A chapter of disasters

breeze. But for Carole Morin it was a sentence of sentences. Here, she

explains why she ended up wanting to machine-gun the entire populaton of

Norwich.

WHEN I was offered the position of Writing Fellow for the spring

semester at the University of East Anglia this year, I ignored the

warnings of previous fellows and decided not to refuse. So what if one

of them nearly went mental, another ran away, and another considered

jumping into the lake because the rest of the faculty wouldn't say hello

to him? Living on the Norwich campus for four months couldn't be that

bad. There's an all-night Diet Pepsi machine that gives change: and the

students taking my fiction-writing course -- no matter how spotty --

couldn't be as boring as the murderers in my class at Wormwood Scrubs.

Soon after I arrived, a mutilated photograph of me wearing shorts in

Barcelona was pinned to the door of the office I inherited from Malcolm

Bradbury. Unpinning the picture, I chipped my Rouge Noir nail polish. On

the back, an academic nutcase had written: ''I hate you''.

A lot of people hate writers, usually because they want to be one.

Everyone has a book ''in them'' along with their liver and kidneys. I

threw the picture in Malcy's bin, then opened the windows wide to

relieve the air of its dated perfume.

As I was thinking up lots of good reasons why artists become

alcoholics, a smiling student came to my door. ''Are you the writer?''

he asked me.

''No, I've borrowed her office. I'm Carina Carew the prostitute.''

Harry Matthews, the experimentalist, used to pretend to be an insurance

salesman when asked at a party, ''What do you do?'' Anyone daft enough

to admit to being a writer can expect the next sneery question: ''Had

anything published?'' How many chefs have been asked: ''Anyone eaten

your nosh?''

The grinning galoot gave me his trilogy to read anyway, saying: ''You

don't look like a writer.'' Hail Mary for that.

On the other hand, being taken for a student is a serious insult. On

my first day on the concrete campus I was thrown out of the staff caff

and sent to eat dog turd and chips ''with the other students''.

I'd eaten this turd at Harvard a decade ago, and it didn't taste any

better with East Anglian ketchup. Surrounded by John and Yoko lookalikes

heaving big bags full of stolen books and soiled underwear, who pay 50p

to hear UB40 (?!) on the juke-box, studentworld hadn't changed. There's

even a blonde who looks identical to a girl who used to be in my drama

class. Alarmingly, it turns out to be the same girl -- she must be a

woman now -- still studying after all these years.

In the corridor outside my office, men with backcombed grey hair and

women with faces like boiled eggs rabbited off in the opposite direction

to avoid me. I refused to take it personally. This rabbit run is the

normal procedure among socially autistic academics. A high proportion of

them are students who didn't have another idea. Thirty years on this

campus (that used to be a golf course) would give anyone personality

problems.

The inmates in an institution are never quite as bad as the staff;

though writing courses are famous for attracting loonies. One of my

poet-murderers in the Scrubs had invited me to move into his cell ''on a

trial basis''.

Superficially, UEA resembles the prison: the students are treated like

shit and the central heating is never switched off.

While in-residence at Glasgow University, Alasdair Gray said: ''It's

always the weirdos who visit you.'' There's the traditional dandruffy

plastic-carrier-clutching student with Ideas who doesn't do Sentences;

then argues that it's part of his Style. There's the jolly out-there

foreign student who wants to know how to Structure their issues. There's

the great galoot with stunning A-level results and a memory like a

tape-recorder who can repeat back what you've just said but doesn't do

spontaneous dialogue.

These visits had a rigid etiquette. The story appeared in my mailbox.

The scribbler knocked on my door and asked: ''Have I got it?'' There are

those who're only going to believe a bad talent forecast; and others who

expect to be complimented for their genius. Like Mystic Meg, I took an

ambiguous guess -- hoping there would be no tears or violence -- but

keeping a hammer handy, just in case.

The interview concluded with an insult. ''So,'' the student said to

me, ''you're a writer? Well I haven't heard of you!'' (I'll take it as a

compliment.) Or, ''I bought your book but I couldn't be bothered reading

it''. (Tee-hee, I still get the royalties.) Or, ''I could write a book

exactly like yours if I felt like it''. (I could never write like you.)

A summons to a creative-writing debate arrived. I was supposed to pay

to listen to a group of people who'd taught writing answer the loaded

question, ''Can Creative Writing Be Taught?''

Evidently. Malcolm Bradbury for one has made a career out of it. But

can it be taught effectively? Imagination is anarchic. The academic

instructor expects to stick to a course outline. This certainty of a

neat set of rules appeals to students whose brains are already

programmed to analyse, not imagine. But rules can make fiction

flawlessly unambitious. A random flick through the work of old boy and

girl, Mark Illis and Suzanna Dunn, on the campus bookstore reveals

remarkably similar sentence structures in bland books with transparent

issues. As aptly named Dean Lorna Sage says: ''There's a true

slipperiness in any text worth its salt.''

