Massoni Reader Response #2

Jennifer Massoni
Professor Abinader
ENG 271: Theories of Creativity and the Teaching of Creative Writing
March 2, 2010

Practical Advice

This week’s reading fascinated me, for it drove straight to the heart of why I enrolled in this class: to learn how to teach creative writing. While I’ve certainly derived value from previous weeks’ reading on creativity and inspiration, those can be nebulous concepts to capture in print, and seem better approached through class discussion. And while the age-old debate over if and how creative writing can be taught wages on, I felt like I walked away from these readings with concrete insight into class organization and procedure, philosophies of teaching I’d like to emulate, and writing exercises I hope to employ one day in the classroom. These are the three main categories I’ll explore further herewith.

First, as to organization and procedure, I appreciated the Gill James essay for showing us alternatives to the standard 12-or-more-student, once-a-week workshop format. For instance, the fact that faculty/tutors work with the more advanced students in smaller groups is brilliant. This can make each student feel like they are getting close attention, allow their work to be workshopped up to five times in a semester (instead of two or three times at most), and gives the teacher a smaller group of advanced students to focus on at a time. James acknowledges this is a luxury, but one “for which we had to negotiate.” Bravo to her and fellow faculty for stretching the given mold to best suit the needs of the students and the faculty.

While not specifically what James put forth, I realized just how beneficial a smaller group format outside of the master workshop has already worked for me at Mills. Last semester, Professor Nixon encouraged two first-year MFAs to meet with one second-year during the week prior to submission. This allowed for the opportunity to run work by a smaller selection of opinions and make changes in advance of the general workshop. We had the chance to see what obviously wasn’t working with a test group, and make a change before wasting precious workshop time on a fixable issue. While this may not always work with time constraints or personalities within an assigned subgroup, I found this pre-workshop workshop to be incredibly helpful, as I felt that I was passing out a second or even third draft rather than a first. And it’s nice to return the favor for the others in the subgroup, which we have carried on our own volition into second semester. Plus, these subgroups may well be from where we find that valued circle of readers who know our strengths and weaknesses and whom we may rely upon after graduation for feedback. Between James’ point and my own experience in Professor Nixon’s class, I am thinking more openly about the format of the workshop and what is possible in a given program outside of the workshop itself.

Gill also proposes a helpful piece of procedure with her standard platform for written comments. In a field where typical grading methods may not (and likely will not) always apply, I appreciated Gill’s nevertheless structured method, which she outlines on pages 50-51: 1) identify the main strengths of the piece; 2) highlight main weaknesses; 3) offer three techniques which will help the writer improve; and 4) end with a general note of encouragement. While this might sound familiar to many, she backed up her steps with sound reasons why, which mostly pertained making the most effective suggestions for progress while minimizing hurt to the self-esteem of the student. Also, she reminded that end notes are not meant to point out every point where the writer can make improvements; likewise, unannotated sections should not be assumed to be perfect or without need for revision. I think this final part is key as there may be a temptation on the part of the student to glorify the opinion of the teacher to the point that they silence their own inner critic or editor, which should be trusted above all. While we look for encouragement that a section is working, as we revise, we may still need to make changes and “kill our babies” as the famous saying goes. James summarizes this well: “surely the purpose of the workshop is not to be a marshal or a gatekeeper of texts on their way towards publication, but rather to offer a training ground for students to become their own best critics” (57). I appreciate this end goal, as programs are really but short chapters in our hopefully long writing careers—we must be trained to be self-reliant.

As for larger philosophies of teaching, the letter exchange between Eugene Garber and Jan Ramjerdi was particularly eye opening as it showed teaching as a dynamic endeavor, with equally dynamic and evolving motivations. Correspondence is such an ideal way to articulate those motivations, for as Julene Bair states in another insightful round-table discussion amongst educators, “When we’re done writing, we usually wind up with ideas that we didn’t, in fact, think before. Writing changes us. It creates us even, I think, when we’re writing exposition, trying to explain something we think we already know” (51). Letter writing, like all writing, demands that we articulate, and “Reflections on the Teaching of Creative Writing” did just that. One major takeaway for me is this dynamic nature of a workshop, like teaching itself: “Workshops are, in a way, texts, discourses, and as such are invaded on every border by ideologies, reading practices, goings-on in the department, in the discipline, in the profession, etc.” (12). Somehow, this fluidity is comforting. As we know from the readings in this class so far, creative writing pedagogy is being “rethought” and it’s reassuring to know we can benefit from prior pedagogy and contribute to its new strategies.

