ABSTRACT
Imagine, for this final chapter, that you are a creative writer. If you actually are a creative writer, that won’t take much imagining! But imagine you are steeped in customs that are not your own, that your identity is not one with which you are familiar. What then? Culture forms us and is formed by us – micro and macro entities, personal psychologies, and vast public entities. In two words: you, society. Society bound in place and time, of course. And within that society: groups, associations, forms of being deeply at the centre of it, sometimes, and on the periphery of it other times. Traditions and challenges to tradition. Perception of what is the dominant culture – whether it is of a small group or of an entire nation – and questions of what is not, and why, and to what ends, and for whom. Here, then, cultural values are made and challenged. They are made and challenged too when it comes to your creative writing – where it fits in that culture, as a practice, as a form of knowledge, as a producer of cultural products (books, films, poems, plays). Creative writing, by definition, is a component of literate cultures – and in being so it is celebrated as a form of advanced literacy, associated with education and bound in ideals of how literate cultures communicate and create and share art.
