Save Creative Writing in TAFE

#16: Amra Pajalic - Save Creative Writing in TAFE 

 I too did this course, starting in 1997. I now have had the confidence to complete my BA, majoring in Literature and Philosophy, am about to begin honours and am a published poet with over 200 performances under my professional writing belt. I also teach creative writing to children and adults, and am inspired to share my craft with numerous community organisations. The creative arts honed and moulded into clear imaginative and accessible communication by my Tafe PWE education is an invaluable life and career skills store, rather than a fomulaic contained goverment structure intent on dollar outcomes. Writers are more than what is seen or measured. Writers are nurturers and are nurtured by the active support systems and tangible skills that develop their craft through the current Tafe PWE course. I now teach within the Tafe PWE course and see the progressive holistic outcomes through the necessarily creative productive process (as much as being a productive outcome, myself!). PWE is creativity. Creativity feeds skill. Creative skill teaches us to listen, to express, to imagine, to understand. What hope have we got if the future of our writing, nay, our communicative community in this country is reduced to strangling possibilities? We may as well strangle each individual voice, each choice, each opportunity for effective vocational growth, if we demoralise our core communication tool - language professed through Professional Writing and Editing.