Reforming Creative Writing Pedagogy:
History as Knowledge, Knowledge as Activism
Joe Amato & H. Kassia Fleisher
Grady Tripp's remark near the end of the film Wonder Boys is calculated to elicit nods of agreement from craft-weary creative writing profs, who have been known to instruct their classes pretty much as they have themselves been instructed; and nods from creative writing students, many of whom are so deeply invested in the notion that their unique voices have merely to be nurtured, under an approving if authoritarian eye, in order eventually to attain sanctioned status; and nods even from the lay public - presumably the largest audience of this film - who deep down inside enjoy being told that the mysteries of the art form, of any art form, are not about to be illuminated within the stodgy confines of the ivy-choked classroom. Lord no. Art invokes its share of mysteries, to be sure, and probably always will, and this is probably a good thing. But one question we might do well to pose, for starters: Is the creative writing classroom a place simply for fortifying the mysteries of creativity, or can something more concrete, more palpable, more critical, more urgent therein be attended to? This essay - equal parts analysis, exhortation, and critique - will drift, gradually, toward consideration of this and related questions. In the process, we hope to identify nothing less than a creative writing mystique, as damaging to writing culture - a term we borrow from ethnographers Clifford and Marcus - as creationism has been to the public's grasp of evolutionary theory. In dispelling this mystique - in helping to rewrite, and in hoping to reform, creative writing pedagogy and culture - we hope as well to illustrate why current compartmentalizations of English studies, including and especially the enclave of creative writing, can only produce narrowly self-identified writers, writers likely to acknowledge only an attenuated range of writing practices.
From the perspective of popular culture and its representations, Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is anything but a unique character, falling as he does so squarely within the tradition of those many celluloid creatures who teach because, well, they no-can-do otherwise. 1 Sure, Grady is a "famous writer" (as indicated at the promotional web site for the film), but of late he's lost his focus, and types reams upon reams without adhering to his own dictum that "writers make choices" (as one of his student-critics reminds him). One lesson we learn by film's end is that Grady, like other boy wonders, will teach only as long as it takes for his royalties to place him in a higher tax bracket, or as long as it takes for him to meet and mate a wealthy (woman) patron. Perhaps we shouldn't blame Grady for following the money, or the mate, but we are well within our rights to ask just what it is that he brings to his teaching - that is, aside from what he says he brings to his teaching (which is very little, as above).
Judging by the opening scene of the film, Grady's creative writing workshop is little more than a safe haven for taste distribution and reinforcement, harsh or supportive as the case may be, turning on the particular constituency of a given workshop. For one, there are no computers present (even the film's web site features a simulated, IBM-style typing head as indexing mechanism), and as is the custom, the classroom serves foremost as a place for receiving writing; one gets the distinct impression that the on-site work of the workshop thus maintains its working commitment to reading (of student writing) activities, and to print culture. And however off-the-cuff, Grady's own orientation is toward nurturing: he reads student work aloud, he is concerned when feedback is too harsh, he personally intervenes when one of his more promising students, James Leer (Tobey Maguire), exhibits an unhealthy fascination with death (in particular, the arcana of celebrity suicide). He and his wife (who, we learn early on, has just left him) even rent out a room to one of his attractive female students, Hannah Green (Katie Holmes) - who is, of course, noticeably attracted to Grady. (It is ambiguous whether this may have something to do with Ms. Tripp's departure.) But Grady is a man who has seen better times, emotionally, physically, and creatively. 2 He's burned out as a writer, if not a teacher, and we're left to wonder whether he has ever imagined his classroom conduct, not to say his art, as having anything at all to do with the demands of critical thought as such. It's certainly tough to imagine Grady as setting an example for his writing students, especially those who, against all job market odds, aspire themselves to be creative writing teachers someday. A less generous viewer might find it difficult to imagine that any would so aspire after spending even a single semester under Grady's engagingly fatuous tutelage.
In fact the narrative and thematic contrivances of Wonder Boys - however diverting as entertainment, and while perhaps comprising "a picaresque odyssey of self discovery" (see web site) - are nothing if not testament to the power of pedagogical nurturing in reinforcing (highly normative and highly gendered) status quo conditions, and the failure of such nurturing as a prime mover of intellectual growth. In addition to depicting, with some accuracy, rabidly incestuous intradepartmental politics, the film gives us to understand, again, that a nurturing instructor puts up his talented (female) student (though Hannah will go on to find gainful if gendered employment not as an author, but as a nurturing editor); that a nurturing instructor puts his talented (gay, male, wealthy) self-elected protégé in touch with his own editor, a sexual relationship with whom will inevitably lead to Big Time publishing opportunities; that a nurturing instructor even lends moral support to his chair's wife, the chancellor of the university, with whom he has been having an affair, and who is now with (his) child. And given that Steve Kloves's script for the film is based on Michael Chabon's novel of the same name, presumably all of this coincides to some archetypal degree with Chabon's experience as a student in Pitt's MFA program. (Trivia question: Why is the film shot at Carnegie-Mellon?) "I used to care," Dylan's voice intones over the opening credits, "but things have changed." Maybe so. Still, one is tempted to add a friendly amendment to the effect that, as far as academic creative writing goes, it's been business as usual.
About which we care still.
Before we go on, we feel obliged to confess that whenever we broach the issue of teaching with our colleagues in English studies, we generally face two major obstacles: the first has to do with the specific demands we labor under as self-professed writers (and not scholars); and the second has to do with the fact that a mere minority of scholars or (creative) writers seem to have given much thought to their teaching. By "thought" we mean, very specifically, critical thought, thought informed by the study of teaching, and the teaching of writing in particular, as itself a legitimate field of inquiry and practice. We believe this follows from a widespread desire on the part of postsecondary faculty to be as autonomous as possible, especially when that classroom door closes; sadly, many graduate programs, even in today's blisteringly difficult job market, continue to encourage same in their graduates. To echo philosophically-predisposed composition scholar Ann E. Berthoff: what's lost on many faculty we know is an awareness that what is being taught in their classrooms, alongside textual study or writing genres, is a theory, or something approaching a theory, of learning (which in writing classes generally includes a theory of language). Though there may be competing such theories, to treat learning as if it were reducible to casual, capricious, or aw-shucks competencies or predilections amounts, at the very least, to wishful thinking.
We would observe that, like bad ideas, good ideas have a way of spreading. (Or in the case of this essay, sprawling.)
