Writing and teaching : teaching for writing

This is how American poet Charles Bukowski (2003) begins his poem 'So you want to be a writer,' the poem that opens the posthumous collection 'Sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way'. Rather than the practices of writing, or what writers actually do, the poem takes a more existential focus on being a writer. What does it mean to be a writer, how is it felt, what is required of the body, the mind, the person, how is everything transformed? In the opening lines, writing is about the body gripped by the desire to write. It seems that writing is something miraculous, or even primeval. Although Bukowski's metaphors are more muscular, his image of writing is compatible with notions of the unique and sensitive literary creative genius of the Romantics. Just 'don't do it' says Bukowski, if we can't do it under these conditions. Where does this leave us as English teachers whose business and passion is writing? Where does this leave our students? In this article we want to contest the premise of the poem, while also using the poem to draw attention to aspects of writing that are often overlooked. How might we create the conditions where writing seems to burst out of your gut, out of your life? We move between teacher as writer and student as writer in this article, though we argue these are interdependent, as we draw on research projects by both authors that focus on the concept of the writerly subject, or writerly identity, and how it might be cultivated. Inevitably our own experience and sensibilities as writers, and how these have impacted on our teaching and research, are woven through