I’m not sure what to think of creative writing classes. The first year I was in the U.S., I met a man at a party who said he had a Ph.D. in Creative Writing. I didn’t dare ask him how many books he had published, since he spoke mainly about his teaching stints.

“Creative writing” seems devoid of ecstasy and bliss. When I hear the words “creative writing,” dental surgery comes to mind.

I have taught a few classes, but for obvious reasons, never a class on creative writing. I did a class on Coetzee, a class on war literature, one on genetic modification, and another on the techniques of suffering. The last two classes I taught at technical universities.

This winter, a liberal arts college in Berlin invited me to teach a workshop on creative writing. I said yes. It was only a weekend, and after all, you should try to contradict your own prejudices from time to time.

I selected a few texts by Kundera, Forster, Hłasko, Coetzee and also something by myself. I didn’t want to come across as somebody who taught a workshop on creative writing without ever having published a book.

One of the texts couldn’t be part of the required reading, because the f-word appeared in it. It was a paper I had written for a colloquium at a university in Cologne. I understand when family newspapers don’t want the f-word to appear in their pages, but if creative writing departments ban the f-word, their libraries will be fairly empty.

But my workshop could do without this particular paper, even though the sentence with the f-word neatly summarized my hesitations about what I was going to do in Berlin. (“Asking a writer to say something meaningful about writing is like asking a prostitute to say something insightful, yet civilized, about fucking.”)

The workshop started on rather balmy Saturday afternoon.

There were six students, all female, and with one exception all of them were from Eastern Europe.

My students were witty, intelligent, and they were bold enough to engage in discussions.

They spoke with admiration but also with distance about novels that I as well admire.

Especially when I was their age, I read novels not only for the esthetic pleasure, but also for the information they contained—to know how to live life, to find out what life is all about.

They didn’t seem to need novels for that reason anymore.

We read the chapter from Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed on Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants.”

Kundera says that one of the reasons why we need literature is to know what we have lived.

To me that is an undeniable truth.

But it was refreshing to find out that there are intelligent, capable readers who are reluctant to accept Kundera’s view.

Perhaps we need literature to admire the structure of the novel. Perhaps.