And to our colleagues in creative writing: We have great respect for the skills and talents brandished by creative writing faculty, even if we are inclined to argue, especially in this digital age, for a more synthetic, more collaborative, and more activist understanding of authorship, and the arts, than the word "author" might imply. Further, we find it distressing, at cocktail parties and the like, to be regaled with the cultural value of pulp fiction, or (less often) greeting card verse, as objects worthy of study and (even) praise; as though the cultural-reception work performed by these more popular (so necessarily democratic?) genres immediately obviates any more refined inquiry into their literary-aesthetic (and in this sense specifically ideological) value; as though we mustn't question whether the marketplace and higher ed might be in collusion (as it were) in producing a mass market for such "popular" works (and such "popular" writing), not to say a trade-based market; as though the small presses are by contradistinction a stepping stone to "greater" achievements, or worse, exclusionary, or worse still, elitist, or what's worst, beside the point.
On the one hand, we too support the collapse of high-low cultural distinctions, and would surely not wish to be viewed as "rightists of the left" (to echo music historian/essayist Richard Taruskin); yet we do maintain that the hows and whys of construction, of making, of poiesis, haunt all genres and all artifacts. Even a little consideration of such factors is likely to shed some light on what used to be called quality, and what today might be better understood as the qualitative value of cultural work - whatever the genre. More to the point: what would our scholarly colleagues make of our lauding the New York Times Book Review as an apt representation of scholastic insight? (Shall we call it the abject sublime?) What would they make of our advocating book review work as the sort of work that scholars might aspire to, hence as a perfectly legitimate criterion, all by its lonesome, for hiring "literature" faculty?
Alas, the sad fact of the matter is that a sizable contingent of creative writers might not find the latter scenario troubling; and it's not that we don't enjoy reading (and writing) book reviews, either. But while they continue to dismiss as "sociological" (a word we've heard fall from the lips of more than one creative writer) the sort of inquiry into writing and reading that we will soon be busy yoking to both literary practice and pedagogical purpose, many of our creative writing colleagues (and their students) are likewise fond of asserting that writing proceeds by intuitive means. And this, no less, contra concurrent claims that craftsmanship is a matter of studied practice, a working contradiction that serves to place art on a higher plane than "mere" craft, and which should at least alert us to problems with craft as such. Emphasizing intuition, instinct, gut feelings and the like is fine as far as it goes. But perfunctory declaration as to the a priori value of such faculties hardly answers to the cognitive complexities of the writing process; any more than an emphasis on revision mitigates a classroom telos of publishable product; any more than an outstanding publication record signals a competent teacher. We are only too aware that, in creative writing circles, advanced degrees (e.g.) are generally held in less esteem than publications. And indeed, though growing in popularity thanks to a competitive job market, the Ph.D. is not infrequently greeted with no small measure of contempt (as we have both experienced first-hand on occasion). Still, we believe it crucial to acquire critical insight into teaching, both as profession and as practice, and advanced degrees can help would-be writing instructors (much as literature instructors), regardless how talented as writers, to acquire the requisite analytical tools, while on-the-job training might merely reinforce bad habits.
Moreover, while we understand the problems associated with overtly programmatic classroom agenda (which might in effect overregulate the writing process, sublimating more unconscious attributes as well as more decidedly unconventional techniques), we cannot in good conscience advocate a helter-skelter approach to structuring the creative writing classroom - especially not on today's politically centrist-conservative, highly compartmentalized, transnationally volatile campuses. 3 Not unlike other higher educational pursuits, creative writing programs should, as a matter of principle and practice, refuse sanctuary for the theoretically squeamish (and we shall define "theory" rather broadly as we proceed). That French expression of which Duchamp grew weary so many decades ago, "bête comme un peintre" - "stupid as a painter" (qtd. in Chipp 395) - is one against which any number of last century's visual artists have articulated the conceptual underpinnings of their work; that writing programs have not always availed themselves of this precedent should give one pause. 4 Besides, as Ronald Sukenick remarked recently in an editorial in American Book Review, contemporary theory has, if nothing else, "made literary life, on the whole, a lot more interesting" (9); and continued hand-wringing about the legitimacy of creative writing as an academic pursuit - often by those selfsame faculty who teach workshops - suggests that creative writing programs have managed to insulate themselves by and large from prevailing English studies controversies, albeit not from a damaging variant of academic self-loathing (to judge from the tenor of several of the interviewee's remarks in Koerner's recent U. S. News piece). The upshot has been as one might expect: in the published proceedings of a recent conference on the future of doctoral education in language and literature (see Hohendahl), only one correspondent proposed, in ambivalently Arnoldian terms, that creative writing (and in particular, poetry) might have something to offer to English studies students: "the creative writers will include poets and some students will learn how to enjoy poetry" (Doody 1217).
We're willing to take what allies we can get, but - is this enough?
Finally, the concerns of third-wave feminism lurk throughout the formal history of creative writing programs. "[I]f creative writing is to have meaning in the academy of the future," David Radavich has written, "it needs to partake of ... broad, informed, intensive reading, thinking, and writing and a commitment to social betterment of a troubled world" (Radavich "Creative" 112; see also Fenza "Letter," and Radavich "Reply"). We heartily concur, and we hope to illustrate why reforming creative writing pedagogy must as well confront the challenge of feminist and postcolonial thought. Further, we hope to mount our challenge in third-wave terms, without succumbing either to more facile postfeminist agenda (see Joyce and Crossley, Mascia-Lees and Sharpe, and Ann Brooks for helpful appraisals of same) or to the essentialist precepts of second-wave work; while acknowledging that recourse to social-constructivist logic (e.g.) or to aesthetic pluralism (e.g.) is no ipso facto guarantor of disciplinary sanity. As writers, we eschew the arbitrary regulation of the real (whatever it is) by any ism, sure. But we will nonetheless not attempt to be all things to all people. It may be reasonably (and ethically) argued, and we feel obliged to do so, that writers, too, participate in structuring that connective social tissue through which the species gropes alternately toward grace and disgrace - an aspect of the human real of which radical feminists have always seemed to us acutely aware.
So we turn now, with this highly conflicted (and contentious!) sense of fictional (academic?) audience peering over our shoulders, to a partial (in both senses of the word) account of creative writing's past, as this past speaks to present matters. If in what follows we inveigh against the current contours of creative writing programs as we understand them, we yet propose what we hope will be regarded as a constructive, if (yes) radical reconfiguration of method and motive. Jacques Barzun insisted long ago that a "born teacher" need not be "asked to theorize intelligently about his art" (207). We respectfully disagree. When it comes to teaching - in all fairness, a calling and a profession, one that partakes both of art and science - talk may be cheap. But we writing teachers need nonetheless to learn to talk a good trade, and most importantly, practice what we do our best not to preach.
