Writing @ Houghton

During a writing class several years ago, visiting poet Wendell Berry was asked to describe what he thought was his most important breakthrough as a writer. He surprised everyone when he said it was the moment he knew he could be a complete person without being a writer. Asking if a poem is worth a suicide, he went on to say that writers do not owe their lives, or the lives of their families, to art. Their first responsibility is to become whole people. Competent, healthy writing, he argued, should then rise from their wholeness.

Berry's comments reflect the attitude and outlook of the Houghton College writing faculty. As important as writing is, it must always be subordinate to prior claims, claims of family and citizenship as described by Berry, and by the claims of the Lordship of Jesus Christ as set forth in the mission of the college.

Standing as a monument to the farsightedness of "Doc Jo" Rickard and Professor Alfred Campbell, its founders, the Houghton writing program has for forty years held to the liberal arts and faith principles they set down. The significance of this should not be lost, for while writing has enjoyed a period of academic respectability, it has also had its legitimacy questioned.

I remember hundreds of teachers and writers gathered at the Library of Congress to discuss the place of writing in a college curriculum. The first session started slowly; for nearly an hour a panel of distinguished writers argued over whether the adjective creative should ever modify the noun writing. Finally, as if he were uttering the final word on the subject, one of them asked, "Have you ever heard of noncreative writing?" Everyone laughed and the panel moved on to another subject.

Sitting in my office this morning, I'm uneasy with the glibness of that laughter and the quick dismissal of the question. For I have heard of noncreative writing; I read it everyday. I read it in student papers. I read it in administrative memos. I read it in the newspapers. And I read it in the work of important writers. Noncreative writing is destructive writing, writing that destroys either the potential of language to express nuances of meaning, or the potential of human beings to experience their place--a bit lower than the angels--in creation.

Creative writing is writing that seeks to discover and articulate these potentials. There is surprisingly little of it, for it is difficult, and most writers, mistaking platitudes for vision, settle for restating what others have said. But creative writing is risky writing. It requires stepping into the dark without a light. It requires living by faith.

In one of his essays Robert Frost said, "Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning but by belief." Frost, of course, is not talking about Christian belief. He is talking about belief in the thing being made. Nevertheless, his remark suggests a Christian parallel. Just as creative writers live by hope, looking ahead to the work which is unknown until it is discovered in the act of writing, Christians live by hope, looking ahead to the new creations they are becoming as Christ works in them.

Writers at Houghton, whether student or faculty, enjoy an atmosphere where these parallel experiences are held to be one experience. This integrating of the discipline of writing and the discipline of faith is what makes Houghton's program unique. It is what makes it worth choosing over a university program. and it is what makes it sufficient preparation for a lifetime of writing.