Abstract
“A Blossoming of Oranges” is a phenomenological response to two houses of criticism of the creative writing workshop model, the first of which positions the workshop model as a force for cultural hegemony, and the second of which identifies the workshop model as a causal factor for the deterioration of writing in America. This defense is presented in the form of theatrical vignettes, participant writing, and constructed conversations between participants, researcher, and critics. Major lines of criticism are explored, as well as the bodies of research on both the creative writing workshop model and the field of existential phenomenology, as they illuminate the workshop model as an aesthetic hermeneutic that may aid in the artistic development of individuals and the betterment of society.
Keywords
It is 2:00 p.m. on a Friday, and all the black, plastic roller chairs in this undergraduate creative writing workshop are filled. Before each student rests a copy of “The Landlord,” a short story by Sunnie Gaylord (2013), “The Landlord.” Workshop members settle backpacks and still their feet, watching Sunnie expectantly. It is mid-February; the air is heavy with radiators, damp fleece, and, when the main doors open and shut, the mineral scent of falling snow. Sunnie takes one deep breath, and begins to read.
Sunnie’s voice, reminiscent of old records, rises and settles back into its grooves. The landlord has driven to another house and watched his tenants drive away. They are his son, Bryan, his son’s alcoholic girlfriend, Hannah, and their infant daughter, Lemon. Outside the car, inside Sunnie’s voice, sparrows scatter like petals in the fragrant air as the landlord shoves open the Buick’s door.
I, the researcher, am the only one in the room who hears his voice. Critics like Anis Shivani would send my students home, away from the pointless labor of writing. Thankfully, Sunnie and the workshop members are unaware of Shivani’s dismissal. By now, the Landlord is back in the Buick, and the rest of us, crowded invisibly on the long backseat, watch him place his face in his hands and begin to cry.
Enter Players, Enter Chorus: Notes on Two Houses of Criticism
Recent decades have seen a burgeoning of creative writing workshops in communities, after-school programs, adult learning, and university classrooms across America and beyond. According to the classic workshop model, writers of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction distribute writing in advance and return to workshop to receive verbal and written comments from their writing peers, with the goal of collaborative improvement of individuals’ writing (James, 2012). Although workshop participants and the literature (
Critics such as Rosalie Morales Kearns attest to the cruel and sometimes violent atmosphere of the workshop in which participants are encouraged to demean the work of others (Kearns, 2009). The workshop model is described as a medieval guild system (Shivani, 2011), a locus of danger and damage for gendered and ethnic voices (Kearns, 2009), and a place in which the influence of the instructor-as-mentor may lead to the homogenization of writers’ voices (Kearns, 2009; Shivani, 2011). According to these critics, the workshop model seems designed to terrorize writers into quiescently writing the same poem or story over and over, thus bleaching the American literary landscape to desert. Even worse, according to Shivani (2011), is the utter irresponsibility of the workshop model, which he suggests finds its purpose in producing wave after wave of mediocre young writers who expect to live comfortably on their craft—and are misguided in the belief that they might possess unique voices and words that America might wish to hear.
As the workshop model is multiply anthropomorphized as the villain in this drama, the rationale for my response is predicated upon the body of educational research and participant testimony (
Reseacher’s Ethos: Positionality
As a graduate of an MFA program and a teacher of undergraduate creative writing workshops, as well as an existential phenomenological researcher with a hermeneutical focus on the workshop model’s transformative power, I present the creative writing workshop model as reflected extensively in the research on aesthetic hermeneutics by Ricoeur (1983), Heidegger (1982, 2001), and Gadamer (1976). I respond to criticisms of the model with participant poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and a created conversation based on transcribed interviews, with the goal of communicating the essence of lived experience of real workshop participants. Furthermore, I propose a realistic explanation for the flaws in creative writing workshops, as an alternative to anthropomorphized indictments of the workshop model as a locus of hegemony or cultural entropy, and offer testimonials from writers on the longitudinal benefits of workshop model pedagogy.
