A little perspective

Still upset over the Freed Screed -- which is subtitled "My years in the creative writing gulag" -- I did a little googling to see who else had commented. I came across a weird, poorly written but still interesting article on a conservative website bitching about an "anti-American" poetry reading held at San Francisco State University. The author points out that there are writers who have survived and written poetry and other literature in an actual gulag, so perhaps (and this is my point, not that of the author of that piece, as she was writing in 2004) calling the far-flung galaxy of creative writing programs and workshops a "gulag" simply muddies the waters.

To give her the benefit of the doubt, "My years in the creative writing gulag" was merely the article's subhead, not a word in Freed's own article, so it may well be that a copywriter chose the term and not Freed herself.

There's a discussion forum on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's website.

Lynn Freed, Freed Screed, creative writing