tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/hanif-kureishi-9310/articlesHanif Kureishi – The Conversation2016-11-09T11:27:26Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/676592016-11-09T11:27:26Z2016-11-09T11:27:26ZWhy the teaching of creative writing matters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144874/original/image-20161107-4711-1vkzi07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pexels</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For the last 30 years or so the rise of creative writing programmes in universities has been met with seemingly unending howls of derision from all quarters. Hanif Kureishi, novelist, screenwriter – and professor of creative writing at Kingston University – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/04/creative-writing-courses-waste-of-time-hanif-kureishi">described them as a</a> “waste of time”. But universities around the world beg to differ, as the increasing number of courses and students testify.</p>
<p>The recent <a href="http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/gooduniversityguide">Sunday Times league tables for universities</a> ranked the quality of teaching in creative writing at The University of Bolton as the best in the country. The programme there also boasts the highest ranking in terms of student experience. </p>
<p>Given that I am the only full-time lecturer in creative writing at Bolton – and also led the programme for two of the three years the recent figures cover – I should be able easily to explain our success, and why our students rate our teaching so highly. I say “should”, because I’m not sure of the answer. </p>
<p>There are easy ways to get students to rate teaching highly. We can tailor the classes to their personal needs and wants, and give them all high marks. Or we can teach them at a lower level than we should so that they feel a greater sense of achievement. But at Bolton we do none of these. So what’s the secret? </p>
<h2>The measure of a mark</h2>
<p>How you actually go about judging the quality of teaching – particularly with a subject like creative writing – is tricky. There are the normal ways that universities use: peer-assessment, student feedback, the evaluation of staff by professionals who specialise in methods of teaching and learning and staff development programmes. And as Bolton is a teaching intensive, research informed university we do a lot of these things, and I think we do them very well. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144872/original/image-20161107-4688-1bqazth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144872/original/image-20161107-4688-1bqazth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144872/original/image-20161107-4688-1bqazth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144872/original/image-20161107-4688-1bqazth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144872/original/image-20161107-4688-1bqazth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144872/original/image-20161107-4688-1bqazth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144872/original/image-20161107-4688-1bqazth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hanif Kureishi, who says creative writing courses are ‘a waste of time’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">andersphoto/Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But I wonder whether what is being measured or evaluated in these assessments is more the style of the teacher, rather than the content. Most assessors are experts in teaching methods and practices – and it’s unreasonable to expect them to have detailed knowledge of every subject. </p>
<p>As non-specialists they are able to measure the levels of student engagement, of academic challenge, of whether the “learning outcomes” which plague university teaching in creative writing are being met. And if you measure it this way, then it’s quite possible that detractors such as Kureishi are right.</p>
<h2>A place for play</h2>
<p>Except that the teaching of creative writing, when done well, is about more than the skills and craft and technique, important as these things are. And as the writer and lecturer Liam Murray Bell describes, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-i-learned-from-ben-okri-about-creative-writing-67178">writers must find and use</a> a consistency of tone, style and voice. </p>
<p>It’s also about encouraging students to play, to move beyond their normal styles and subjects of writing, beyond their use of traditional structural, narrative and poetic forms – and to ask them to see what happens. In this sense <a href="https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/euphemism-the-university-and-disobedience">university is a place for play</a>. Teacher and game designer <a href="http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/Four_Concepts.html">Eric Zimmerman has defined play</a> as: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The free space of movement within a more rigid structure. Play exists both because of and also despite the more rigid structures of a system.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If students are not actively encouraged to play then we are simply encouraging them to remain as static as they were when they entered higher education – even if they are more adept at using “writerly” skills and techniques.</p>
<h2>The secret of success</h2>
<p>To me it seems there is no “secret” to good teaching. You do the basics, and you do them as well as you possibly can. You limit class numbers. You give student-writers the individual attention they crave. You make sure that your teachers are good writers and that your writers are good teachers, so that expertise can be shared effectively. </p>