As an existential, hermeneutical phenomenologist, I locate my own experience, knowledge, and perspective—both of the workshop, through the multiple positionalities of MFA graduate, poet, and teacher, and of the body of research on the use of the creative writing workshop model—as essential and meaningful heuristics in this defense. In traditional phenomenology, the Husserlian reduction requires the researcher to eliminate all a priori assumptions and biases, both personal and professional, which may exist between researcher and subject matter. As an existential phenomenologist, I acknowledge that all description is rooted, if invisibly, in interpretation (Ricoeur, 1983). Creative writing is deeply phenomenological, as its foundational desire is to communicate the essence of experience. For this reason, this response to criticism strives to illuminate the experiences and responsive writing of workshop participants as well as the body of scholarly literature on the creative writing workshop. This approach is vital for a comprehensive response to criticism that may have longitudinal, damaging effects on a teaching methodology shown to have longitudinal, positive impacts on myriad writing populations.
In the Room With the Muse
The three participants* involved in this phenomenological study are a purposive sample of a larger, ongoing study on the creative writing workshop and transformative learning theory. All were previously students enrolled in creative writing workshop classes at a community college in a town of 30,000 in the Mountain West of the United States, and all matriculated successfully to the university in the same town. One participant, Sunnie, is a 28-year-old Chinese-American female, majoring in English with a creative writing focus at the university.
*All three participants requested to be identified by their real names
The second participant, Jason, is a 25-year-old White male who is employed full-time at the university and is a part-time student, studying creative writing and English. The third participant, Oscar, is a 31-year-old White U.S Army veteran who has, since his return from Iraq, earned a bachelor’s degree and teaching certification in secondary education from the university and was accepted into the graduate program in English in 2014. All three participants are senior managing editors of the literary journal, Open Window Review, and all self-identify as writers.
Mining Essence
For the purposes of this phenomenological study, data were collected via the audio recording of phenomenological interviews, artifacts in the form of published and unpublished participant creative writing, and phenomenologically crafted, creative participant responses to an invitation to describe the development of authentic voice in the creative writing workshop, for the purposes of intensification of language and phenomenological reverberation (van Manen, 2014).
Heteroglossia
Drawing from memoing notes, my researcher journal, and verbatim transcriptions of audio recordings of interviews, I coded and grouped common codes, eventually constructing themes that center around concepts of autonomy, authentic voice, audience, and the workshop model as participants responded verbally to topics presented in semi-structured, phenomenological interview questions and through participants’ phenomenologically responsive writing samples. I also constructed and co-constructed vignettes that phenomenologically illustrate workshop experiences, as well as an imagined conversation in three themed sections among myself, participants, and Rosalie Morales Kearns. Trustworthiness and accuracy of data analysis were supported through crystallization of thematic responses and frequent member checks, which offered participants further constructive and directional agency.
The Philosophers’ Oracle: The Workshop Model as Aesthetic Hermeneutic
In my research on the creative writing workshop and phenomenology, and specifically the existential phenomenology of Heidegger (2001), Derrida (1978), and Gadamer (2004), I return again and again to aesthetic hermeneutics and the concept of bildung. Aesthetic hermeneutics requires
a journey of finding a sense of identity and personal meaning in experience born in the midst of universal human struggles. This is a journey undertaken by a community of interpreters working together in mutually corrective and mutually collaborative efforts to understand texts and contexts. (Slattery, 1996, pp. 1, 12)
This presents a strong connection to the concept of bildung, which can be described as the cultivation of a community of learning that encompasses and utilizes different social, political, racial, gendered, and economic identities (cultura) to form a cohesive whole. A truly crucial element of bildung is the ability to come together and create a spirit of mutual respect and community with people of different backgrounds, genders, ethnicity, politics, religion, and race, among other socio-cultural differentia. And, of course, the elemental connection between the creative writing workshop and philosophical phenomenology is the communication of essence of lived experience through the craft of writing as a collaborative, generative effort in a community of practice that mirrors Gadamer’s (1976) extension of Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle. “Each person is at first a kind of linguistic circle, and these linguistic circles come in contact with each other, merging more and more” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 17).
The exegetical fruits of this collaboration are best described by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “So, it is in relation with the other that thought finds itself. In conversation with the other I may find that I am thinking thoughts that I did not know I had” (van Manen, 2014, p. 130). This concept is elaborated by Paul Ricoeur, who believed that hermeneutical phenomenology examines how human meanings are deposited and mediated through myth, religion, art, and language. He elaborates especially on the narrative function of language, on the various uses of language such as storytelling, and how narrativity and temporality interact and ultimately return to the question of the meaning of being, the self, and self-identity. Thus, the creative writing workshop is easily located inside this illumination of aesthetic hermeneutics, offering as it does a collaborative space in which texts are interpreted and reimagined according to agree-upon contexts and languages of discovery.