Act 1: Getting from There to Here
As one might surmise, there are histories at stake in films like Wonder Boys, which is to say, in (popular) representational exercises and motifs. One such history is the history of creative writing instruction itself. D. G. Myers's The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, is perhaps the best place to start. Anticipating that his readers will want to know what his agenda might be, Myers self-consciously holds to "the old discredited liberal principle that knowledge is its own end," which for him coincides with the desire of "creative writing's founders" to advance "the principle that literature is an end in itself" (4). Judging by the more practical and professional developments that characterize the history Myers unveils, the current situation in creative writing does seem to be at odds with Myers's allegiances. While we ourselves find the old (Western) humanist platform no longer tenable - in which (e.g.) the writing or reading of literature as an end "in itself" presumably augurs a more enlightened, more cultivated human being (absent the desire to scrutinize more closely the values attending to such cultural self-absorption) - we do appreciate the pedagogical benefits of teaching those who would look upon creative writing as something other than a means merely to marketplace end.
Myers's approach to creative writing history profits from two methodological assumptions: first, in place of the customary binary model (e.g., "literature" "vs." "writing"), he treats English studies in tripartite terms, such that "the constructive art of literature" (10; Myers includes literary criticism, such as the New Criticism, under his "constructivist" umbrella), along with literary scholarship and composition, is a constitutive pursuit of English studies; and second, he treats creative writing as something newly packaged under the institutional sun (13), and not simply as a subset of those centuries of imaginative writing that precede it - which latter ahistorical view is regularly advocated by creative writing faculty who would bridle at the proposition that a spoonful of institutional perspective helps the bromides go down.
We will have ample occasion (below) to consider whether English studies does well as a profession by advocating composition, literary scholarship, and creative writing as intrinsically discrete activities (we think not). Suffice to say that Myers does a fine job of showing how resistance to nineteenth century philological study resulted in the rise of English composition, and he traces in exacting detail the incipient conceptual and historical twists & turns that culminate in the particularly progressivist orientation toward creative writing that distinguishes our first such classrooms. Seen in this historical light, creative writing embodies a "dissent from [nineteenth-century US] professionalization," emerging as a matter of "conservative reform" (7) against the backdrop of a burgeoning postsecondary enterprise more and more steeped in technological expertise. Creative writing addresses concerns left unattended by more practical writing programs (i.e., schools of journalism); by classrooms whose primary focus lay in grammar instruction and the like; by scholars for whom the literary artifact had been primarily a means of exploring one or another sociohistorical circumstance (sound familiar?). Myers identifies the prototype for the creative writing classroom as such: Hughes Mearns's work with children in the twenties at the Lincoln School, "a progressive laboratory school run by Teacher's College, Columbia University" (102). A self-professed follower of Dewey, Mearns experimented with the Lincoln curriculum by "replacing English with creative writing" (103). 5
The individual's (birth)right to self-expression - indeed, expression of individuated experience - underwrites Mearns's instructional efforts. In those early flapper-era classrooms, the emphasis was on personal growth and (what corporations today like to call) interpersonal communication (of experience), as opposed to professional technique, and the entire enterprise was predicated on the assumption of universal language capacity: poets may be born, not made, but each of us is at least a budding poet, and this speaks to our common (developmental) humanity. Further, the teacher's job is one of helping children harness this shared "primitive" writing capacity (as Myers puts it, "[t]he ideology of the primitive"), both by "trusting to natural growth" (113) and by "suggest[ing] reading" (114; but see Myers 112-16 for implicit conflicts between an emphasis on nurturing nature and a perceived need for critical skills).
We would argue that theorizing along such organic lines borrows ultimately from doctrinal Romantic notions of creativity - which would lead one to expect typical postromantic fissions. As Raymond Williams aptly states the (post)Romantic case:
Yet what actually happened was a deep split, which produced its own powerful categories of separation, some of them old terms in new forms: categorical divisions between the "referential" and the "emotive," between the "denotative" and the "connotative," between "ordinary language" and "literary language." (32)
It's instructive, if reductive perhaps, to extrapolate from Williams's remarks in considering the current state of postsecondary affairs, where referential, denotative, ordinary language would seem to be treated primarily as the province of expository, scientific, engineering, business, technical, or professional writing programs. 6 Meanwhile, emotive, connotative, literary language would seem to be the province of the humanities (insofar as the reception of such artifacts, so conceived); and in generative terms, the sole province of the creative writing classroom, or "workshop" (for the evolution of this popular term, see note 7). Within the humanities, in fact, critical writing, such as the widely deployed research paper, is often tacitly advanced as a matter of referential, denotative, ordinary (and "objective") language (notwithstanding, e.g., the curricular presence of stylistically more ambitious Continental philosophies) - which has had the unfortunate effect of making the "creative," again, viewed in opposition to the critical, the domain of presumably touchy-feely creative writing types (like us). Polarizing matters in this way obscures the conceptual gains obtaining from a generative ("creative") perspective when dealing with reception ("critical") issues, as well as those gains attending to the generative via the distancing (from one's own work, say) effected by a turn to reception (our scare quotes meant to suggest that the creative and the critical are far more tightly wound than most writers and scholars evidence in their teaching).
In any case it wasn't long before issues of personal growth (via creative writing) yielded to more professional imperatives, thanks largely to the example of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the thirties. Norman Foerster, director of Iowa's School of Letters from 1930 to 1944, was instrumental in getting the University and the Board of Education to accept the creative dissertation (in 1931). Educated as a "new humanist" (see Wilbers 71-72), Foerster believed that the program he spearheaded at Iowa would position criticism (only later the New Criticism) and creative writing (only later the Writers' Workshop) "hand in hand" (Myers 133); his program might thus ultimately benefit professional writing culture, whose practitioners were "lamentably uneducated" (qtd. in Myers 134). For Foerster, "promising young authors" were distinguished by the "possession of creative energy," and a chief goal of the creative writing course of study was to nurture such energy, while cultivating the "writer's proficiency in technique, his ability to discover and control a mode of experience suited to what he has to say...." (qtd. in Wilbers 46). As evidenced by his curricular efforts at Iowa, Foerster's (as other new humanists') primary contribution to creative writing theory resided in a crucial departure from Mearns's earlier progressivist (or creativist) slant toward self-expression - that of positing a properly disciplined critical aptitude as a key aspect of writing instruction (see Myers 133-136). Part of Iowa's success in attracting students to its newly-packaged program turned, eventually, both on its renowned faculty of established wordsmiths (Iowa was not the first to hire brand-name authors), as well as on the success of Iowa graduates in finding publishers for their work (Wilbers 51; the eventual prominence of the New Critics owes more than a little to the Iowa example). Later conflicts arising, for example, between more regionalist (and partisan) moorings and Foerster's humanist temperament would seem to have been resolved under the banner of Iowa's tight-knit writing community, and its graduates' clubby solidarity (Wilbers 54).
