Etiketter
Ryan Boudinot berättar här vad han har lärt sig av att ha undervisat i creative writing under lång tid. Han skriver bland annat:
If you aren’t a serious reader, don’t expect anyone to read what you write.
Without exception, my best students were the ones who read the hardest books I could assign and asked for more. One student, having finished his assigned books early, asked me to assign him three big novels for the period between semesters.Infinite Jest, 2666, and Gravity’s Rainbow, I told him, almost as a joke. He read all three and submitted an extra-credit essay, too. That guy was the Real Deal.
Conversely, I’ve had students ask if I could assign shorter books, or—without a trace of embarrassment—say they weren’t into ”the classics” as if ”the classics” was some single, aesthetically consistent genre. Students who claimed to enjoy ”all sorts” of books were invariably the ones with the most limited taste. One student, upon reading The Great Gatsby (for the first time! Yes, a graduatestudent!), told me she preferred to read books ”that don’t make me work so hard to understand the words.” I almost quit my job on the spot.
Intressant läsning, tycker jag som gammal skrivarelev (även om två år på folkhögskola inte riktigt kan jämföras med ett ”master of fine arts creative-writing program” såklart). Så vad ska man tycka om det Boudinot säger? Några spontana tankar eller åsikter?
/Sara