<p>And you make students read widely. They should read the classics, I suppose, but they should also read the “non-classics” – what many academics see as trash fiction. And they should read their peers and contemporaries too. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144875/original/image-20161107-4694-4n3t3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/144875/original/image-20161107-4694-4n3t3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144875/original/image-20161107-4694-4n3t3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144875/original/image-20161107-4694-4n3t3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144875/original/image-20161107-4694-4n3t3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144875/original/image-20161107-4694-4n3t3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/144875/original/image-20161107-4694-4n3t3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Read far and wide to become a better writer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Importantly, they should read things such as advertising billboards and street signs, the shapes of buildings, the colour of the pavement, the weather, the look in people’s faces. Writers need to breathe in so that they can breathe out their own individual reactions and responses. At Bolton we spend time reading and breathing, and that helps students find voices and interactions which can blend with the craft of writing to produce work which means something to them. </p>
<p>Very few students will earn a living as a writer. But writing is about more than that, and the ability to communicate effectively is a rare and precious thing. Good teaching should not be measured in the texts which students produce, then, but in the knowledge gained through the actions of writing – knowledge which lasts forever. </p>
<p>In the end, if students enjoy their studies, and believe that they’re gaining skills which are transferable in the workplace and will last them well beyond university, then perhaps that is what they see as ‘good teaching’. And perhaps too they’re the best ones to judge.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67659/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Holloway lectures in Creative Writing at The University of Bolton </span></em></p>Not every student will publish work or win prizes and very few will be able to earn a living putting pen to paper, but the teaching of creative writing is about more than that.Simon Holloway, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of BoltonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/526992016-01-14T19:21:57Z2016-01-14T19:21:57ZFriday essay: Can you keep a secret? Family memoirs break taboos – and trust<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108122/original/image-20160114-2359-1vjaatu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Memoirists who write about divorce, addiction or suicide can start important conversations – and leave families feeling exposed or humiliated. Where do you draw the line?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">fosa./Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The television premiere of Benjamin Law’s adapted memoirs <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/programs/the-family-law">The Family Law</a> may have had us laughing last night, but a foray into the recent past of the family memoir genre reveals an ethical minefield of sibling conflicts, clashing memories, and unwanted exposés. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1043&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1043&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108124/original/image-20160114-2345-wtqi56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1043&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Benjamin Law’s memoir The Family Law (2010) has been adapted for TV.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Black Inc</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In response to biographies scrutinizing his marriage to Sylvia Plath, the <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/brilliance-with-blind-spots-1-699072">poet Ted Hughes said</a>, “I hope each of us owns the facts of his or her own life”. In family memoir such hopes are dashed. </p>
<p>When writers tell the story of their lives they also divulge the experiences of siblings, parents, and lovers. They make the private public, often with a unique spin on events and not always with the consent of those involved. </p>
<p>Given the intimate nature of family life these tangles are perhaps unavoidable. The facts of our lives are always shared. </p>
<p>But life writing still raises important ethical questions. The memoirist’s candid account of family struggles can destigmatise taboo topics – such as divorce, sexuality, and suicide – but at what cost to those whose lives are laid bare? What should come first for a writer, loyalty to the truth of their own experience or respect for the privacy of others? </p>
<p>These questions have troubled a series of high-profile memoirs and autobiographical novels. Writers such as <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-karl-ove-knausgaard-cant-stop-writing-1446688727">Karl Ove Knausgaard</a>, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3671392/Hanif-Kureishi-A-life-laid-bare.html">Hanif Kureishi</a>, <a href="http://www.lilybrett.com/">Lily Brett</a>, and <a href="http://www.davidsedarisbooks.com/">David Sedaris</a> have upset family members by using personal details in their literary works. </p>
<p>These cases alert us to the difficulty of narrating shared life stories. How do we get to the truth when people remember the past differently and have conflicting investments in how the story is told? </p>
<p>But we might also see the potential social benefit of tell-all family memoirs. By representing the conflicts and silences that families live with writers can introduce more diverse and honest accounts of family life into public culture.</p>
<h2>Whose struggle?</h2>
