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Origins of Creative Writing at UBC
In a piece called Origins & Peregrinations, a former head of UBC Creative Writing, George McWhirter has attempted to set the record straight.
Preface
The debate regarding the appropriate academic place of Creative Writing within North American universities is an old one and has intensified in recent years. Is the live process and actual production of literature fully an equal value partner to the study of literature through commentary and the critical analysis of process? At the invitation of UFV Research Review, George McWhirter, former Department Head of the Creative Writing program at UBC and the past inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Vancouver, examines this critical literary and educational issue. In doing so, he relates much regarding the development and evolution of UBC's pioneering Canadian program in Creative Writing, as well as his from his own experience in preparing young writers for a professional career.
Origins & Peregrinations
Why did Earle Birney split from Creative Writing at UBC after he had forced Creative Writing to split from the English Department and became an independent department? Apart from being exhausted by the process of separation and being fed up with UBC - the English Department approach follows academic method, and Creative Writing, the professional - the simple answer is that Earle retired. He got in a former student and Director of CBC Vancouver, Bob Harlow, to be first Head.
Later, in the 1980s when Earle was made a UBC honorary doctor, there was a Creative Writing founders' fight - it was resolved by R.W. Will, the Dean of Arts, who declared Earle the founding force and father, but Bob as the first Head, which he was. It was Jake Zilber who did major committee work on the movement of the proposal for a Creative Writing Department through the Faculty of Arts and various governing bodies.
I'll go over some of the ironies about the split, which is endemic to the difference between the Creative Writing process and the English Literature studies approach. The English Department approach follows academic method, and Creative Writing, the professional; hence the Creative Writing degree is a MFA and is terminal, without a Ph.D dimension at UBC, because at that point it would also get into the study of the writing process as well as the practice. However, other institutions now do offer Ph.Ds in Creative Writing.
The split between the academic learning about literature and the creative writing professional's approach to learning by doing recurred in the late seventies. I proposed a graduate course in Editing and Managing a Literary Magazine that would turn the production of PRISM International with graduate students.
Preface
The debate regarding the appropriate academic place of Creative Writing within North American universities is an old one and has intensified in recent years. Is the live process and actual production of literature fully an equal value partner to the study of literature through commentary and the critical analysis of process? At the invitation of UFV Research Review, George McWhirter, former Department Head of the Creative Writing program at UBC and the past inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Vancouver, examines this critical literary and educational issue. In doing so, he relates much regarding the development and evolution of UBC's pioneering Canadian program in Creative Writing, as well as his from his own experience in preparing young writers for a professional career.
Origins & Peregrinations
Why did Earle Birney split from Creative Writing at UBC after he had forced Creative Writing to split from the English Department and became an independent department? Apart from being exhausted by the process of separation and being fed up with UBC - the English Department approach follows academic method, and Creative Writing, the professional - the simple answer is that Earle retired. He got in a former student and Director of CBC Vancouver, Bob Harlow, to be first Head.
Later, in the 1980s when Earle was made a UBC honorary doctor, there was a Creative Writing founders' fight - it was resolved by R.W. Will, the Dean of Arts, who declared Earle the founding force and father, but Bob as the first Head, which he was. It was Jake Zilber who did major committee work on the movement of the proposal for a Creative Writing Department through the Faculty of Arts and various governing bodies.
I'll go over some of the ironies about the split, which is endemic to the difference between the Creative Writing process and the English Literature studies approach. The English Department approach follows academic method, and Creative Writing, the professional; hence the Creative Writing degree is a MFA and is terminal, without a Ph.D dimension at UBC, because at that point it would also get into the study of the writing process as well as the practice. However, other institutions now do offer Ph.Ds in Creative Writing.
The split between the academic learning about literature and the creative writing professional's approach to learning by doing recurred in the late seventies. I proposed a graduate course in Editing and Managing a Literary Magazine that would turn the production of PRISM International with graduate students.
Submitted on July 18, 2013 in By David.
