Best & hardest... Mostly experiences

My workshop experience in an academic setting is limited to last semester. Prior to that, the last workshop experience I had was years ago. I will just tell you briefly that the very first writers workshop I participated in met at a bookstore that used to be situated at the top of Broadway where it intersects with College Ave here in Oakland, in a little bookstore called A Woman’s Place. We were all women. Negativity and ego-bashing was the order of the day. Anything went, and they seemed to think that was constructive criticism! After a few weeks I fled, never having shared a line of my work.

Disheartened but still thirsty for interaction and feedback, I eventually joined a fairly well known writers workshop in Berkeley that met on Thursday nights and published a quarterly called Thursday’s Child. The prevailing atmosphere was one of snobbery and superiority, as a handful was actually published creators of fiction. In addition, they seemed to favor the notion of getting published at all costs and the safest way to do that was to regurgitate formula writing. I fled there as well after a story I submitted for publication in the anthology was criticized for stirring the very emotions I had hoped to unsettle.

The best workshop I had ever participated in prior to last semester was ongoing out of the home of a community college instructor/novelist friend, and I attended it faithfully for several years. There were rules and guidelines and my friend was very strict about them and enforced them religiously. The feedback was sometimes on point, often rambling, and sometimes exciting, particularly because no one was allowed to say anything negative except in the most positive of ways (which, effectively, negated the criticism). This presented an imbalance. This, I think, is one of the greatest challenges of a workshop – imbalance in all its iterations. The workshop became boring, perfunctory and predictable. I had had enough experience in the private and community based writers workshops to make me swear them off for years.

A person can develop a passion or a horror of a discipline depending upon the way it is taught or facilitated. Yet, whether private, community or academic in nature, there are commonalities in terms of structures and how they relate to outcomes. This raises the question of whether or not it should be ongoing with the same people all the time, with minor changes here and there. I think there should be written guidelines. And I think these guidelines should be reasonably enforced. My friend went overboard. However, I felt that ‘discipline’ was too lax in my novel workshop last semester which, overall, I enjoyed tremendously (What does one do, though? We are all grownups and should not be treated like fifth graders). We were told that we had to participate in every class discussion, and that class participation counted a great deal in the overall grade at semester’s end. In the workshop were some of the usual suspects. As exemplified in the mock workshop in class last week, in addition to myself who didn’t get it that she was supposed to be the “author” of the poem (her slip of paper said she was the “writer who is very nervous”), and so didn’t put it together until rereading aloud at the end her assigned character but was feeling awkward and lost up until then, and then quite embarrassed (I suppose this is a type too, the disoriented and lost soul!), there was a person who talked a lot and constantly apologized for it, a couple who always said only nice things, others who tried to rearrange your work into their own words, etc., but for the most part, the discussions revealed that the others had thoroughly read your work , sometimes twice, thinking critically about it and typing up thoughtful responses (this was the professor’s idea and most of us obeyed). However, there were two people who stood out more than everyone else, in a negative way. One of these workshoppers always acted as though he’d only gotten two hours of sleep the night before, spread out all over the big conference table as though he owned it, grumbled feedback on rare occasion and who, I thought, was rude and disrespectful to the professor. The other person said absolutely not a word week in week out unless asked, and then the answer was of no substance. Neither of these two people was to offer written feedback either. You never knew what they really though of your work. That is another imbalance. And, now that I think about it, there was a workshopper who never seemed to be on the same page as everyone else!

Sorry for all the rambling, but this blog assignment is not as easy as first thought. I think the absolutely best thing about a writing workshop is you get the opportunity to here what others think about your work. Conversely, you get to see what your fellow budding artists are up to as well, and we all hope to have the opportunity to say one day, “She was in my workshop at Mills!”

Trite but true, one of the hardest challenges from the point of view of the instructor or facilitator is that of creating a safe environment where constructive criticism is fostered, where all feel as though they are being treated fairly. Within that framework, one secondary challenge would be to keep the balance in participation, and quality and relevance of participation. For example, I think we shouldn’t confuse valid criticism with personal taste. I’ve had others tell me my sentences are too long, or I should make a paragraph somewhere where I did not. My question is: too long for whom or for what? A salient feature of my writing is long sentences and long paragraphs. A workshop should also teach what valid criticism is. One thing that seems to stand in the way of effective criticism, in a major fashion, is the expectation, the hovering ghost of political correctness. Hardly any existed so many years ago when I first ventured out. Nowadays, it appears just the opposite is true. Admittedly it is a difficult line to draw. Still, some fellow work-shoppers think it’s okay to inject their own personal likes and dislikes, beliefs, etc., into a critique when the artwork should be the focus.

Finally, I think I’ve spent way too much time on this without having said anything the rest of you don’t already know in some form or other. So I might as well add: as a student it was challenging to watch the two classmates mentioned above not come through for the rest of us week after week and show up the next semester presumably to take up where they left off.