Thus, the creative writing workshop offers extraordinary phenomenological aesthetic opportunities as a conduit of shared essence that we so often locate in poetry and borrow from fiction.
Players of Two Houses: Critics of the Workshop, Divided
In this section, I present the most serious points of criticism leveled at the creative writing workshop model, by two of its most vocal critics, Anis Shivani and Rosalie Morales Kearns. I chose Shivani and Morales Kearns as the key Players due to the oppositionality of their critical stances. While Morales Kearns portrays the workshop model as damagingly critical, as well as hegemonic and repressive for gendered, ethnic, and political voices, Shivani characterizes it as a mechanism of mediocrity that is perhaps too unrestrictive, too willing to pretend that anyone who wishes to write, can, and worse, that all individuals possess unique voices of their own, thus contributing to the literary decline of America. Although these two critics generally do not agree, their arguments fairly comprehensively encompass the majority of criticism of the workshop model in contemporary America. I respond to Shivani’s major points of criticism through the lens of the literature on the workshop and through participant writing that offers an authentic, alternative perspective, and to Morales Kearns by constructing an imagined conversation in three segments that includes participants Sunnie Gaylord, Jason Deiss, Oscar Lilley, as well myself and Rosalie Morales Kearns. I believe this heteroglossic approach reflects the kind of egalitarian dialogue that Morales Kearns calls for in her criticism of the workshop, while offering substantial dialogue among players (critics), chorus (literature and participants), myself (researcher), and oracles (theorists and philosophers).
Poor Yorick: The House of Shivani
Voice: A one-trick pony?
Anis Shivani, in his 2011 collection of essays and reviews, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, ruminates on foundational, fatal flaws that he views as being toxic to the workshop model, leading him to call for its demise. The first of these fatal flaws is the notion that the workshop model helps writers find their voices. According to Shivani, “To think that you possess a voice of your own is delusional,” and even if you did, “Voice is too vague to be useful for anything.” He admonishes writers to “put aside the notion that you can learn writing” via “neat dictums like finding your voice under your ass, where you’ve been sitting on it all along, or in your condom wrapper or Ikea knife set . . . or wherever it’s been hiding.” According to Shivani, “Voice is a one-trick pony” (Shivani, 2011, pp. 151-154).
Canopies and Tightropes: This Question of Voice
Anis Shivani may be the most vocal of recent critics of the workshop model, particularly where the concept of voice is concerned, but he is by no means alone. The writer’s voice is unquantifiable; it is intangible and extremely difficult to define. It is also the one thing that a writer must find before they are able to write as individuals, standing though they are on the shoulders of giants. Of course writers are influenced by those who have come before; it is the essence of the writer’s lived experience and unique interpretation of the world that empowers them to use their writing for social justice, allows them to bring their own voices and identities to the literary conversation, and creates a uniquely voiced space which they alone can occupy (Bacon, 2011; Berzsenyi, 2011; Bourdieu, 1991; Capello, 2006; Graham, 2000; Haddix, 2012; Howe, in press; Kendig, 1994; Ostrom, 2012; Powell, 1994). Despite this colloquy of The Chorus, Shivani flatly dismisses this phenomenon; it appears he considers young or novice writers incapable of uttering anything authentic; “To think that you possess a voice of your own is delusional” (Shivani, 2011, p. 152).
The Chorus Responds
Ironically, the body of literature on the use of the creative writing workshop as a mechanism of transformative learning for the development of voice, identity, and empowerment, especially among at-risk writing populations, is overwhelming in its support of the workshop model (Bacon, 2011; Guzzetti & Gamboa, 2004; Schilt, 2003; Schwalb, 2006) and its ability to scaffold the development of strong voices for those who have, traditionally, remained voiceless in society (Bourdieu, 1991; Freire, 1970; Wissman & Vasudevan, 2012). Shivani’s derisive dismissal of their lived experience and right to speak authentically amounts to hegemonic gatekeeping, which is ironic, considering that he believes the creative writing workshop model to be inherently anti-democratic. Shivani’s insistence that unique, authentic voice is impossible, as a product of the workshop model, led me to request that my participants contribute creative pieces, like the poems, “Canopy,” by Jason Deiss, below, right, and “Lifemap, Language,” by Sunnie Gaylord, below, left. These poems serve to highlight the unique, authentic voices of these two writers, both long-term members of the same creative writing workshop. I present them side by side to tangibly counter claims that the workshop manufactures and demands homogeneity of member voices; these extremely different poems were written in response to the same subject—the development of a unique voice as a member of a creative writing workshop.
