This year’s Will Hays, Jr. Visiting Writer was a guest speaker at the English Department’s Creative Writing/Creative Teaching Conference for high school teachers. Pulitzer Prize winner and Florida State University professor Robert Olen Butler had this advice for his fellow teachers:
"Creative writing courses can and should focus on craft and technique. But every one of those courses should have this as a final assignment: ‘Forget everything we just said. You cannot use this again in the primary act of creating; it’s a nice secondary pleasure, but it’s not the thing itself.’
"Art does not come from the mind, from the analytical facts; it comes from the place where you dream, from your unconscious. A work of art is an object created from an artist’s dreamspace, and the primary and only necessary way in which the reader must encounter that work of art is through the readers’ dreamspace.
"This aesthetic response is the only necessary response to a work of art. You are meant to thrum to a work of art, like the vibration of a string on a stringed instrument."