<p>By the time literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard published the first volume in his six part autobiographical series, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7147831-min-kamp-1">My Struggle</a> (2009), several members of his family were no longer speaking to him. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108125/original/image-20160114-2352-sycjup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Karl Ove Knausgaard’s memoir Min Kamp (My Struggle) (2009) caused serious family conflict.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Forlaget okober</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Norwegian writer’s aim was to describe the banality and drama of his daily life in raw detail. Critics have hailed the result as <a href="http://flavorwire.com/438468/karl-ove-knausgards-my-struggle-is-the-rare-21st-century-work-of-art-were-forced-to-savor">Proust for the 21st century</a>. Readers have said they feel as though he has written their innermost secrets onto the page. For Knausgaard’s family this is more than just a feeling. It is their reality. </p>
<p>Knausgaard doesn’t pull any punches. While much of the series is devoted to vivid descriptions of ordinary life, like brewing a cup of tea or going for a run, there are also details that most of us would shudder to have on the record. </p>
<p>Gossipy, post-dinner party conversations that he and his wife have about their guests are recounted verbatim. The rancid excrement that stains his incontinent grandmother’s couch, his father’s descent into squalor and alcoholism, the spoken and unspoken insults of his marital rows, the fumbling sexual encounters of his youth, his second wife’s struggle with bipolar, his feelings of frustration and boredom as a parent: it’s all there on the page.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, when Knausgaard sent copies of the first manuscript to his family, <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/karl-ove-knausgaard-a-traitor-to-his-family/news-story/8588890843c7d69a30101aadc4e4d4a1">they were unhappy</a>. His paternal uncle tried to halt publication, threatened to sue, and attacked the book in the Norwegian press. Tonje Aursland, Knausgaard’s ex-wife, recorded a <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/knausgards-ekskone-snakker-ut-1.7317286">radio program</a> about the experience of having her private life exposed in the novel, and then again in all of the media scrutiny that followed. </p>
<p>Knausgaard admits that the series also took a toll on his current marriage. The relentless attention caused his wife, Linda Boström, <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/august/1375315200/james-button/my-struggle">to have a breakdown</a>, which Knausgaard details in the final episode of My Struggle. </p>
<p>Knausgaard made a decision to publish a tell-all book. He exposes his own struggles to be a good husband, father, writer, brother, and son with disarming candour, sometimes even to the point of self-humiliation. </p>
<p>But the people who share his life did not make this decision. They didn’t know that their words and actions, sometimes at very vulnerable moments, would be published let alone read by millions of people, almost half a million in Norway alone. In a country of five million, that’s roughly one in ten people who know the intimate details of your private life. </p>
<p>The author is well aware of his indiscretion and what it costs him and his family. “I do feel guilty,” <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9104793/Hay-Festival-Karl-Ove-Knausgard-on-A-Death-in-the-Family.html">he has said</a>, “I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives”. Knausgaard also <a href="http://n.inklive.com/magazine/features/2013/06/interview-eith-karl-ove-knausgyrd#q5jKr8dtyGwwVXFD.99">understands</a> his father’s family’s response to the novels:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wish this could have been done without hurting anyone. They say they never want to see or talk to me again. I accept that. I have offended them, humiliated them just by writing about this. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Familiar characters</h2>
<p>British novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi is less remorseful about using his family as source material. In 2008 his sister published a letter in the Independent titled <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/keep-me-out-of-your-novels-hanif-kureishis-sister-has-had-enough-790839.html">Keep Me Out of your Novels</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1268&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1268&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108126/original/image-20160114-2374-iid8ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1268&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hanif Kureishi’s ex-wife accused him of writing about their marriage in Intimacy (1998).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Faber and Faber</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She claims that most of his works use family members as characters. These include his parents in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/302998.The_Buddha_of_Suburbia">The Buddha of Suburbia</a> (1991), his uncle in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091578/">My Beautiful Laundrette</a> (1985), his ex-girlfriend in the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093913/">Sammy and Rosie Get Laid</a> (1987), and an account of leaving his wife and children for a younger woman in his novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153418.Intimacy">Intimacy</a> (1998). </p>
<p>Yasmin Kureishi is most upset about her brother’s portrayal of her in the 2003 film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323298/">The Mother</a>. “It made excruciating viewing,” she says, “It was like he’d swallowed some of my life, then spat it back out.” </p>
<p>After reading Intimacy, Tracy Schoffield, Kureishi’s ex-wife, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/movies/features/hanifkureishi.htm">criticised him</a> for thinly veiling the break-up of their marriage as fiction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He says it’s a novel. But that’s an absolute abdication of responsibility. You may as well call it a fish.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In defence, Kureishi <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3671392/Hanif-Kureishi-A-life-laid-bare.html">argues</a> that by writing candidly about his life he gives voice to a collective experience: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why would you vilify me? I’m just the messenger. I’m writing a book about divorce – an experience that many people have had - or separation, children, all that. … That book was a record of that experience. </p>
