English professor Richard Kenney’s office was more like a closet, with a jungle of books growing from floor to ceiling. Tall stacks of paper camouflaged a small wooden desk, where a man sat peering at his computer screen.

He held wire-rimmed glasses by his fingertips and touched them to his lips when he was thinking. At first glance, he seemed detached from the world, an absent-minded professor more content with keeping his head in his books than coming back to reality.

“I’m interested in people who read novels, but only in the summer or people with a crazy uncle who recites ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ at family gatherings,” Kenney said. “I’m looking for people with warm curiosity, both amateurs and dilatants. ‘Amateurs’ from ‘amar’ meaning love, and ‘dilatants’ from the word delight. All I want is a little love.”

A little love? The words didn’t seem to fit the out-of-touch professor mold. In the midst of sounding like he was ready to go into a rendition of the Beatles classic, the published scholar was showing interest in the wannabe writer.

“Writing is a vocation requiring specialized skills,” Kenney explained. “But unlike a lot of specialized fields, writing is supposed to go out to the general public.”

About five years ago, Kenney and his colleagues began discussing ways they might make writing, specifically creative writing, more accessible to a larger community at the UW. The result of their efforts is “Writers on Writing,” an English class being offered for the first time winter quarter.

Unlike other creative writing classes that have 20 to 30 students engaged in focused study, English 285 is a lecture format open to anyone. In fact, up to 100 undergraduates from any major may enroll, as well as additional graduate students.

According to Kenney, the model for the course was the creative writing study-abroad program in Rome, where he said people at every level of apprenticeship in the art were involved in a conversation.

“Am I a better poet than you?” teaching assistant Scott Provence remembers Kenney saying. “Yes, I have 20 to 30 years of experience. But, are my perceptions and ear for the human language any better than yours? You saw the same scene I saw last night. How would you convey it?”

Provence thinks having a blank slate will be an asset, rather than a hindrance, in this class. And for those who are studying poetry, fiction or nonfiction, the class will reinforce the fundamentals of writing.

But, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.

“You won’t have to write a 10-page paper, but you will have to exercise muscles of perception that have long been atrophied,” Provence said. “This class takes a holistic approach that forces you to take two to three steps back when looking at poetry.”

Kenney considered his own undergraduate experience in creating the course.

“The classes I most remember were lectures where professors really had something to tell us,” he said.

“Writers on Writing” is designed to have a different member of the creative writing faculty lecture each Tuesday and a local writer, many of whom are UW graduates, share their own work on Thursdays.

The only instruction Kenney gave the professors was to talk about what interests them the most.

“Students should be alert, engaged, curious and flexible because we don’t know which direction professors will take this,” teaching assistant Sarah Erickson said.

Provence thinks this lack of preplanned structure is a brilliant idea.

“It will open up the field of poetry, which has been so closed off,” he said. “We get to break into the craft.”

Specifically, students can expect to be given a topic or concept in lecture to stew over. They will then be given a small assignment, such as an “observation log,” to help process the material overnight. This assignment will be less polished, and more of a “gestural response,” Kenney said. In other words, the work will be more about the thinking process, and less about the final product.

For instance, Kenney will be giving a lecture titled: “What is it? Or, Ars Poetica?” He hopes to start with the question of what art is and get as far as poetry that is about the art of poetry itself. Overall, Kenney hopes he can give students freedom to speak with joy.

“Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man,” he said, quoting Ezra Pound, a 20th-century poet.

The whole class is aimed at remembering why we, as human beings, think art is important.

“We often think about language as communication, but in creative writing we think about the love of language itself,” said Maya Sonenberg, the UW’s creative writing director. “Creative writers use a special lens to look at what they read. They wear many different hats. They have a pleasure-reading hat, a scholarly-reading hat and a writer’s-reading hat. The latter is what we wear to look at how a work is creating the effect it’s creating.”

But, no matter what hat students will wear next quarter, the goal is to bring people together to talk about writing.

In fact, the creative writing department purposely chose to have the class during lunch hour, so that professors from other departments might grab a brown bag and attend the lectures.

“We have a room, we have the people and we have an idea,” Kenney said with satisfaction. According to him, that is enough.

Reach reporter Catherine Daley at features@dailyuw.com.