Would seem to have been resolved: R. M. Berry offers a more foundational explanation for the failure of New Humanism, and the Iowa model, to grapple critically with a trade publishing market that, since the thirties, has produced manifold more books, under far stricter economic surveillance and profit-mongering (and in this regard, see Epstein, Schiffrin). As Berry has it, "Foerster's harmonious account of universities and the media, which in 1931 involved only a blind spot, after the early sixties required either a myopia more pervasive or a literary tradition sharply different from the New Humanist one" (69); hence, programs that "authorized critics to teach poets better than they authorized poets to teach poets" (70). In short, New Humanism's failure to apprehend sufficiently the institutional mechanisms at stake in producing and valuing literature ends up privileging a scholastic, even canonical view of literary history, one rooted in essential(ist) humanist values; which critical myopia permits the caprices of the marketplace to infiltrate wholesale the teaching enterprise.
Indeed, Iowa's lingering influence on creative writing programs - professionally and pedagogically - cannot be overestimated, even if it cannot likewise be asserted that Iowa is to be held solely responsible for what has followed in its continuing wake. For one, the program's early emphasis on "technique" has translated over time to the now pervasive orientation toward writerly craft. Yet craft has served over time as something of an instructional dodge: though the Grady Tripps of the creative writing world may not be able to make poets and writers (or so they would assert), they can in their more inspired moments expose the uninitiated to their money's worth of professional know-how. Thus the presumed master transmits, however he does so, much-prized insight to his graduate student apprentice, which apprentice hopes someday to become a master himself.7 This often takes the form of the master spending hours and hours (and hours) line-editing the work of all apprentices so that it may eventually pass professional muster (or such is the plan). Never mind that even a decade of this sort of fastidiousness is bound to bring a fair measure of burn-out to even the most dedicated pedant; and never mind that marking up manuscripts in this manner constitutes in fact the sheer imposition of one (highly aestheticized) will over another.
To ask an obvious question: Given the logic thus employed, how likely is it that one programmed in the rather ordinary mysteries of craft will go on to become a "famous writer" like Grady Tripp? (Which is to assume that fame makes for a productive pedagogical goal.) Myers summarizes early twentieth century curricular controversies regarding how best to reform college composition - whether "along practical and professional or literary and artistic lines" (75):
"Genius" referred to the portions of an academic subject that were excluded from consideration [...]; what remained - the teachable element - was "craft." (76)
And similarly with regard to the critical locus, in a postwar world in which creative writing has been firmly established as an academic field of study:
Over and over writing teachers said that writing itself cannot be taught, but a discipline of criticism associated with it can be. (158)
As to the situation today: Ron McFarland summarizes nicely (c. 1993) the majority view when he asserts that, of the "five essentials of a serious writer" - as McFarland has it, "desire, drive, talent, vision, and craft" - we creative writing teachers ought henceforth to proceed with the understanding that "only craft can be taught" (34).
The unsurprising, if no less unfortunate, end of Myers's historical narrative brings us to our current, highly dysfunctional state of affairs: creative writing programs are now staffed primarily by "[w]riters who teach" (168), as opposed to teachers who write. Not that this emphasis on teaching wasn't in some sense compromised from the get-go; the early twentieth century saw a number of modernist poets, for example, trying to find a "situation" (Myers 79) that "would still afford them the leisure - the freedom from professionalism - to be poets" (77). Yet as Myers has it, these poets exhibited nonetheless a firm commitment to education as such - to teaching their craft, if not their calling (cf. Myers 77) - and it's not unfair to observe that they were somewhat less allied with professional apparatus than are writers caught up in today's academic ... situation (which is not entirely writers' doing, to be sure).
And what a situation it is: judging by the intensive professionalization and blatant careerism that bookends 21st century creative writing chatter, the Iowa example, and that of other such programs, hasn't been entirely sanguine (to put it mildly). Just have a good long look at any issue of AWP's The Writer's Chronicle for a sense of how prevalent The Renowned Author Model has become in marketing graduate writing programs ("Come study with..."), formatted side-by-side with an extensive array of contests, awards, and the like, all Guaranteed to Make a Published Author Out of You. Or browse through Poets & Writers Magazine for information on when/where/how/& with whom to schmooze, so many of which whoms turn out to be card-carrying creative writing faculty (like us) enjoying (like us) varying states of residency. And all of this is accompanied by a cornucopia of suggestive, even exotic entreaties, pastoral-sequestered or urban-cosmopolitan as the case may be - pick your poison. Our current favorite: the Zoetrope Short Story Writers' Workshop, "held at Francis Coppola's Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize," where both struggling writer and established author alike may apprentice themselves fruitfully to the faculty-at-large, and take time off to "[v]isit the Mayan ruins," [r]ide horses through the rainforest," and "[s]wim in cool mountain rivers" (see Poets & Writers). "WRITING CAN BE TORTURE!" the ad announces; hence Coppola will make you a resort offer you can't refuse.
It might be counterargued that professional discourse is, after all, bound to be a messy affair; and that we mustn't rail against our professions simply because they advocate competence and skills and the like, as opposed (say) to institutional awareness and social commitment; and that this is, after all, and setting aside the academic milieu, an era of painfully conspicuous consumption, disposable dot.coms, and what David Brooks has happily dubbed Bobos ("bourgeois bohemians," a timely upgrading of the booboisie). And it's not that these magazines and journals and the like don't occasionally publish useful, "insider" information, and substantive journalism on the writing world (Michael Scharf's "Metromania" column in Poets & Writers leaps immediately to mind). But the entire effort is rooted in an industry quagmire of public relations - by university writing programs, retreats, colonies, workshops, organizations - coupled with Ann Landers-ish op-ed advice regarding "the writing life," all of which is crucial to one's professional success. Or so aspiring writers are led to believe. But how to separate the pith from the pablum? And if one insists (like us) on seeing oneself primarily as a writer who teaches, how then to do justice to one's teaching?
We do want to do justice to our teaching - don't we?
A further conceptual twist or two should help to put things in proper historical perspective. Gabriel Gudding's recently published, "From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in Mainstream American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing," presents readers with a well-researched, spirited, but in our view, periodically distorted excursion through creative writing history and practice, specifically along poetry coordinates. Gudding manages to surface an interesting dialectic (what he refers to as a binary) between, on the one hand, a poet's experience, which Gudding would articulate in more private terms and with due regard for the vagaries of authorial celebrity, notoriety, and the like; and on the other hand, her craft, which Gudding elaborates, variously, as talent, ability, intention, and so forth.