<p>I don’t see why I should be vilified for writing an account of it. … If you’re an artist your job is to represent the world as you see it – that’s what you do.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The same has been said of Knausgaard’s work. He disregards the privacy of his family. But he also challenges the rules of what we can and cannot say. He drags the darkness of our everyday thoughts into the light. In doing so, he de-shames social taboos, or at least offers the truth of what he thinks rather than what he should think. He sees the role of an artist as that of a social truth-teller. </p>
<p>But the tension around family memoirs brings into question the idea that an artist is simply documenting the truth. In some cases families are not upset that their lives are being represented so much as that the representation is, to them, inaccurate. </p>
<h2>That’s not what I remember…</h2>
<p>Can the memory of one person capture the true complexity of social events? What happens when people recall things differently? Kureishi’s sister and mother insist that he is not simply a messenger. His descriptions of his roots support the identity he desires in the present. Yasmin Kureishi, for example, recollects a very different image of her father than the one her brother paints in The Buddha of Suburbia. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108127/original/image-20160114-2374-qwsepp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Doris Brett wrote Eating the Underworld (2001) to tell her own version of her childhood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Vintage</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the radio documentary Knausgaard’s ex-wife recorded in 2010, <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/knausgards-ekskone-snakker-ut-1.7317286">Tonje’s Version</a>, she says what annoys her is that her memories will always be secondary to his work of art. People assume they know the truth of what happened in her life because they have read My Struggle. </p>
<p>Doris Brett was so opposed to her sister Lily Brett’s autobiographical renderings of their childhood that she published her own <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5428390-eating-the-underworld">counter-story</a>. Lily Brett has written novels and essays based on her experience of growing up in Melbourne as the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-interview-lily-brett-20120927-26m51.html">daughter of Holocaust survivors</a>. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5428390-eating-the-underworld">Eating the Underworld</a> (2001), Doris claims that her sister wrongly depicts their mother as depressed and sometimes cruel. Doris doesn’t recall her mother screaming in the night. The two sisters seem to remember their mother as two very different women. </p>
<p>When Lily Brett and her father received copies of Eating the Underworld, Lily <a href="http://karenkissane.com/2001/09/a-literary-feud-born-of-family-trauma/">issued a statement</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There are some things not worth replying to. This book is one of them. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her father, 85-year-old Max Brett <a href="http://search.informit.com.au.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/search;rs=1;rec=1;action=showCompleteRec">said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This book by my daughter Doris, is a book of madness. … I recognise very little of our family life in this book.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Doris Brett chalked their public response up as further evidence of the bullying and favouritism she describes in her book.</p>
<p>For Yasmin Kureishi, Tonje Aursland, and Doris Brett the issue is not simply about privacy. They are all willing to tell their own stories in the public eye. Rather they want their life represented accurately, as they remember it. They insist that there is more to the shared story of their family than what is seen through the quixotic eyes of the memoirist. But of course the same question of memory’s unreliability also applies to them. </p>
<h2>Tangled lives</h2>
<p>With tongue in cheek, David Sedaris addresses the blurring of memory and imagination by describing his family memoirs as “<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/david-sedaris-offers-realish/">realish</a>”. Sedaris has forged a successful career by recounting the foibles of his family life in best-selling collections such as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10176.Dress_Your_Family_in_Corduroy_and_Denim">Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim</a> (2004). </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/108130/original/image-20160114-2343-195rjvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Sedaris’ book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) was the first his sister Tiffany allowed him to include her in.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Little Brown & Co.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Along the way, his sister, Tiffany, requested to be left out of his stories. In a 2004 <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/08/15/sister_in_a_glass_house?pg=full">interview</a> with the Boston Globe, she said “I was the only [sibling] who told him not to put me in his books. I don’t trust David to have boundaries”. Like Aursland, she became upset by the consequences of the stories. People read them as fact, and an invitation to discuss her private life. </p>
<p>In 2014, Sedaris came under fire for an essay he published in the New Yorker, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/28/now-we-are-five">Now We Are Five</a>. The essay describes the Sedaris family’s attempt to deal with their grief over Tiffany’s suicide. </p>