That night was weighted
in equilibrium.
I felt the milk stillness
you only see in noir film
coincide with the smell
of blood static
and my own sticky pulse
mincing war drums.
I imagine,
the night I accept a marriage
proposal,
caught in the weight of age
and optimism,
I’ll still be curious
as to what your lips are
engaging in
at that very moment.
Until then,
I hope your mouth shapes
itself
to my name.
I hope there’s retribution
in the commitment to the tightrope,
the respect of weight
it cradles.
I hope one day you can draw
me
a map of my life in a language
I can understand.
I just wanted you to know,
I’m capable of waiting.
The greenhouse
was peaceful, stable,
calm.
Transplant
means a grove,
where snows devour
last year’s growth;
where branches fracture
and collapse,
and mending returns boughs
heavy with apricot and lemon.
For all these changes,
I sweep the heavens
in blossomed oranges.
I see my voice as a person, an unattainable lover, whose relationship to me grows stronger through the balance of desire and of not being ready. My relationship with my voice is very intimate, but I feel a certain disconnect. It’s continuously evolving, so it’s hard for me to say that I know it intimately. But I’m willing to hold out. I’ll always be striving for a deeper understanding of my own voice, but I’m incredibly grateful that I’ve discovered it.
These poetic interludes illuminate the phenomenological aesthetic hermeneutic of the workshop, providing access to both lifeworld and exegetical phenomenological experiences. These two poems written by workshop participants also respond to Shivani by offering a disparate but whole portraits of workshop voices. Shivani may still believe this is delusional on their part; what is notable for these participants is that they possess a strength and ownership of voice that empowers them to be more concerned with the helpful criticism of their workshop peers than generic criticism from someone completely unfamiliar with their work.
Shivani’s disdain for Millennial writers, however, is stringent and unavoidable.
One might say that the problem is that the young continue to read and write novels; only, one wishes, they didn’t, since they read wrongly and write wrongly, and perpetuate the illusion that a lively literary culture is still in existence, which is a further disservice to their sense of reality. (p. 113)
This indictment of Millennial writers reflects a generational dissonance in Shivani. He, as someone who makes his livelihood as a writer, must certainly realize that no generation, including his own, has ever written according to the tastes and edicts of the generation that came before them. It is, as Shivani would probably agree, their duty to write according to the ethos of their own generation and their perspectives on a world that they inhabit in ways that Shivani cannot. If, in fact, they read and wrote “rightly” (I take this to mean, as Shivani himself does), he would only accuse them of being inauthentic. Perhaps, based on Shivani’s apparent dismissal of young writing students with “the lowest common denominator taste of undergraduates” (p. 26), and the apparent futility of trying to teach them, “At some point, compartmentalization from the stupidity of freshmen being taught basic English becomes impossible, and the mind rots” (p. 27), his real frustration lies not with the workshop model, but with the fact that the craft of writing is a continuous process, both practically and existentially, and that it is open to everyone.
Another of Shivani’s major criticisms is detailed in his essay, “The MFA/Creative Writing System is a Closed, Undemocratic Medieval Guild System that Represses Good Writing” (Shivani, 2011). As is apparent from the title, Shivani’s argument is that the structure of the workshop model is undemocratic, as it distinguishes between levels of skills and experience; there are novice members, more experienced apprentices or journeymen, and the masters, who teach. In comparison with Shivani’s proscriptive determination that novice writers should be neither seen nor heard, it is difficult to credibly cast the foundationally egalitarian aesthetic hermeneutic of the creative writing workshop model in a comparatively undemocratic light.
Although Shivani’s analogy between the creative writing workshop program and the medieval guild systems is overly dramatic and labored, certainly some important similarities do exist; those similarities also exist in all professions and trades in which the act of labor is an act of art, craft, or practice, such as painting, medicine, woodworking, or law (James, 2012). It is not undemocratic to acknowledge that in such professions, if one wishes to attain the highest level of mastery, that level must be attained through practice and—in many cases—apprenticeship. Even the most gifted painter, writer, or doctor requires entrance into the body of knowledge and wisdom on their trade, profession, or art. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) extensive scholarly writing on legitimate peripheral participation underscores the extreme relevance of collaborative communities and scaffolded attainment of increasing levels of mastery. Such is the structure of the creative writing workshop model. Ironically, if this system was dismantled, Shivani would find himself surrounded by even more young people who “read wrongly and write wrongly.”
