Can creative writing truly be taught?

In this extract from The Wrong Country, his collection of essays, poet Gerald Dawe muses on the present and future role of creative writing in Irish cultural life

Gerald Dawe: ‘My own sense of creative writing is that it is only about one thing and one thing alone: practice, the making of literary work’ Pic: Bryan Meade

There is a lot of creative writing going on in Ireland today at all kinds of levels, and with different scales of expectation and provision, obviously not just in the universities. There are some who find all this creative writing buzz less than convincing, being of the opinion that while it does not do any harm, it bears little critical relationship to actual literary production and achievement, or the essentially self-motivated, solitary and ...