What is creative writing? I sat down with Dr. Carl Peters, a professor in UFV’s English department, over a mug of steaming coffee to find the answer.
Originally from Toronto, Peters studied visual arts in Saskatchewan. However, the program didn’t live up to his expectation and after finishing it, he decided to come to the mountainous shores of British Columbia. What brought him into writing was a love of books and reading, especially He Who Runs May Read by Gertrude Stein.
One might ask what this book has to do with writing, and the answer is everything. As Mr. Peters put it in a more sophisticated vernacular: “If I want to be a serious writer, I want to prove to myself that I can read well, and how can I do that? So I thought, why don’t I explain a difficult writer, that’s always fun. Gertrude Stein is in keeping pace with that project. [I would] try to annotate her and read her with as much focused intelligence as possible, which is how I want to read, hence how I want to write. The better you read the better you write.”
Comparing writing to a kind of blindness, Peters believes that the process itself is internal and has to come from ourselves “travelling” in our inner dimensions. It can be a struggle at times, but it sharpens one’s awareness and writing skills greatly.
Peters is going to hold a presentation on November 17 in the Abbotsford campus library about the topic. “My talk on the 17th will comment on creative writing as that kind of process,” Peters explained. “Then it will rebuke expressions like creative writing because all that I think we are trying to do is learn to write. I don’t think it’s creative. I don’t think it’s uncreative.”
Peters hopes to address the question of “What is creative writing?” saying it leads to the question of “Why write?” which is a key question for modernists. “I make no distinction between living and writing,” he mused. “Both are what you do: writing is never more than an extension of living.”
Peters says he created the event to promote his new annotated study of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. He explained that Stein “tried to write in the way Picasso painted … Tender Buttons focuses mainly on the cubistic tendency to understand that objects have multiple points of view and it changes according to those.”
I asked Peters how, as students, we can judge how much of our own voice to bring into academic writing. Saying that a lot of students struggle with that question, he told me that “What we are trying to do as academic writers is explain. In explaining, what we are making is expository writing. Something really extraordinary happens when you dare to put an expository text next to the non-expository one.”
“Along the way,” Peters added, “experiment with the way to construct that narrative.” He cited the works of Kafka, Poe, and George Bowering, as well as poems by bill bissett and bpNichol as “speaking to writing processes and ‘inner dialogical thinking’ or voice” and says he tries to “put all of that together in ways that can inspire students.”
As our talk slowly drew to a close, one last question stood out in my mind, a kind of worry many of my friends succumb to, as do I. Eying my now empty coffee mug I asked, “What would you tell to the students who feel like they are not talented and so they will never be able to be a creative writer?” His answer was quite simple, and because of that, much more resonant.
“If they write, they are already writers. If they keep writing they will improve.”
Carl Peters Considers What is Creative Writing? will run from 1 to 2 p.m. on Thursday, November 17 in the Abbotsford campus library.