Glass Carpets: The House of Morales Kearns
In her article, “Voice of authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy,” Rosalie Morales Kearns raises many serious concerns about equality, access, and emotional well-being in relation to the creative writing workshop model. She describes her own experience, and the experiences of others, as being silencing, alienating, damaging, and also hegemonic, in that she felt her gender and ethnicity were factors that led to a lack of acceptance. It is not my intention here to negate or invalidate Morales Kearns’ perspective or experiences; I believe the situations she describes are almost certainly at play in any number of workshops across America, even as I write this response.
What I wish to examine and respond to is Morales Kearns’ foundational decision to seek the cause of her dissatisfaction with her workshop experiences in the workshop model itself, rather than situating it as a product of the specific workshop she attended. As she explains, “Rather than attribute these negative experiences to competitiveness or malice, I find it worthwhile to seek out the cause within the workshop process” (Kearns, 2009, p. 790). As a result of attempting to locate the failures of her own workshop experiences in the workshop model, Morales Kearns calls for a fundamental restructuring to solve problems that are not in fact rooted in the aesthetic hermeneutic of the workshop model.
Respect for the Tightrope: Creating a Conversation
What Morales Kearns calls for is an “egalitarian version of workshop . . . which . . . is a conversation among equals, in which everyone (professor included) is engaged in a shared learning experience” (Kearns, 2009, p. 804). The following conversation is a constructed one; I begin each themed section with one of the major criticisms of the workshop model as described and illustrated by Rosalie Morales Kearns in her article, “Voice of Authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy.” The responses in each section are created from verbatim transcriptions of phenomenological interviews between myself, Lori Howe, and participants Sunnie Gaylord, Jason Deiss, and Oscar Lilley. Again, I seek not to invalidate the experiences detailed by Morales Kearns, but to offer a crystallized alternative vision of the workshop model, to illustrate that the flaws in some individual workshops are not necessarily attributable to the workshop model or generalizable across all workshops.
Theme I: Damage
Workshops don’t require that comments and criticism be articulate, well-explained, or grounded in common understandings of the language of constructive criticism. To quote Eugene Garber, “I have been in workshops where the commentary was so groundless, stupid, and hurtful that I swore I’d never have anything to do with another one” (Garber & Ramjerdi, p. 13). I could also cite Carol Bly, who uses terms like “bullying” and “low-level sadism” to describe creative writing workshops. The first time she observed a workshop, she (Bly) writes, I . . . noticed two points: first, the room was filled with the smell of fear, and, second, I didn’t care for the expressions on the other students’ faces. They had the look of cats near a mousehole [A]t least one dynamic in that room, whether conscious or unconscious, was low-level, mild, politically sanctioned sadism (Kearns, 2009, p. 791).
I have never had that experience in a workshop. I don’t remember any time when it felt sadistic. I mean, sometimes people didn’t know what they were talking about, and I was like, “obviously, you don’t even understand this story, so just go read it again,” but it wasn’t like they were being mean on purpose. Maybe lazy, like they didn’t put the work in. Now when I’m in the workshop I’m just able to pick things out and talk about them professionally. I have the vocabulary to talk about it, to be helpful with comments. I can’t imagine where I’d be as a writer without it. I’m very proud that I have the skills now. I can help other writers. There’s a language, though, and you have to have the vocabulary to use it. That comes down to the instructor.
What do you mean?
I mean it comes down to the instructor—that’s where the whole feeling of the workshop comes from. If you have a teacher who doesn’t bother to teach the vocabulary of creative writing workshop, it could be a free-for-all. But that’s the instructor’s job, to share the language, and to make sure everyone uses it, knows how to use it.
Can you describe the sense of competition?
It was always neck and neck in our workshop, we were so on the same level, we just wanted to stand out—no one wanted to sound like anyone else. I’d say the biggest feeling was probably respect for each other’s voices. And differences. And also, respect for—for the process, I guess, doing the writing, making it better. We wanted to improve, not outdo each other. Writing isn’t a competition, anyway. You want to compete, compete with yourself.
