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A late-spring twilight in a boarding school in Ooty still lives with me. It was one of those large rooms in a building that had redone Harry Potter’s Hogwarts with 21st-century technology – stone floors, arched windows, discreet wiring, glowing screens. There was hushed magic in the room with about a hundred teenagers gathered in eager silence. They were Potterheads in a curious way: anxious about motivation, mental health and reading and thinking habits, but everything was dwarfed by an obsession with a large looming cloud. That was the unnameable magic of the already-present future, the force that you didn’t want to name but had to.

Artificial Intelligence. Will my learning matter anymore? Will my skills matter? Will I?

I, too, was grappling with a question that, at that time, seemed unrelated to this looming anxiety. Can creative writing be taught? As a writer who has taught for two decades at universities worldwide, this is in fact a question I have heard often – on campus, at book events, literature festivals, conferences, even at parties – Can any art be taught? Can it be learned? In a classroom?

That afternoon in Hogwarts Hall, it didn’t quite strike me that this was a basic question about...

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