Fiction Still Needs Defending

A few weeks ago I taught a creative writing class to a group of teenagers from an international high school. They hailed from all over the world—Turkey, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Australia, the U.K., and so on—and mostly they wanted to talk about New York City, which they were visiting for the first time, what life is like here. They found the people they were meeting to be fascinating—they were fascinated in particular with how open these people were, how ready to share themselves. They asked about my favorite things about living in the city, and what was difficult about it, and where I liked to eat and which neighborhoods I liked to spend time in. Their questions were not, on their face, about creative writing, but I think what they were doing was adjacent to it, which was imagining themselves into my shoes or the shoes of other New Yorkers, imagining what it might be like to be here all the time.