Learn to write with William S Burroughs

Cory Doctorow 8:00 pm Wed Feb 26, 2014

In 1979, William S Burroughs delivered a series of lectures on creative writing (though he insisted that he was teaching creative reading — that is, analyzing the writing process by reading, because everyone can be taught to read, but only some will be able to write) at Naropa University. Three of these lectures, running to over four hours, are up on Youtube, covering writing exercises, Brion Gysin, Aleister Crowley, science fiction, General Semantics, and cut-ups. These are excellent listening, and are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivs-NonCommerical (as is the rest of the Naropa collection.)

William S. Burroughs lectures on creative reading, including a discussion about various authors including Joseph Conrad, Denton Welch, Jane Bowles, Brion Gysin, and Julian Jaynes. Burroughs also addresses subjects such as art heroes, hemispheres of the brain, and the training of assasins.

William S. Burroughs' lecture on creative reading – Burroughs mentions a wide variety of authors including Aleister Crowley, Paul Bowles, and many others. The class also discusses science fiction, non-fiction, general semantics, scriptwriting, cloning, rotten ectoplasm, and judgement in cut-ups, as well as Burroughs's novel The Soft Machine.

Take a creative writing course with William Burroughs

(via Kadrey)

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