Theme II: On Praise and Criticism
“The focus on fault finding precludes a thorough and meaningful engagement with the author’s work on its own terms; we are . . . positioned to pass judgment and impose norms, even in some utopian workshop in which the feedback consists solely of praise!”(p. 792). The writer in the workshop is positioned to “take it on the chin” (p. 795).
Ideally, we’d all be so good, there would be no need for criticism, but if that were the case, if that was the skill level of every writer, there would be no need for workshop. How is it possible for your writing to improve, if no one can tell you what you’re doing wrong? The people who tell you that you should make changes are generally trying to help you, rather than just trying to make themselves feel better or more superior. Removing criticism from the workshop is basically to remove the part that makes workshop actually work.
I believe in writing therapy. It’s got me through so much trauma to write things down on paper. But what gets me red in the face, is when I write something like this down on paper, to have people ask me stupid questions; I’m like shut the fuck up and don’t ever bother me again. If you have a write-therapy group, that’s going to be different from a serious writing group. Here’s the crucial difference: In write therapy, you’re writing to feel better. In a serious writing group, you’re writing to write better. That’s a big difference in why people write, and it can be traumatic, having people critique work when you are writing it to get out a traumatic life event. That’s something that needs to be understood and addressed before people get into workshops. There’s room for both, but not in the same place at the same time. If you’re writing for therapy, you probably don’t want to be in the workshop group with serious writers. If you don’t get out of your comfort zone, you aren’t going to grow as a writer, but if you are writing for therapy, maybe the comfort zone is important. Maybe what you need is praise. Maybe what you need is validation, and if that’s the case, criticism about small stuff, the nuts and bolts, might be frustrating.
Writing is an intimate and personal process. When you create something, you can be too close to it to see what it needs. That’s what the workshop is; to make you see what you don’t want to see. Because it’s too personal for you to see it on your own. It isn’t like there’s no praise in workshop—there is. But if you want to grow, you take the praise, it feels good, and you take the criticism, because if you can listen to it with an open mind, it will make your work better. If you feel like you are “taking it on the chin,” you’re too close to your work. Maybe put it in a drawer for a month and come back to it with some professional distance, so it won’t be like someone telling you that your baby is ugly. If you take the workshop so personally, it can’t help your writing.
Theme III: On the Rules and on Power
For me, the most troubling aspect of the normative workshop is the gag rule. When I started my MFA and first encountered the gag rule, it struck me as a distinctly raced practice—specifically a Euro-American practice. When I saw how comfortably my fellow MFA students acquiesced to the gag rule, I felt that I was in a profoundly foreign place (pp. 793, 794).
I’m half Chinese, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I don’t think anyone really feels comfortable being quiet while other people talk about your work—it’s really hard to not say anything, because you want to answer questions, you want to explain. That’s why the rule is there; the point of workshop is to hear what other people have to say about your work. And you can’t do that if you are talking. I think you can go out after and have coffee and just talk, you know, then you can talk about your work as much as you want. Sometimes you need to do that after workshop. Workshop is intense, it’s challenging.
The workshop is just that—a workshop. It’s a place where things are fixed, repaired, made whole, made beautiful. It’s not just a showroom. It’s not a stage. I think that the way the workshop is meant to be run, the way it should be offered, it’s like “here are some supports you can use until you can find your feet, then go find your own corner of the written word and make it your own.” A workshop that is a workshop that helps people as writers will hold itself to their voices instead of holding their voices to itself. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, or whether you’re a man or woman. A workshop that tries to force your voice into its mold is one to turn around and walk out of, unless you join a workshop to become Jane Austin Clone #43. As long as we are striving toward that goal together, we’ll all reach it. You’ll hear all our voices.
I learned and I gained from learning the rules that were in place in the workshop, and I hate rules. You can learn from other writers in the workshop and construct your own voice. I always have hated rules. Without learning the rules, and without the structure, I would not have been able to reach a place where I can force myself to look at what I’m doing and writing, and to look hard at my own style. Without the rules that made me examine my own work fiercely, I don’t think I would have been able to find that self-critique in my own work. I guarantee my book would not be on that Harper Collins review list if I hadn’t walked into that first undergraduate creative writing class, if I hadn’t stuck with the workshop for five years. So the structure and rules of the workshop, yeah, they’re important.
