What does a writer’s education look like? Is it access to books, regular letter-writing, difficulty in childhood (war, illness, a brutal boarding school)? What talent or disposition primes the young writer for their training? In the push and pull of nature versus nurture, a key element is the right teacher, at the right time: the encouraging, goading or resistant pressure that nudges along the curious mind.
The essays in a new book edited by Dale Salwak, Writers and their Teachers, lead you to reflect on your own teachers, but one of the themes is that the writing teacher, in retrospect, takes many forms.
