Kurt Vonnegut wrote, way back in 1967, "You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do."

Every once in a while, someone seems compelled to attack the profession of teaching creative writing. I usually find this amusing, as well as more than just a bit irritating. No one seems equally compelled, these days, to attack music teachers, or dance teachers or even art teachers. But in places like the New Yorker, Salon, even the venerable Guardian newspaper, there seems to be traction in attacking creative writing programs.

It is interesting to note that most of these pieces are written by people who don't teach creative writing. Some of these pieces have been better than others, such as this one; others, such as this one, are fairly even handed, while others seem to consider the whole thing a scam, and want to tear Master of Fine Arts programs apart.

But I do teach people to write, and to write well. I have been doing it for a long time.... And now I even teach people in graduate school to teach creative writing. I teach teaching, as it were -- a weirdly double-headed profession if there ever was one. And, of course, I also write books, poetry, novels, memoir and books for kids.

I began teaching writing in 1985, in the extension program at the University of Alberta. Since then, I have taught in community halls and small colleges and arts programs and people's living rooms and in libraries and in graduate school. I have taught people of every age and every level of education and with diverse backgrounds.

Moments like this happen: Many years ago, I was teaching a writing class at my local community hall in a small rural community on Kootenay Lake. There were eight people in the class, all elderly, including my mother who, after a lifetime of hard work farming and raising children and grandchildren, wanted to learn to write poems and stories. She wrote one very beautiful poem and then stopped.

One afternoon, I asked them to write something innocuous, about a happy experience in their childhood. A couple who had moved here from Germany wrote about their idyllic summers in a lost Germany before the Second World War. Every person, when they read their piece, wept, and when the German couple each read theirs, we all wept. Then we sat together in silence for a long time. "We were enemies then," someone said softly.

Making order from chaos

So what do I really teach when I teach creative writing?

Many things. Generosity, for one thing. Listening, reading, ideas, thinking. Playing with language. Shifting sentences around. Patience. Attention to minute details. And, of course, writing itself, as a craft, an art, a skill, a form of music, a way of thinking.

I often begin a class by talking about how contradictory the practice of writing is. After all, a writer works with his or her mind, heart, memories, emotions, thoughts, ideas and sense of self. He or she brings these very private elements into the open, into a story, and then presents the story to a reader. If it is done well, the reader will live in the story as well, whether it is a poem, fiction, or non-fiction, and understand something new. If it is not done well, then there is frustration on both sides and the writer goes back to work looking for clarity and coherence, for language and order and engagement.

The skill in writing well is often hard for the reader to see because within a good or a great piece of writing, the reader and the writer both disappear into the story. As the great Ursula K. Leguin says, "The purpose of a sentence is to get you to the next sentence." If, for whatever reason, the reader is pulled or stopped or blocked from reading, the writer needs to find out why and fix the problem.

Until someone has actually done it, it's hard to appreciate the amount of time and patience and nitpicking and technique and care that goes into finishing a piece of writing. Writing moves from chaos to order. Writers often aren't sure what their story is about when they begin it. But they need to be sure when they end it. When they are done, they need to have a good idea of why they wrote it and why other people should read it.

On language

People think writing is about stories, and of course it is, but it is also about language and the music of language. The story sits within the language and the form of the language determines a lot about how the reader understands the story.