During my MFA program, I recall leaping at the chance to cross genres and take a fiction workshop; my motivation was the chance to work with a visiting imminent writer whose work I greatly admired.
On the first night of workshop, HE began the discussion of the first piece, by a writer I’ll call Stephen.
“This is just a delightful piece of twaddle,” HE said, shaking his head. “It’s drivel, really, but rather cute, isn’t it?” HE gazed fondly round at us, letting his pristine paper copy of Stephen’s piece float to the floor and out of sight. Silence. Facial gymnastics overtook us as we mutely interrogated each other. Was HE serious? Stephen was one of the best writers in the group. More than that, this was that writer, whose work we so respected, but his comments were sadistic and cruel. I suddenly felt unbearably hot; I would be skewered, left for dead. Glancing around, I saw the same beads of sweat blooming on foreheads.
HE grinned, gesturing for the group to begin comments; clearly, he expected us to slaver at Stephen’s open wounds. Megan, another of our best writers, cleared her throat. “Stephen, I love how you’ve nested so many layers of political commentary inside the satire of this one night in a restaurant kitchen, but I think the character of Felix would move the plot better if he could move back and forth, inside/outside . . .”
When Megan finished, the rest of the workshop followed suit in the tradition of the workshop. HE looked exasperated. HE’d poured Stephen’s blood in the water, but it hadn’t drawn a single shark. Over the semester, HE continued to blast the quaking writers of our group with vitriolic glee, but not a single workshop member joined him in the darkness. In fact, after workshop, we often speculated that HE’d gone mad—or was HE getting drunk before coming to class?
None of us had ever experienced such pointless and unhelpful criticism in the workshop, and we were not impressed. Moreover, we were disappointed, shaken. Some of the barbs had lodged deep, and one workshop member left the program.
At the end of that semester, we escaped gladly from the dead air and strain of that writer and his “workshop.” Over pizza and beer, I discussed the tortuous semester with a colleague who knew HIM better than most.
“You know, his wife died right before he came here,” she told me. “I can’t believe he didn’t cancel; it was a terrible ordeal. He’s barely keeping it together.”
I include this vignette and afterword because they are true, and because they help me remember that teachers of writing—teachers of all kinds, in fact—are human beings with flaws, subject to frailty of ego, emotion, and loss, just like the students in their classrooms. It was not the workshop model that failed, here; in fact, the workshop strengthened under attack. It was the eminent writer, entrusted with leading our workshop, who failed for personal reasons. And this is not uncommon. There also exists a false assumption in the writing world that gifted writers must necessarily be competent teachers of their craft. What is unarguably true is that the workshop leader, regardless of stature in the literary community, bears the great responsibility of creating and requiring an atmosphere of cultura in the workshop environment, as well as providing the lexicon of commentary and maintaining the spirit of bildung.
It is not common, at least, not in my experience, for students to interpret poor teaching skills on the part of an engineering or biology professor to mean that the teaching methodology is flawed. It is amazing, though, how often poor instruction in creative writing workshops is held up as justification for dismantling the workshop model, as though the model itself is responsible for emotional attachment to writing, or for human weakness.
The Untying of the Knot
As you read this, people of all ages and levels of experience are engaging in the aesthetic hermeneutic practice of the writing workshop in rooms across the world. They do this for many different reasons; some have stories they need to tell in order to feel that they are free to live their lives. Others enjoy the atmosphere of cultura, of coming together with other writers from different backgrounds, races, histories, politics, genders, and religions to discover how the heteroglossia of the workshop can challenge their work to grow. Still others nurture a dream of becoming famous writers. Certainly, there are those who attend workshop to vent their own dissatisfactions by criticizing others for sport, but this is simply one facet of the human element of workshop. It would be impossible to cull all possibility of damaging comments and hurt feelings from the workshop without standardizing it, without amputating the hands and arms that feed its beating heart. The workshop, like theater, is a place where voice is always already under construction; it is a place of apprenticeship, where language and craft are handed down and knowledge is shared. Its model is the essence of Gadamer’s extension of Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, and of bildung; it is, at its very core, the essence of culturally responsive pedagogy. It is what we owe to our students, ourselves, and to society; if we strive for democracy, the written history of our people must be inked in all our voices, not only those of a fortunate and powerful few.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography
. Her first book of poems, Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains, was released on November 15, 2015, by Sastrugi Press. Her second collection, Voices at Twilight, is currently in press with Sastrugi Press (2016).