For Gudding, the current rift between experience and craft (which has its roots in progressivist teaching, as Gudding offers this latter history) has resulted in a debilitating poetic anomie, afflicting and inflecting for decades U.S. (mainstream) poetic practice as well as its public status and reception. Gudding's chief concern hovers around what he regards today as a lack of agency ascribed to poets - by critics, and by poets themselves - and he argues that this is the result, broadly, of a gradual erosion in the cultural preparation (and perhaps education and training) of prospective poets, who are apparently weaned early on these days to seek the somehow pre-articulated, craft-reduced poem, whether in the world or in themselves. For Gudding, this trend first surfaces in the sixties as a craft-experience binary: "the more craft a poem exhibits," writes Gudding, "the less experience it is seen to carry," hence "the less 'real' it seems," and the less it is valued. It's important to note that, unlike the raw vs. cooked variant (offered famously by Robert Lowell, borrowing from Virginia Woolf, in his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 1960), the craft-experience dialectic that Gudding posits does not designate aesthetic approximations so much as bring the issue of cultural value to bear on aesthetic value. For whatever else it is, "experience" is never a given, and certain types of (social and individual) experience will inevitably be privileged as more or less desirable - which reality will itself mediate the question of how best to render said experience (whether through academically centered craft, or through some other appropriately socialized practice).
But for us, a key problem with Gudding's analysis, and corresponding polemic, is that he would have us understand progressivist pedagogical theory as epitomizing poetic practice (in toto) then, and now; and more important to our discussion, he would have us read any number of poets-on-their-poetry as indicative of pedagogical theory and practice (in toto) now, and then. It's difficult to discern, finally, which part of our public domain is to be held accountable - historically, or practically - for those perceptions of poetry, and poets, that Gudding finds most salient, and most problematic. Anyone who teaches creative writing learns to be at least a little skeptical of drawing firm conclusions about a poet's teaching from what said poet says about her poetry (whether as a craft, as an art, what have you; and note that Myers is generally careful not to use such ex cathedra proclamations by writers as evidence of actual classroom practice). Further, if the craft nexus is not the only way to think about creative writing instruction (it's not), neither does the mid-century shift toward a "poetics of discovery" (as documented by Gudding) speak directly, ipso facto, to creative writing pedagogy.
Gudding's focus on things poetic precludes in particular any mention of the rise in the West during the past thirty or so years of alternative writing pedagogies, the rhetorical contours of which more critical varieties no doubt owe a thing or two to progressivist thought. 8 For that matter, Myers's account fails to document the last several decades of (localized) resistance to orthodox workshop (and writing) pedagogy. Finally, despite Gudding's wish to make poetry (or Poesy) speak for academic creative writing (and vice versa), and however ivory-tower'd poetic practice may be, it has never been entirely isolated from other academic disciplines (fiction writing, English studies, the arts and sciences) and it participates to some degree, as must all human endeavor, in the sociopolitical sphere proper.
What we find intriguing with regard to Gudding's critique is that his dialectic of craft-experience would seem to correspond, roughly (and respectively), to the more familiar (to us, anyway) dialectic of product-process - and once viewed in this light, there may well be another way to read the contemporary predicament. For it would appear to us that, far from advocating a lack of agency, and a concomitant isolation of craft from experience, the traditional creative writing workshop is one wherein process has been made to answer to a highly delimited and overdetermined understanding of product, much as poetry (e.g.) is put to the service of producing market-modulated poets. 9
To put it another way: craft-technique, or know-how, including the craft tips and quickies and generally generative exercises to which some apparently lucky few are exposed at retreats and summer programs and such like - is doled out excessively in orthodox creative writing classrooms, via any number of textbooks and casual (albeit instructor-centered) advice, with the aim of capturing highly individuated experience (AKA the self-made writer), and rendering it in appropriately "literary" terms. Which will, it is to be hoped, be rewarded in the long-term by bullish earn-outs. In fact, about the only element of traditional workshops more ubiquitous than craft is sheer unbridled opinion (as in Grady's classroom, and seemingly, as in all manner of collective "workshopping" activities). Though often held at arm's length by those who purport to be committed to more open-form literatures (slam poets, or postBeat Beat writers), craft even for these bards denotes practiced skill, as opposed to "mere" improvisational talent. As editor Alan Kaufman describes those "demons of the imagination" (xv) that he has selected for inclusion in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry:
Though, for the most part, they display a savage antipathy for the poetry establishment and its values, there is a lot of well-hidden craft in their work. (xvii)
Sometimes too well-hidden, in our judgment, though we appreciate the panache of Kaufman's effort. In all, craft - as opposed to art - would seem to be a most convenient way for writers to discuss the more acquired aspects of their practice, without their having to think too awful hard about what, exactly, is so vital about this wholesale dissemination of craft as the teaching imperative. 10
This might be, though, to give craft itself too short a shrift - along with its customary, intellectually fuzzy co-conspirator, voice. 11 Craft and voice, after all, enter into the (US) creative writing corpus and classroom in the midst of a century where body-centered abilities are more and more at the risk of technological prosthesis. 12 In fact, looking back at the inception of creative writing (recall Meyers's "dissent from professionalization"), we note that there is already something of a practical and ideological schism separating the technological optimism that underwrites fin-de-siècle professional advances and the presumably more expressivist, if nonetheless nationalist, aims attending to the "creative," the generative site of a literature newly ensconced (not as a mass product, for the "masses," but) as Literature. In the past century, any number of writers have struggled with the issue of technology and the arts, whether they're to be opposed, united, hybridized - even whether writers have, in fact, any collective say in the matter. (Our Underwood colleagues would no doubt abstain.)
One key issue turns on the value we're willing to assign to what creative writing instructors know, both as writers and as instructors - and we are referring here not simply to the knowledge represented by writers' proclamations (as above) on their professional habits, but to the knowledge associated with what is happening in their classrooms. Note that we are not after the historical value to be assigned, à la Myers, to pedagogical utterance; we are asking instead how we might understand, in sum, that knowledge which is produced by creative writing instructors, as creative writing instructors (which instrumental way of putting things puts us, we know, somewhat at odds with Myers's more liberal humanist outlook). And with regard to the latter, there are indeed other histories to consider, especially when creative writing as an academic practice is viewed as having something to do with disciplinary pursuits that share the same curricular rubric - writing.