<p>A friend of Tiffany, Michael Knoblach, published a letter in the Somerville Journal accusing Sedaris of ignoring her request not to be a subject in his stories and exploiting her death for artistic and monetary gain. (The letter has since been taken down, but a similar version is reposted in the comments <a href="https://tealeavesdogears.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/sharing-someone-elses-grief-a-question-of-tact-with-david-sedaris/">here</a>). </p>
<p>Should Sedaris have published Now We Are Five after his sister’s death? Some may argue that he should have respected her request not to be represented in his stories. On the other hand, the story is also about her parents, and her siblings. It speaks candidly about grief, guilt, and the way death jolts us into reality. Even when faced with estrangement and loss, the life of the family remains intertwined. </p>
<h2>The Family Law</h2>
<p>Australia’s own David Sedaris, Benjamin Law, has written a memoir about growing up in a large Chinese-Australian family in 1990s Queensland. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8293532-the-family-law">The Family Law</a> (2010) was adapted for television and premiered on SBS yesterday. Law’s memoir offers a funny take on the everyday quirks of family life, but it also deals with sensitive issues such as his parents’ divorce. </p>
<p>The Family Law is unlikely to draw the kind of scandal that greeted Kureishi or Knausgaard. In a recent keynote at the <a href="https://iabaasiapacific.wordpress.com/">Asia Pacific Auto/Biography Association’s Conference</a>, Law noted that when he gave his family the manuscript to read before publication, they were mostly concerned with correcting his grammar. Law’s father insisted that audiences are smart enough to know the story is told from only one point of view, and with comedic license. </p>
<p>Law may win our hearts with the help of his siblings. They weren’t to know their teenage travails would be re-staged on national television. It might also be strange for his parents to hear the public weighing in on their divorce. But Law’s story will be a welcome addition to a television landscape that currently doesn’t come close to representing the diversity and richness of Australian families. </p>
<h2>Social secrets</h2>
<p>In her research about <a href="http://soc.sagepub.com/content/45/4/539.refs">family secrets</a>, sociologist Carol Smart talks about two kinds of families: families “we live with” and families “we live by”. Families we live with are our actual families, which may be ridden with tensions. Families we live by are the ideal versions of happy, cohesive families that Smart says we draw from popular culture. </p>
<p>We tell family secrets, Smart thinks, to bring the reality closer to the ideal. We edit certain experiences from the public eye so our family fits with dominant ideas about what a family should be. </p>
<p>In this context, to reveal a family secret might be to refuse pressures to pretend. To disclose conflicts within families can open up a space to talk honestly about family life, to question social norms, and acknowledge different kinds of relationships. It can be a way of bringing the ideal closer to the reality.</p>
<p>Revealing family secrets can be insensitive and ethically dubious when the teller is not the only one who has to live with the repercussions. But it can also be a way to rethink the reasons why we keep certain things secret in the first place. </p>
<p>For family memoirists, where is the line between rattling social proprieties and respecting others’ privacy? This is not an easy question to answer. And the answer would be different in each case. </p>
<p>But it is worth remembering that the true stories that enrich our public sphere are often drawn from the intimate and shared lives of their authors. It is not only Law who gives generously of his life to bring a new story to Australian viewers this week, but also the supporting cast, his family.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52699/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ashley Barnwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>True stories that enrich our public sphere are often drawn from the intimate and shared lives of their authors. Where is the line between rattling social proprieties and respecting others’ privacy?Ashley Barnwell, Lecturer in Sociology, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/240182014-03-06T03:54:06Z2014-03-06T03:54:06ZWhy writing programs are worth it: a reply to Hanif Kureishi<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43243/original/yzm6drhb-1394068087.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">British author and teacher Hanif Kureishi has slammed writing programs – but he's missed the point as to the value of teaching writing at universities.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Having served in a more humble capacity at the University it is now an honour to call myself a professor at Kingston. – <a href="http://www.kingston.ac.uk/news/article/1147/10-oct-2013-buddha-of-suburbia-and-my-beautiful-laundrette-writer-hanif-kureishi-named-kingston-university-professor/">Hanif Kureishi</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In October last year Hanif Kureishi, novelist and screenwriter, and author of The Buddha of Suburbia and The Last Word, was promoted to professor at London’s Kingston University. Describing his work as a teacher, he said his students used him as a “resource” to talk about their work, “the same way as I work with a director on a movie”.</p>
<p>Kureishi may not in fact see value in the teaching of writing in the academy. For only a month later, he was telling The Times <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/people/qa-with-hanif-kureishi/2008915.article">Higher Education</a> pages that undergraduate degrees in creative writing “were a waste of time … you might as well give them a swimming certificate”.</p>
<h2>Dying of boredom</h2>
