On 'Reflections on the Teaching of Creative Writing: A Correspondence' by Eugene Garber and Jan Ramjerdi- Reading Response #1

I have a strange affinity for tension. Though my physical and mental health are as compromised by too much of it as anyone else, I often find tension to be the site of and spark for considerable learning and growth. In the context of academic settings, tension often manifests as debate, dissent, and difficult classroom dynamics, where competing narratives on a text, whether student-produced or not, emerge and engage in some level of conflict. I find those conflicts, and the discussions they spawn, to be the space where my most memorable levels of scholastic or creative engagement occur. I’ve often questioned this affinity for tension, framing it as an immature penchant for drama and a problematic reliance on ideological clashes to make for a rewarding or inspired experience in the classroom. Reading Eugene Garber’s and Jan Ramjerdi’s ‘Reflections On The Teaching Of Creative Writing’ correspondence alleviated some of this self-critique, and helped me understand why tension, as an entity, has made for such useful moments of personal and artistic development.

In their letters over the course of a summer, Garber and Ramjerdi, teachers at state universities on opposite coasts, discuss their experiences in creative writing workshop classes, assess the shifts that have occurred in creative writing programs since their emergence in the 1950s, and theorize on the utility of teaching creative writing in general. Embodying a level of self-discovery through back-and-forth communication, itself necessitating trust in an unknown process and a willingness to disagree or raise more questions than they answer, these two writers and teachers discuss the impact “thematic, cultural criticism” (feminist, anti-colonial, Marxist, etc) have recently had on the experience of creative writing workshops, and feedback generated by student-created texts. Discussing “the shift in focus from the text as autonomous object to text as a construction of the reader” and the “redefinition of the role of the reader from a neutral observer to an active participant,” they name the extent to which concerns around socially responsible representation in creative writing have become more prevalent in the contemporary, college- or university-based workshop. They further examine how, despite the potential challenges faced when creative writing teachers need become facilitators of discussion on the depiction of traditionally marginalized communities in student writing, such discourse can provide participants and faculty an opportunity to embrace their respective growing edges, and gain something useful not only in terms of their creative practices, but also in their understanding of the world at large (which, ultimately, should be one of the goals of any successful writer, I would argue). Though “a common body of knowledge cannot be assumed,” Ramjerdi states, “underlying the sometimes contentious clash of alternative readings is the fact that there is real dialogue in process.”

With that simple assessment of what often plays out in workshops as complicated, convoluted disagreements following the build-up of interpersonal tensions based on colliding/competing worldviews among participants, Ramjerdi captured what makes such messy conflict a location for legitimate development—“there is real dialogue in process.” Unlike workshop discussions that rely exclusively on concerns of craft and technique, ultimately staying in a very safe, unthreatening space, when theme, content, and characterization within a piece of writing are called into question, students (both the writer under review and those chiming in with commentary on her/his piece) are engaged in a much realer, rawer, potentially transformative dialogue. As Ramjerdi states, “When the discussion gets interesting what is generally going on is that the text is clashing with a reader’s ideology and/or poetics and there is a good likelihood that this reader develops her response as she speaks and others listen and respond… a conflict will emerge. This is good and shouldn’t be suppressed.” Tension in a workshop class usually lets me know that such potential’s around the bend, if participants are brave or trusting enough to pursue it.

Garber goes on to raise the question of “master narratives,” defining them as the primary “stories a culture has to have in order to teach its patterns and values,” and suggests that “an energetic disturbance happens when a piece alters the counters (characters, symbols, ethics) of a master narrative…” While Ramjerdi offers a level of opposition in the form of a rhetorical question about “how we can write or speak at all without invoking a master narrative—that is, how can we communicate at all without reference to the prevailing economic and social relations [since] that is all we know”—I found the mention of “disturbance” occurring when master narratives are challenged to speak volumes about prior instances of anger or frustration I’ve experienced in workshop classes or following readings/performances, where my own or someone else’s work unsettled a space’s acceptable, socially sanctioned norms. By the sheer force of kneejerk critiques that would follow some blatantly paradigm-challenging piece of writing or performance, a “disturbance” could be felt, and with it, the tension of having to negotiate critiques of a classroom’s, or the broader society’s, status quo.

Having read Garber’s and Ramjerdi’s correspondence, and garnered a sense of the value they both seem to ascribe to this tension (indeed embodying it at times in their own occasionally differing perspectives), I gained some feeling of relief and encouragement regarding my own workshop experiences, both as writer who’s occasionally come under fire for blatantly or subtly confronting master narratives and as participatory critic/commentator who’s from time to time called peers to task for co-signing on problematic representations of already disempowered communities in their writing. As Garber notes in one of his last letters to Ramjerdi, “the world is, to a large extent, discourse. Who changes the language game changes life… I argue that evaluative commentary in workshop does not have to be destructive. If commentators join writers where they have chosen to be, join the dance, then commentators can help writers find effective moves.” Agreed.