I sat down over Zoom with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, a writer and professor of VIC275 (Creative Writing: Short Fiction) at Victoria College to talk about writing, creativity, and online learning.
The Strand: What do you do outside of your work at UofT?
Professor Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: I write—that’s the main thing that I do. Of course, it always changes because as I finish projects, then new ones come in place. I’m working on a book about writing and creativity…with my PhD supervisor who has become a friend of mine. It’s a dialogue on creativity and writing. The book is not overtly psychoanalytical, but we are making it kind of an analog between the ego and the editor and thinking through ways in which we can help writers kind of loosen themselves up toward creativity.
The second book is a book of essays on the topic of desire. One of those essays was published in a magazine called Hazlitt online, and the essay is on the topic of kissing. The way that I’m conceiving the collection is kind of like a memoir at a crisis point in my life when I was leaving my marriage, sort of the four years afterwards, and each essay is interrogating an object that I was wanting. Kissing was one of them, the colour pink is another one, so some of them are quite mundane and some of them are more abstract than others.
Then the third book is kind of an unexpected novel that I wrote last year, and I think that we’re going to find a real overabundance of novels in the next couple of years, because so many writers are holed up at home with the COVID-19 and what we do when we’re stressed out is write. I also teach at Colorado College courses similar to VIC275. I sometimes take on private clients, and the other thing that I do is I supervise students in their final creative thesis at the [Creative Writing] MFA at the University of Guelph.
How, when, and why did you come to teach at UofT?
I’m a freelance artist. So my main priority is my writing, and then I try and piece together enough little jobs on the side to pay for that, because writing, typically—well, I mean, it does sometimes pay, but it’s a very precarious way to run your life because you don’t know how long a project might take, from beginning to end. Anyway, typically, creative writing is not a very highly paid job, unfortunately. So I’m always looking for teaching gigs, and because right now most of my paid work is in the US and I’m getting older; I’m trying to figure out how to get more work in Canada so that I don’t have to travel every year.
How do you think creativity should be taught? Can it even be taught?
I think my starting point is that we are already creative. Humans are inherently creative. So I don’t think I need to teach students how to be creative, I just think I need to help them believe that they are creative, and sometimes help students trust that their creativity is worthwhile and productive.
We live in a very capitalist society, and I think that many students have parents who are funding their education. That can be an issue, where students have to justify what they’re doing to parents who maybe want them to be in a STEM program or doing something more obviously practical. But I also think that STEM students, even students who are in other maybe more directed humanities programs where they might more predictively get a well-paying job, will benefit from studies in creativity. Every job requires that you are nimble in your thinking, and there’s maybe nothing more nimble than the study of creativity or getting creativity to be part of your daily practice. So, can I teach creativity? No, but I can help somebody to be more creative.
As an educator, what are some things you think educators should incorporate into their teaching when adapting their courses for online learning?
I mean, I would never tell another professor how to teach, or how to run a class in any category, but I do think that teaching online can mean that students are sitting an awful lot and staring at screens. My courses involve quite a lot of embodiment. I want my students to move, I want them to use their bodies more. If professors can incorporate movement into a classroom, I think it will really help students.
I try to fit in breaks during the [classes] that I teach. Which, you know, in the normal course of things, if class was an hour and fifty minutes it would go by so quickly. But online, it can feel like a lot for a student to sit there. When I give a break, I’m always hopeful that the student won’t flip over to Facebook or whatever, but will go do something for those ten minutes.
What would be your advice to young writers?
What every single writing teacher in the whole history of teaching writing always says: read more. Also, take time to have experiences and to live your life. Writing is important, writing is obviously a passion of mine, but I [don’t] think it’s the only thing, you know?
Sometimes, I have students who are so driven to get good marks and really want to have a professional life as a writer that they get subsumed with the act of writing to the detriment of actually living their lives. So I do think you kind of need a balance between those two things, and not just because you should write what you know or something like that, but actually, you should live. You should live your life. It’s a beautiful thing to have a life. I think writing will benefit from having had a well-lived life.
