulate the results. And that I now think is at least part of what the drama students meant by ‘self-development’.

We’re talking about the 90s here. Churches shrinking or shrunk, the therapy movement surviving only in pockets, a strong and increasing tendency to convert all education into a species of training for business: where was the space of the personal? In the last redoubt, the humanities faculty, and there only in a few places. I feel privileged to have taught those courses.

Sp perhaps that’s what happening in the creative writing courses: a space for disciplined subjectivity, a place to consider life as a moral journey. (It won’t be that of course where Theory informs the teaching.)

More to come on this topic, but the Essendon-Collingwood match is calling.