In the words of its author, this intimate psychological novella is “mainly about how difficult it is to write – indeed to experience – a story of real emotion in the Czech Republic”. The Creative Writing Lesson is also, of course, an expression of the author’s self-consciousness; as if out of nowhere and before the reader’s eyes this tale emerges of a teacher of creative writing, a tale which glimpses the fortunes of several of his students, most significantly those of a “magnificent substitute mother”. Masterful in the telling, concise in its composition, appreciative of gradation and mystery, deft in its linking of individual motifs: all this testifies to the charm of this treatment in prose of a “crash-course in writing”.

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