(Aside)
(What has been lurking at the margins of the foregoing discussion - and what threatens to complicate our agenda in some decidedly productive, if precarious, ways - has been a more thorough consideration of the artist in the university context. We could declare simply, as is the custom, that such a consideration is "beyond the scope of our essay." But in truth, M.F.A. studio arts curricula have diverged so neatly from creative writing tenets that to situate such curricula "beyond our scope" (however tantalizing a prospect!) would be nothing if not remiss. (Here is Harold Singerman's apt summary of the prevailing art school view as to what the university study of art can and cannot be (we quote at length this important passage): On campus, art cannot be a calling or a vocation. To be included among the disciplines, art must give up its definition as craft or technique, a fully trainable manual skill on the guild or apprenticeship model. At the same time, it cannot be purely inspirational or simply expressive; the work of genius is unteachable and self-expression is untutored. Moreover, art in the university must be different from a certain "common sense" of its problems and procedures. Whatever has called a student to enter the department - the love of past art, an excitement about the process of creation, a desire for personal growth, the ability to draw - one of the primary lessons of the graduate program is that art can no longer be seen as a simple response to, or merely the repository of, those needs and excitements. Among the tasks of the university program in art is to separate its artists and the art world in which they will operate from "amateurs" or "Sunday painters," as well as from a definition of the artist grounded in manual skill, tortured genius, or recreational pleasure. Moreover, art in the university must constitute itself as a department and a discipline, separate from public "lay" practices and equal to other studies on campus. (5-6) (Singerman - who holds an M.F.A. in sculpture, but by his own account cannot "carve or cast or weld or model in clay" (4) - sets out to explore how and why concentrated study of artist's métier has been supplanted by a more conceptual academic framework; which situation stems in part from the influence of conceptual art, yes, but is also a consequence of related twentieth-century maneuvers in the art world. Under Singerman's steady eye, we learn for example how the commonplace designation visual arts has its academic origins in a purposeful, Bauhaus-derived effort to reconfigure university fine arts so as to abolish high-low distinctions (69-73). In sum, whereas creative writing programs have, as we have argued, remained by and large adamantly opposed to any but a craft fixation, studio arts programs have, as Singerman relates, moved increasingly toward more conceptual (not work exactly, but) strictures; and the gallery system, however steeped in marketplace motive and connoisseurship, has worked to buttress this reality (see also Tomasula on this latter point). (Singerman discusses in fact how "the same synthetic impulse of general education that transformed the teaching of studio art" provided the curricular logic underwriting the emergence of creative writing programs (195). He argues (citing Myers's dissertation) that the "skills learned [in creative writing] are taught as 'critical' rather than technical, even if they are taught in 'workshops' or address the 'craft of writing,'" one reason being that "the work is extended and finished elsewhere," and not under a disciplinary eye (197). Singerman finds that creative writing, unlike studio arts, "has come to insist strongly on an intensely exaggerated individuality, an acute examination and operation of the self" (197). Hence, though "both studio art and creative writing work to instantiate the difference of each individual practitioner," creative writing aims at the "'content,' or perhaps the peculiarity, of the individual student writer," whereas "studio work requires the student to construct his or her difference historically or positionally" (198). (We would take issue here only with Singerman's characterization of the "critical" ("rather than technical") component of current creative writing instruction. That such instruction might have been aptly labeled "critical" during Iowa's early years is a strong probability. But such instruction may today be deemed "critical" only with the corollary that writing is thereby to be viewed as a craft - and all that this implies. One of the implications: that those works that do not lend themselves to craft-based analysis (assemblage, say, or found work) will likely not find their way into the curriculum (regardless whether technique is practiced in or out of the classroom). A second, more important implication: that the function of those many critics who practice criticism (not to say theory) has gradually come to be viewed by creative writing faculty as a threat to craft-based criticism - i.e., to their writerly expertise. To put it another way: craft-based criticism has become a rather rudimentary application of tried & true analysis, designed primarily to promote the verbal artifacts, linguistic processes, and received wisdom of a bygone era; an analysis thoroughly resistant to consideration of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability, and how such factors impact notions of authorship and community, past and present. Whether one looks at creative writing handbooks/guides (e.g., DeMaria, Rozakis, Schaefer and Diamond, Stegner) or introductions to specific writing-reading genres (Bell, Bernays and Painter, Burroway, Dancyger and Rush, Field, Lionel Fisher, Hunter, Novakovich, Lance Olsen, Packard, Richard, Seger, Vendler (Poems), Wolff and Ferrante) - and regardless the obvious merits one may ascribe to such primers - one gets the distinct impression that the aim is to produce recognizably functional (craft-y) artifacts, where function as such (meaning or structure as opposed to evocativeness, revelation, etc.) is paramount; and where function (and by extension, form) is properly conceived as reader- or audience- or marketplace-bound, but rarely as contingent upon shifting, yet nonetheless identifiable communities of writers, working not out of compliance to (classroom) communicative expediency, but in conjunction, if not outright collaboration, with one another. (A notable exception in this regard is Elbow and Belanoff - but even here, in addition to some ossification of genre, one finds a rather formulaic model of academic community built around shared writing and reading processes.) (We are speaking not of interpretive communities in the organizational abstract, nor of autonomous colonies in the hermetic raw - albeit intellectual puffery, ingratiation, and solipsism persist in any actual community as real community problems. We are speaking instead of living collectives who share, broadly, a history of working assumptions about the contested site of aesthetic value, and who give of themselves accordingly. As an academic matter, this latter sense of community turns less on what are today perceived as institutionally risky student-faculty interactions ("meet me for a beer after class") than on a shared commitment to supporting colleagues' work - attending/organizing readings; working together on editorial tasks (the primary benefit of student-run journals); exchanging work outside of class (and providing extracurricular feedback); socializing together, and on occasion, with faculty (sure, and with the obvious caveats regarding power and position, without which caveats such socializing often implodes); expanding one's sense of community to include other educational and community institutions, and other locales (i.e., familiarity with the online world, familiarity with outreach programs); and for those of our students who themselves teach, or hope to teach, grappling with teaching itself as a vital public concern. (Please pardon any residual Fourierism. And we might note in passing that the texts produced by the scholarly set typically reveal the presumption of just such a community, organized (if loosely) around cherished notions of discursive value and professional give-and-take.) (In any case, and to his credit, Singerman does not fall into the customary trap of advocating a return to the presumably more amber pursuits of métier. Instead, in a final chapter entitled, "Toward a Theory of the M.F.A.," Singerman struggles brilliantly to articulate why - even though "[t]he goal of an artist's training cannot be facility, that ease with one's métier that cannot be challenged and need not be pushed" (208) - there remains nonetheless the question of the "otherness of the work of art" (209). Drawing on the work of Max Weber, various Frankfurt school theorists, and recent inquiry by Pierre Bourdieu, Singerman argues forcibly, if at times ambivalently, that the beautiful as a form of "transcendence" - quoting Marcuse, "its invocation of the beautiful image of liberation" (qtd. in Singerman 209) - has become "in the modern university, terribly naive" (209). "That version of transcendence has been replaced by another one," writes Singerman, to wit: The works of postmodernism in the university thematize their positions and reflect their knowing better, letting those of us who know, know that they too are vigilant. (209-10) (While it may be foolhardy to anticipate the arrival of perfectly un-disciplined others, the prospect of the other as a real postmodern possibility arises when one considers that "those of us who know" often have occasion to intervene into singularly disciplinary moments (one of which moments we will introduce during our Inter/mission). Singerman concludes by spelling out what today's university environs offers to the would - be artist by way of educational probabilities - and perhaps, by (our) inference, possibilities: I have written of the artist in the university as particularly aware of his or her place in the narrative of recent art and have argued that awareness itself as [sic] a specifically professional knowledge. Crafting a history of the discipline or mapping its contemporary shape and producing work in relation to it are skills - skills we admire in the university humanities. And these are the skills that have increasingly come to replace the workshop crafts and academy techniques of the objects the university teaches as art history. (212) ("Crafting" disciplinary history might be understood as a "skill[]," but to us this implies a relatively cut & dried proficiency or competence; hence such professional knowledge is perhaps better understood as a matter of (critical-creative thought) processes that persist in seeking their limitations. Nevertheless, Singerman's point here is clear. For him, there can be no turning back - and there should be no abrogation of professional duty, either. "In assuming the name of the artist as a professional name," he writes, "one assumes a responsibility, an obligation to that name's past as well as its future" (213). To which we might add that this applies to one's teaching, as well. (So again, and to put the matter rather deontologically: how to honor this obligation as a teacher?)
