Workshop: A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes | Poets & Writers

“Can you really teach creative writing?” Professor and novelist Dan Barden answers this while offering his own unorthodox approaches to teaching a workshop.

subscribe by Dan Barden The Practical Writer From the March/April 2008 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine 1. LEPRECHAUNS, DRAGONS, AND ME “Hey, can you really teach creative writing?” It’s a question that’s nearly bathetic in its longing for a simpler world, in which there was such a thing as talent and genius and wastebaskets full of crumpled pages. As silly and discredited as this question seems to be (considering there are over three hundred creative writing programs in the United States and more popping up each year), it persists, in one form or another, hidden in our conversations about li

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