Creative writing racket

Apparently the Sydney Morning Herald gets several hundred Letters to the Editor every day, and publishes about 25 of them.

This was one I sent in that wasn't printed...

Lisa Pryor’s nasty piece of tall poppy slashing (‘A novel idea turns creative writing into an academic racket’, Feb 27-28) warrants a response.

She claims creative writing postgraduates are ‘gutless… compliant, institution bound and approval seeking’ and lack the mettle to be great novelists.

I’d like to drop a few names here. Tim Winton. Nam Le. Ian McEwan. Kazuo Ishiguro. Kate Grenville. Tracy Chevalier. Andrew Motion. Danielle Wood. Wendy James. Nikki Gemmell. All graduates of creative writing programmes.

Pryor 'doesn't have a problem' with funding writers but seems to be arguing people without university degrees are a more worthy focus for the dollars. What sort of anti-intellectual cringe is this? Let's support the REAL writers, the ones from the working class who couldn't afford to go to uni, the unrecognised geniuses who scorned high achievement in the education system...? Because obviously anyone who does well enough at uni to get a PhD scholarship must be a hopeless approval-seeking teacher's pet...?

And her exhortation to ‘take a year off work to get on with it and write’? Oh, we all have a book in us - no need to hone our skills, be mentored, receive robust critiques from fellow writers - just sit down and pour it out onto the page.

Janene Carey Armidale