Alan Shapiro: Mark Twain and the Ambiguities of Creative Expertise (July 2019)

As teachers and writers, we often talk about the creative process in contradictory ways: on the one hand we celebrate the importance of craft, which is to say, of knowing what we’re up to when we write; on the other hand, we say that at our best we write by instinct, intuition—trying not to know too completely why we do what we do. Shapiro’s lecture looks at Life on the Mississippi to see what Mark Twain’s description of his training to pilot a steamboat can tell us about these inherent and inescapable tensions between will and inspiration, calculation and intuition when it comes to writing poems and stories.