I’m going to be off the rest of the week teaching at a writers’ conference. After he moved to Miami Beach, Isaac Bashevis Singer got a job teaching writing at the University of Miami. A friend heard that he was doing something at the school, but didn’t know what. “I teach,” Singer told him, “that which cannot be taught.”
There were no creative writing courses in Warsaw, Poland, when Singer was growing up there. The teaching of writing is a fairly recent activity, and its effectiveness is hard to judge, despite the proliferation of MFA programs and conferences such as the one I’m attending. Travel writing has something of an advantage, since I can talk about all the research and legwork that’s involved before one ever sits down at a desk to engage in the somewhat mysterious act of putting experience and thought into words. Also, like all good writing instructors, I introduce my students to great writing. And here, too, I have an edge, because the great travel writers are almost always unknown to them, and they become the startling stars – the true teachers – in my classroom.
