Authors Electric

This week marks the start of my third term of teaching creative writing at the International Writers’ Collective , a creative writing community here in Amsterdam. It seemed like a good occasion to revisit a blog post I wrote in December 2017, wondering out loud in truly Hamlet-like fashion, whether I should be teaching at all. My existential doubts stemmed from a question Francine Prose asks straight up in Reading Like a Writer : Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? … The answer is no. What then was I expected to teach? Image source: Pixabay the first time When I was in college, I worked as a tutor. One semester, I taught math to local high school students. Another semester, I’d help premed students learn to write an essay.  The latter was a deeply painful experience because it turns out that, in order to write you need to be able to think. When all you’re trying to do is pass your freshman humanities class, then writing is...

I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that everyone else is as knackered as I am after Christmas. I didn't get much of a break, because I had some urgent writing jobs to finish (damn you, Buster Crabb!), some very large plates of Christmas pudden to consume (damn you, Father Christmouse), and the most appalling chest, throat and nose and ears infection which I assumed was terminal and everybody else cruelly categorised as man flu. (Damn the lot of you; it's a pity I didn't die. That [might] have wiped the smiles off...) Any road up, here I am, just out of me sick bed, struggling manfully to carry on, and worrying about me tax return. Does nobody care about me? Jan Stoker Funny you should say that, because maybe someone does. Or then again, maybe not. You be the judge. It was Wilf, possibly the most eccentric of my many eccentric sons, who is studying in Glasgow, but claimed to have got me the most original Christmas present of all time. What's mor...