Students often ask: ''If Bradbury was any good at teaching writing

wouldn't his own books be better?'' Another professor insists that ''the

best thing about his novels is that nobody reads them''. An Italian

intellectual admitted: ''I read one! He has this useful technique of

announcing a joke at least five pages in advance''.

It's impossible to be a mediocre practitioner but a brilliant

motivator. Though it's likely that famous graduates Ian McEwan and Kazuo

Ishiguro would have been published without Professor Bradbury's

guidance. Who knows, their novels may have been more exciting. As

anarchist Enrico Malatesta said: ''If a man was born with chains on his

legs . . . he might attribute his ability to walk to those very

chains.''

Though the question could be ''Why not teach writing?'' It's as

justifiable an option for a degree course as Renaissance poetry or the

semiotics of the big toe.

My class met once a week at 9am in the basement. There was a bad smell

in the room, possibly because students didn't have time to jump into the

communal shower beforehand. They'd been up all night raging -- or

reading -- and need as much sleep as possible before a hard day's

talking.

My students were familiar with UEA creative-writing structure -- or

the Malcolm Method; photocopied fiction from two subscribers is

circulated in advance; read aloud in the two-hour seminar; then

discussed by the group. Everyone falls asleep until it's their turn.

''So,'' I said to introduce myself, ''write a short fiction in the

first person on losing your virginity.''

''Aren't we going to discuss this?'' Dandruff asked, alarmed.

''In this writing class we're going to write,'' I replied, full of my

own importance.

''I'm still a virgin,'' Smiler admitted out loud.

''Make it up.'' I explained the relationship between autobiography and

fiction -- how the first-person voice isn't really you. Seven-year-olds

understand this, but educated teenagers stress about motivation.

''Who is it then?'' Big Bore asked.

''It's your character.''

''How do I know who he is?'' he persisted, with a face that was asking

for a slap.

''Ambiguity can make art more interesting.''

Outside my window, defecating dogs used the gap between the house I

was paid to live in and the lake. None of their owners carried pooper

scoopers. As the semester progressed, the dogs were still defecating --

sometimes taking a swim afterwards. The students had started wearing

crazy tight shorts to show off their thunderthighs. If I were writing

from life, I'd have to use this scene in my book.

Nick Hornby gave a reading from his novel, High Fidelity, and admitted

that it's made up! A student visited me to complain: ''That guy hasn't

done his research. I wasn't impressed.''

''But surely making it up makes it better? Fiction's supposed to be

invented.'' Unconvinced, she handed in a story about incest -- leaving

me to vomit over the anal research.

Stories about incest were pushed under my door until I felt like

committing suicide. Stories about bored teenagers in a borrowed car

driving to an off-licence made me reach for the iced vodka. The

good-natured-mum-who-wants-to iron-lots-of-shirts story gave me violent

fantasies. Though I would hate to have missed the intriguing tale about

the addictive side of airport prostitution; and two boy geniuses in a

class of 11 isn't bad.

Even though I kept urging them to lie and reinvent reality, they kept

assuring me that ''everything I've written is true''. When I suggested

that anyone stuck for inspiration could steal from other art forms, my

Likeable Lad student confessed to taking a tin of salmon from the Union

Stores.

My colleagues were still rabbiting off in the other direction when

they saw me coming, and even occasionally swinging doors in my face --

but I refused to take it personally. The thought of having to talk and

use the photocopier throws the boiled-egg brigade into a panic attack.

Anyway I'd started jumping into the elevator and using the back stairs

to avoid people myself. Not to mention pretending to be my twin sister,

Carina Carew.

Then I heard that the vice-chancellor didn't approve of me. A meeting

had been held in the coffee-room. My worst offence was that when UEA had

its Teaching Quality Assessment the external examiner graded me

(snigger, smirk) Excellent, while the School was Satisfactory. Instead

of making me want to jump in the lake, this open warfare cheered me up.

I could stop pretending it was nothing personal.

Near the end of my sentence, Hugo Williams -- a former Fellow who has

continued to teach poetry at UEA for 15 years -- cheerfully asked: ''Is

everyone being horrible to you?'' Doing their feeble best. Though the

Vice-Chancellor's racy wife had explained that I was joking when I said

I wanted to machine-gun everyone in Norwich. Doors had stopped slamming

in my face and a few people had smiled at me. (OK, they stank of gin.)

Now school's out. I've escaped the Norwich nightmare. Angela Carter

was an extra in my dream last night. Wearing an alarmingly tight PVC

catsuit, she was driving around the UEA campus in a caddie, hunting down

a cockroach that turned out to be Professor Bradbury.

Angela Carter didn't have a big faculty fan club at UEA until after

she became famous. ''That was when Angela really wanted to kill them,

when they tried to take the credit for inventing her.''

* Carole Morin writes Half Life, a weekly column in the Spectator. Her

new book, Dead Glamorous, will be published by Gollancz next spring. Her

novel, Lampshades (described in the Sunday Times as ''Lolita with a

brain''), recently sold out in paperback and is currently on loan from

every library in Central London.