* * *
* * *
All told, the field of composition studies has for years mounted a sustained critique both of the composing process and of those methods and strategies by which we go about teaching same (the latter known in the field as composition pedagogy, itself influenced by decades of educational theory and practice). What we find striking is the utter ignorance of, and occasional willful disregard for, the controversies and insights of composition studies (about on a par with resistance to critical theory, in fact), that many creative writing instructors, whether more conventional or more avant-garde writers themselves, so often exhibit in meeting their teaching obligations - which contributes, in our view, to the anti-intellectualism of so many creative writing programs (which anti-intellectualism was argued so forcibly more than a decade ago by Eve Shelnutt, among others). Equally striking, in our view, is the narrow, even anemic conception of writing and reading as such that often characterizes research and inquiry conducted under the composition banner. 13
Though published in 1987, Stephen M. North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field, still affords an excellent overview of various forms of knowledge production in composition studies. Self-avowedly building on Paul Diesing's notion of "methodological community," North offers a "portrait" that is in effect a survey of competing forms of (academic) knowledge, and of those who generate same: the practitioners, the scholars (the latter including the historians, the philosophers, and the critics) and the researchers (the latter including the experimentalists, the clinicians, the formalists, and the ethnographers). Of most interest to us here - and most controversial at the time - is North's valorization of practitioner knowledge, or what North refers to as lore, produced by knowledge-makers comprised of "Composition's rank and file" (22). North spends a good deal of time unpacking lore in order to mitigate its "negative, even denigrative connotations" (23):
This is not to say that Practitioners' lore is without logic or form. Not at all. It is driven, first, by a pragmatic logic: It is driven by what has worked, is working, or might work in teaching, doing, or learning writing. Second, its structure is essentially experiential. That is, the traditions, practices, and beliefs of which it is constituted are best understood as being organized within an experience-based framework.... (23)
One problem that surfaces immediately is how best to document lore, for "textbooks, syllabi, and the like" typically "do not provide a very accurate image of lore," owing to these latter documents' static, ostensibly objective representation of such practical knowledge (23-4). Indeed, lore as a form of knowledge exhibits three "important functional properties" (24): first, "literally anything can become a part of lore" (24); second, "[w]hile anything can become a part of lore, nothing can ever be dropped from it, either" (24); and third, "[b]ecause lore is fundamentally pragmatic, contributions to it have to be framed in practical terms" (25). Hence contributions to lore from the scholarly or researcher ranks will invariably be altered to meet this final pragmatic stipulation - and part of North's point here is that there are in fact contributions to lore from scholarship and research, scholarship and research into writing as a practice. And no self-respecting member of the composition community, to be sure, would advocate going about one's daily business with zero regard for scholarship and research (or so we say).
This is old news - our entire presentation is in some sense old news - if you've been attuned to the public controversies (most notably between "theory" and creative writing) that have bubbled up over the past two decades (for a spate from the eighties, see Gibbons, Morton and Zavarzadeh "Cultural," Perloff "'Theory,'" Shelnutt, and Stitt); and if you've been attuned to the past decade of inquiry into creative writing from the vantage point of composition studies. In fact Wendy Bishop has demonstrated over and over that both creative writing and composition might benefit from a more closely conceived working alliance (see e.g. Bishop "Crossing"). And in a recent CCC Online exchange, Ted Lardner has himself suggested rather broadly that lore might be a nice way to think about creative writing discourse; while Tim Mayers has helpfully interrogated craft and "craft criticism"; and George Kalamaras and Mary Ann Cain have re-theorized, respectively, blurring genre boundaries and the classroom fall-out of formalism (see Cain et al.). In some ways this latter exchange goes well beyond our theoretical concerns here, beginning with inquiry into the "expressivist" and "objectivist" rhetorics mutually informing creative writing practice, in order ultimately to prompt, as Cain puts it, a "more thoughtful conversation" about "the boundaries between creative writing and composition."
Old news or no, though, it may well be the case that lore offers creative writing practitioners a way to think about what they do in terms of the sorts of knowledge they collectively advance about what they do - as instructors of (creative) writing. This assumes that we ought to bring to our teaching at least as much critical scrutiny as we bring to our writing, our searching, our researching. One problem here is that "research" within the creative writing community is generally understood, with some justification, simply as writing. This would be OK were it not for the tacit corollary: that what writers write and teach ("writing") has no demarcated content as such (as opposed to what scholars write - e.g., books on the Romantics - and teach - "content courses" on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley). Thus the oft-cited requisite relationship between teaching and research becomes de facto, for creative writing faculty, an institutionally-reinforced relationship between teaching writing and, simply but profoundly, writing - which obscures not only the whats of teaching creative writing but, given writers' customary resistance to any but more traditionally-conceived workshop pedagogy, the hows. Of course, permission to conduct business as usual does not render moot the need for thinking critically about one's teaching, which is surely the primary service that we academics provide. 14 And lore may be useful as a conceptual tool with which we practitioners might begin to rethink textbook insights, aesthetic theory, writing exercises, craft tips, reading habits, workshop tactics, craft tips, fuzzy notions about voice (sorry!), literary anecdotes, craft tips, painfully exacting discussions of prosody (sorry!) craft tips craft tips craft tips. (Not a perfect litmus, but: a quick search at amazon.com will turn up dozens of how-to-write-such-&-such books, each featuring that favored titular imprimatur - craft.)