<p>And at The Independent Literature Festival at <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/the-independent-bath-literaturefestival-creative-writing-courses-are-a-waste-of-time-says-hanif-kureishi-who-teaches-one-9166697.html">Bath</a> last weekend, Kureishi told his audience that most of his postgraduate students “can write sentences but they don’t know how to make a story go from there all the way through to the end without people dying of boredom”.</p>
<p>One can only cringe to think of the uncomfortable snickers that followed Kureishi’s remark to an audience dotted with his own students.</p>
<p>Brit writers have now weighed in. </p>
<p>Lucy Ellmann argued that Kureishi is right, and that universities are now culture-crushing corporations in which literature is “destroyed”. Jeanette Winterson, who teaches at Manchester University, disagreed. She aims, she told <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/04/creative-writing-courses-waste-of-time-hanif-kureishi">The Guardian</a>, to “alter” the students’ relationship to language:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My job is to explode language in their faces. To show them that writing is both bomb and bomb disposal – a necessary shattering of cliché and assumption.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Winterson speaks to the heart of higher education learning and teaching. University study, be it in science or humanities, should offer a changed, informed and frictive relationship to the discipline. </p>
<p>Learning, to extend on Winterson’s view, is an experience that will alter the student’s relationship to the subject through critical, experimental and disciplined experiences with new knowledge, methods and sometimes unforeseen conclusions.</p>
<h2>Edward Said’s amateur</h2>
<p>The teaching of creative writing within this view aims to engage students in a re-evaluation of language, the contexts in which we read and write, and of course to teach elements of writing technique and craft, which are developed through repetition and practice over a period of years. </p>
<p>Students graduate with significantly advanced written communication skills, which they take out into broader communities, as teachers, parents, carers, friends, colleagues. That is, citizens who can read, reflect, debate and write with skill. </p>
<p>With the capacity to become, in the words of the late cultural theorist Edward Said, the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-reith-lectures-professionals-and-amateurs-is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-independent-autonomously-functioning-intellectual-in-the-fourth-of-his-1993-reith-lectures-a-series-entitled-representations-of-the-intellectual-edward-said-considers-the-modern-pressures-that-challenge-ingenuity-and-will-this-is-an-edited-text-of-last-nights-radio-4-broadcast-1484964.html">amateur</a>, not merely a specialist with “one eye on the clock”, publishing awards and book-film rights, but with “an interest in the bigger picture”.</p>
<h2>Only teaching for an elite?</h2>
<p>Winterson is interested in the bigger picture. </p>
<p>Kureishi, it would seem, is not. </p>
<p>Kureishi, it would appear, is from the school of teachers whose focus is not on the learner, but on themself. This approach focuses on the transmission of knowledge from the expert to the receptive learner. </p>
<p>Ideally, the student is an elite talent: preternaturally bright, both an auto-didact and a willing disciple. Students for whom sentences and narrative are not easy, whose best work comes with much rethinking and rewriting, who are sometimes inarticulate on the page; these students are hard work in Kureishi’s world. </p>
<p>In the learner-teacher model in which the learner is a reflection of the teacher, such students offer the teacher a spotty mirror image.</p>
<p>Creative writing learning engages students in thinking methods which privilege varied approaches to creativity. Creative writing is a valuable part of the spectrum of undergraduate university learning and teaching that ranges from knowledge transmission to experiential learning. </p>
<p>The writing and critical thinking skills that students develop are also generic and transferable (to use some learning and teaching jargon), and need not be specific to any single creative genre. Mostly young and soon to graduate, it is a double reward for undergraduate students to enjoy the learning and see that it will also have practical application in the varied knowledge economies that many of them will soon be working in.</p>
<p>Students are drawn to the more intensive postgraduate coursework creative writing programs because they want to talk about, think about and learn about writing, and of course to have their own writing extended and challenged. </p>
<p>They want to be part of a writing community and to meet with others who love what they love: writing. Most have been writing for years, on their own. Many express the desire to become published. And if they do want to publish, good on them. Whether they succeed or not is only one measure of the worth of the program; the publishing industry is a multi-faceted, fast-changing beast on which no-one is guaranteed a grip.</p>
<h2>Will he be booed?</h2>
<p>How can Kureishi return to class after these statements, which indicate he despises the bulk of his students? Kingston University representatives have told <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/04/creative-writing-courses-waste-of-time-hanif-kureishi">The Independent</a> his work is valued by the university and his students, but they may be rueing the spring day last October when they conferred on their formerly “humble” teacher the status of professor.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/24018/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Messer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Having served in a more humble capacity at the University it is now an honour to call myself a professor at Kingston. – Hanif Kureishi. In October last year Hanif Kureishi, novelist and screenwriter, and…Jane Messer, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.