In response, Garber takes the workshop’s vitality a step further and suggests, “workshops ought not to be enclaves, safe havens, but ought to be as dynamically related to the rest of the program as possible” (13). I would have to agree. At this juncture, I think everyone else has quite brilliantly and thoroughly covered the debate over where theory does or does not belong in the workshop, but I will add this vantage point from within the debate. I took Professor Cady’s “Critical Theory” class last semester. I was one of just two MFAs out of 14 students, the rest in the class to satisfy their MA requirement. On the first day, we were all asked why we enrolled in the course and what we were hoping to get out of it, but the professor and the students seemed particularly curious about us MFAs. I replied that I thought Literary Theory was a good basis for what would come next in the program (as I would think for any graduate program related to the literary arts). I honestly didn’t realize it was such a bizarre merger until this semester, after reading so many texts that question its placement, ponder its absence, or pursue ways to digest it for student writers. Having seen Saussure, Derrida, Foucault, and other theorists show up in this class, I’m relieved I had such a thorough overview as Professor Cady’s, and highly suggest her class for anyone interested. It’s hard, it’s dense, it had me scratching my head more often than not, but I now feel armed with yet one more set of tools, which I can use or dispense with as needed. As educators, why wouldn’t we want our students exposed to as many ways to draw connections to/from their work and the work of others?

“Life in the Trenches: Perspectives from Five Writing Programs” offered a round-table discussion among four professionals who are actively and simultaneously students/writers/teachers. Even 16 years after this interview’s publication, the fears, demands, and rewards of leading this triplicate kind of life, from its financial constraints to required time management to evolving teaching styles and creative processes, are relatable. As a Community Teaching Project teacher this semester, I’m getting used to the juggling act and also have been on the eager lookout for useful writing exercises. Julene Bair offered an intriguing one: “Probably the most global thing that’s inspiring me currently is a deep understanding of the relationship between remembered images and imagination. I’ve been having my students do a series of assignments early in the term called the ‘Image Calendar.’ After we read Joan Didion’s ‘Why I Write,’ I ask them to recall the ‘images that shimmer’ the way Didion describes. They then ‘write up’ an image from four different periods of their lives. This is all by way of collecting material for essays that they’ll write later in the term” (46).

While not insanely provocative, I do think this exercise might be a helpful way to get that undergraduate introduction to creative writing class, which we’re always hypothetically referring to, using personal experience to feed new ideas and new forms. I also liked how Ann Turkle practices a merging of expository and creative writing in her classes: “I encourage my creative writers to do essays and my essay writers to try fiction. I can do this in a department which seems to prize good writing over genre distinctions. At the first-year level, these crossovers are easy. Oddly enough, creative nonfiction becomes a bit of a poor cousin as the course numbers go up. In our department (at FSU), one is on more solid ground as a poet or fiction writer than as an essayist or memoir writer” (50). What a fascinating trajectory (or perhaps an unfortunate yet common narrowing). Perhaps if MFA programs didn’t funnel students into one genre from the get-go, such a sense of liberation would continue. (I think Celine already made some great points about the benefits of not worrying so much about genre distinction.)

In closing, I also found some solid non-academic goals in this week’s reading. For instance, Lynn Domina includes many in “The Body of My Work Is Not Just a Metaphor.” Some were expected and ever strived for, such as “one of the primary tasks of the student writer is to learn trust and acceptance of the self” (28), but others were surprising, such as echoing William Stafford’s suggestion that “one condition of a successful writing class is that students be confident of a respectful reception” (30). Creating that atmosphere of trust, however, enables this. In “Life in the Trenches,” Rex West had an interesting way to achieve such trust and communication: “I try to get students to see me as an experienced student rather than a teacher” (44). And if our workshops are truly dynamic, we must remain students after all.