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Professing Silence: Imaginative Writing and the Academy (Inaugural lecture as Professor of Creative Writing)

On approaching this occasion I have found myself asking with renewed interest what it is, exactly, that, as a Professor of Creative Writing, I profess? The word ‘profess’ has its origins in the early fourteenth century, when it meant ‘to be received into a religious order, as by taking vows’. Although I shall go on to more contemporary meanings of the word, this is, however odd it may sound, the best starting point for reflecting on my ‘profession’. Here is a passage from my last novel, For the Sake of Silence, in which a Trappist monk, Father Joseph, agonizes over his profession as he finds himself caught between his vows, which bind him to silence and contemplation, and his work as a missionary, thrust upon him by the decision of his Superior to engage in the apostolic activity forbidden by the Order. The scene is Reichenau, a mission station in a remote part of South Africa, in the late 1880s: