Writing tips plus advice from creative writing teacher Chris Hutchinson

Chris Hutchinson is the author of five poetry collections, as well as the cult-classic auto-fictive verse-novel Jonas in Frames. His new collection of poetry, Lost Signal, is published in May 2025 by Palimpest Press. In this collection, Chris celebrates the resilience and adaptability of language, while locating the tipping points of our ongoing environmental, informational, and humanitarian crises. Subtle semantic shifts mirror ideological rifts—yet lyricism thrives, along with a diversity of perspectives, forms, and styles, affirming faith in the power of the human spirit to challenge the insidious forces shaping our collective present.

Born in Montreal, he has lived all over North America, from Dawson City, Yukon, to Brooklyn, New York, working as a line cook and, more recently, teaching creative writing to undergraduates. Chris is presently a permanent faculty member of the English Department at MacEwan University, located on Treaty 6 Territory. He thinks that writing advice is overrated, but does offer insightful and solid tips plus writing advice in this interview!

Author and creative writing teacher Chris Hutchinson

How life experiences shape writing tips plus advice

On Creative Writing: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

Chris Hutchinson: I don’t think my life experiences have shaped my style, per se.

My style is more likely tied to my own idiosyncratic sense of what’s weird, what’s ugly, what’s beautiful—my aesthetic instincts, in other words—and this is something I was probably born with. I think my style has been “shaped” primarily through reading—through internalizing the cadences, textures, and tonal palettes of the various ‘Englishes’ I’ve encountered and swooned over in my literary predecessors.

I’d say my life experiences have shaped the content of my work more directly—the emotional shading, the images, the people, places, and situations that surface in the writing. But of course, style and content are two sides of the same Möbius strip.

To the next generation of writers and artists: Rebel. Tear it down. Rebuild.

On Creative Writing: What advice/guidance would you give to writers?

Chris Hutchinson: Honestly, advice is overrated—though I dish it out all the time because it makes me feel important, I guess. And it’s kind of my job, as I teach creative writing at a university. But I’m never sure if anything I say has much practical value.

The problem is, you can’t discover the solution without going through the problem first. Sure, I can point to some of the pitfalls, maybe describe a few of the rarefied peaks, but each writer has to find a new path to the waterfall. The struggle is real! Every generation has to reinvent the art for themselves—which means overcoming the previous generation, by not always listening, or by creatively misinterpreting them, then going in other directions.

I’ll say this: Because I’m endlessly bored and frustrated by 99% of Canadian literature and literary culture—it’s become so sterile, sanctimonious, and safe—I’m counting on the next generation to do something riskier. Something better.

So my general advice is: Rebel. Tear it down. Rebuild.

But don’t destroy everything. Don’t completely turn your back on the past. There are treasures worth finding, preserving, and carrying forward, maybe in a different form.

Remember what Adrienne Rich said: “Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”

Oh, and be kind. Take the bodhisattva vow.

The role of social media in modern literary culture

On Creative Writing: Do you use social media to engage readers, writers, or publishers and, if so, which platforms?

Chris Hutchinson: There was a time, not so long ago, when poets and writers connected with their audiences in just two ways: either on the stage or on the page. When I was coming up, there were no screens to obsess over, no digital friends, followers, likes, or retweets to track. Submissions went out in the actual mail, and so did the replies. Lit journals were made of dead trees. Simpler times! (And yet, some things never change. Even Gertrude Stein complained, over 100 years ago: “Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”)

I’m old enough to have hated Twitter (X, whatever) from the very start. Long before it was cool to hate it, I avoided Twitter like the plague. But I’ll admit it: I’ve been on Facebook this whole time—though I’m always about to delete my account forever. Why? Because social media is a misnomer. It’s isolating. Anti-social. These little boxes billionaires build for us where our behaviours can be analyzed and predicted as we perform our ‘authentic selves.’ I’m over it.

And yet, I’m not over it. It’s how I tell people when a new book comes out. It’s how I share about any readings or talks I’m doing or attending. It’s how I keep up with (spy on) old friends (and enemies). It’s how I support the Kitten-Meme Industrial Complex.

But I hate the constant worry about my online persona. Hey world, I exist! Am I trending? Am I relevant? Am I reading the right books and espousing the most up-to-date progressive opinions? I already have an in-the-flesh persona to manage every day, and that’s exhausting enough.

Artificial intelligence: The broader social and economic impacts will be devastating

On Creative Writing: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

Chris Hutchinson: I think certain kinds of writers will survive AI with their souls intact. It’s everyone else I’m worried about. Most literary types—by dint of their god-given obsessions—will keep engaging with the meaning-making, consciousness-expanding potential of language as it arises from and falls back into the human imagination.

AI's uncanney valley vibe

The more cynical post-humanists among us, however, may be the first to embrace our robot overlords. There are always games to be played—blending, collaging, remixing, whatever—along with constraint-based deviltries. And AI writing has its own kind of ‘uncanny valley’ vibe. You’ve heard of Deep Imagism (a la Robert Bly and James Wright)? I bring you: Deep Plagiarism (a la ChatGPT).

The broader social and economic impacts will be devastating, no doubt—potentially worse than the political wreckage and spiritual atrophy caused by social media.

But again, none of this is new. In 1935, Walter Benjamin warned of the spiritual, artistic, and political dangers of “mechanical reproduction”—specifically, the loss of the “aura,” that sense of authenticity tied to the “presence of the original.”

Case in point: In the corner of my office sits a wooden bat that once belonged to poet Patrick Lane—and before him, John Newlove. (There’s a whole story, about why Newlove had the bat in the first place and how Patrick got it, which I won’t get into.) When Patrick died, Lorna Crozier passed the bat along to me. That history, that lineage, and the fact that all these flesh-and-blood poets once held the bat and maybe swung it around, that’s its aura. Otherwise it’s just a dented piece of wood. I could 3D print a better bat tomorrow, but it wouldn’t mean anything. You see what I’m saying?

Definitely don't edit as you write

On Creative Writing: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

Chris Hutchinson: I try not to edit as I write. In fact, that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do (here I go giving advice) when writing a first draft—if that’s what you mean by “as you write.”

I’m a big believer in the Dadaist practice of automatic writing (which creative writing teachers sometimes conflate with “free writing,” mistakenly), in what Frank O’Hara called “going on your nerve,” in letting the language do the talking, letting the unconscious bubble up to fill the page.

It’s like flying in a dream: The moment you stop to think about it—hey, this is impossible!—you plummet back down to Earth.

When writing a first draft, you have to turn off your internal editor, silence your inner critic, and just go, man, go—get into the flow of what Allen Ginsberg called “bop prosody” describing Jack Kerouac’s improvisational, jazz-inflected style. Dig?

The rush of a first draft is a fragile, fleeting thing—like a dragonfly. Short-lived. It arrives suddenly, intuitively, marvellously. As Keats put it, “If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” So when it comes, honour it. Nurture it. Follow it as far as it will take you.

You’ve got the rest of your life to second-guess, tinker, revise.