Hanif Kureishi has just been called a d**k.

We are at a weekly literary evening organised by the School of English at the University of Kent, and the remark elicits some nervous laughter, and polite, if uneasy, silence. The indicter teaches at the university’s Centre for Creative Writing, and he is miffed, extremely, over certain remarks Kureishi has made about his profession. Speaking at the Independent Bath Literature festival earlier in March, Kureishi called creative writing courses a “waste of time”, implying further that the skill of storytelling cannot be taught. (Kureishi was charged with resembling a certain part of the male body because he is also professor of creative writing at Kingston University.)

We are gathered for a reading by Evie Wyld, a London-based writer. Her second novel, All the Birds, Singing has recently been published, and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and long-listed for this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. She and the moderator are discussing creative writing courses; Wyld obtained both an undergraduate and postgraduate degree in the subject. “If it hadn’t been for that,” she says, “I would never have become a writer.”

This, in a nutshell, exemplifies the polarity of the debate, on-going for seemingly a millennia now, surrounding creative writing courses. (Possibly there has been more written about creative writing courses collectively than all the writing actually done in these courses.) We have its critics and champions, its advocates and malcontents, almost, aggravatingly, equal in count. For every piece that describes creative writing as the “biggest con job in academia” there is another that claims it can “produce independent-thinking, craftsman like innovators”. Is it a system set up to silence writers, and dupe students? Or does it introduce ways of thinking about writing that are strong and purposeful? For every Hanif Kureishi there is a Jeanette Winterson.

The issue with creative writing courses, though, has less to do with whether they are beneficial or counterproductive. The problem, I think, lies elsewhere.

My concern is that creative writing courses may disallow creativity from flourishing outside the enclosure of a university curriculum. That ‘creative writing’ could become inextricable from the name of a subject of university tuition. That these courses become ‘badges’ or the sole markers by which one graduates to the rank of ‘good’ writer. In an already biased publishing industry, they could stratify the process even further — many publishing houses, especially in the UK and US, refuse to consider manuscripts not submitted through a literary agency. Will literary agencies one day refuse to consider manuscripts that aren’t written by someone with a creative writing degree? The filters could be endless. And the gatekeepers of ‘good literature’ manifold.

Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, calls the creative writing program “an American invention, (which) has recently become an American export.” The British were initially contemptuous of the idea, regarding them, as the critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury put it, as being “like the hamburger — a vulgar hybrid which, as everyone once knew, no sensible person would ever eat.” The UK’s first master’s degree program in creative writing opened in 1970. By 2011, there were over 90. And the ‘vulgar hybrid’ has spread even further. To Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, and the Philippines. In India, even though they’ve taken time to catch on, they’re being offered, mostly as a minor part of an English Literature course or a diploma, at a handful of places, including Indira Gandhi National Open University, Symbiosis college, Pune, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, The British Council and, more recently, workshops in Kolkata organised by the University of East Anglia, UK (for the sum of ₹25,000).

I cannot help but find this trend unsettling, for reasons that have little to do with the debate on the efficacy of creative writing programmes. For one, creative writing courses are pre-eminently an English-language phenomenon and, like the process by which English originally spread around the world, they bear the stench of colonialism. They are embodiments of a lurking ‘big brother’ attitude, whereby anything done in the West is always, somehow, worthy of studious imitation under an assumption of being beneficial. Secondly, wherever they may exist, they invariably appear to serve the goal of enclosing whatever ‘autonomous zones’ — temporary spaces outside formal structures of control — that exist for the development of the writing craft, into a bureaucratic system of accountability and control. Ultimately, then, what creative writing courses threaten is the very existence of writing as a craft, branding it instead as a ‘skill’ that can be bought, sold and certified.

My suggestion is for us to work towards the multiplication of common spaces — bookshops, libraries, independent festivals and publishers, book clubs, literary groups and even cafés — where writing may thrive as craft, nurtured communally, in the grassroots. The only reason I would find to join a creative writing course would be to access a nurturing environment for my writing, where no alternatives were available. It is to those alternatives, not to the further branding of creative writing courses, that I hope we turn our attention, and where we place our faith.

janice pariat is the author of Boats on Land @janicepariat

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