Yet once theorized as lore, it might be that much clearer that the creative writing workshop is, and has been for years, a relatively impoverished site of same, at least in terms of any such industry-wide apprehension of knowledge-making. Though Myers grounds creative writing history in terms of its contribution to an evolving and rather measured form of disciplinary knowledge - albeit a knowledge increasingly subject to professional incursion - he too notes a gradual departure from the "effort to handle a single order of human discourse in a way that would yield a unified body of theory" (147). For Myers, creative writing programs now resemble an industrial "elephant machine" ("a machine for making other machines," 146) because their original curricular premise (and promise) - "the movement of criticism toward constructive knowledge" (147) - has been trumped by professional demands. This follows in the main from creative writing's positioning as "one of the primary engines driving the postwar expansion of the American university," with the university itself becoming "the permanent center of artistic activity in America" (148; given the current turmoil in public funding of the arts off and on campus, we might take issue with "permanent"). Once "the purpose of its graduate programs (to produce serious writers)" has been "uncoupled from the purpose of its undergraduate courses (to examine writing seriously from within)" - according to Myers, this occurs during "the late sixties and early seventies" - creative writing becomes merely another programmatic means of manufacturing future (writing) professionals (149).
Aside from a comparatively few, irregularly published counterstatements to more orthodox instructional models 15; and instead of creative writing instructors arguing passionately with one another on a regular basis for alternatives to the standard workshop format (no mere straw man of idiosyncratic proportions, this latter, as Myers's history reveals, and as any number of us "educated" under the auspices of same may attest to); and instead of thinking about the teaching of writing (poetry, fiction, etc.) as a means of exploring and constructing, say, the world; what we have, by and large, are old soldiers' and old souls' retreats (and simulacrums of same), where each writing guru is the sole proprietor of his or her localized little tribe; where the Gradies of the world can and will unapologetically forgo constant, thoughtful, practical confrontation with issues:
of classroom authority
of community
of critical engagement
of social responsibility
of education as such
of poiesis
of content and form
Clearly we are waxing rantorical here, and grinding progressivist axes, and frying anti-progressivist fish, with the aim of getting us back to that question we posed at our beginning, "for starters." To wit: Is the creative writing classroom a place simply for fortifying the mysteries of creativity, or can something more concrete, more palpable, more critical - more urgent - therein be attended to?
~Problems with creative writing mystique often surface in the most mundane administrative terms. For instance, where we teach, entry into the intermediate and advanced undergrad workshops is by application (excepting those students who have applied and been admitted to the creative writing track), and access is restricted by permitting each workshop instructor the latitude to admit or deny based on her evaluation (?) of the writing sample submitted with the application. Now, we have reservations regarding an undergraduate creative writing major in general, in part because we would like to see our writers do more reading, and more reading about reading (i.e., "theory"). And our department is (typically) shorthanded when it comes to creative writing faculty - we have more students making application than we have classroom space.~
~However, what conflates the enrollment issue (on our campus, anyway) is a commonplace justification for restricting access to workshops: that we do our students a disservice by allowing them to believe "they have what it takes" to become writers when their writing exhibits meager talent; ergo, to "save" them the suffering pursuant to pursuing, untalentedly, a...profession?...which will reject them...certainly?... - to save them said suffering, we individual faculty must do our collectively (protectively) professional duty by evaluating (?) a writing sample, according to each of our individual...lights? The fact that this stipulation is not applied to (say) upper-division courses in the English literature track (with English lit students only marginally more "marketable," "professionally"-speaking, upon graduation) is just the first of several hints that should give us pause to consider whether the workshop is a place for teaching (and learning), or whether some other, mysterious...rarefied?...activity is facilitated within its confines.~
~In any case, attempting to alter s-o-p and admit any student into a given workshop - provided only that said student has completed the prior sequenced workshop - has been met (here) with some administrative resistance because there is no such established curricular prerequisite or precedent. One is to admit or deny students based solely upon the quality (?) of their writing, period. And you see, trying to be a bit less prejudicial, and a bit more democratic, by trying to treat workshops - like literature courses, like science courses - as learning opportunities (regardless one's "talent"), raises the (albeit remote) possibility that a student might not have been admitted because he has simply not met the informal, against-the-grain criterion (i.e., completion of prior sequenced workshop, with the working assumption that progressive exposure amounts to something). Such a student might feel that his writing is of sufficient quality (?) to permit him to bypass, let's say, the intermediate workshop, and jump straight to advanced status (again, contra the way things work in the literature track). And if said student should lodge a formal complaint on these grounds - well. Or at least, so goes the administrative qualm.~
~But it's not students who are consciously opting for subjective appraisal rather than sequenced (if not necessarily developmental) instruction. And in fact this potential administrative predicament, whereby enrollment numbers are regulated and rationalized on the basis of presumed writing promise, is anything but administrative in nature - it begins with creative writing faculty, with the instructional mythologies to which we are all susceptible, to varying degrees.~
~As a quick & dirty means of identifying this susceptibility - and to introduce now that moment of disciplinarity to which we earlier made reference - we ask readers if you would take a moment to gauge your resistance to an actual job announcement posted to the Poetics online discussion group on 14 November 2000 (see Joris):
The Department of English in the University at Albany expects to hire an assistant professor (tenure track) in Creative Writing (fiction and/or non-fiction). Candidates should be able to teach courses (at the graduate and undergraduate level) in contemporary poetics, the theory of fiction and meta-fiction, and have expertise in one or more of the following fields: hypertext and multimedia; journalism; transnational literatures; or related fields. We are seeking candidates with a strong theoretical background, as well as demonstrable expertise in a scholarly field of inquiry to be part of a program that encourages interdisciplinary research and teaching. Letter, curriculum vitae, and writing sample by December 6 to [etc].
The University at Albany is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action, Immigration Reform and Control Act, and American Disabilities Act Employer.
~We are cognizant of the way "theory" in the foregoing might figure a partial displacement of the aesthetic. Yet we would maintain that the higher your resistance to this ad, the more susceptible you are to creative writing mystique. Some might argue that moving beyond such mystique is matter of eliminating (say) false consciousness - well OK, as long as this means (1) we can use our critical faculties to do so and (2) we must keep doing so (see e.g. Althusser). Without wishing to sound too cheery or too glum about it, we don't regard those who oppose or resist us as laboring mindlessly under an ideological delusion - we regard them, first, as laboring, and second, as laboring within a bureaucratic institution that squelches difference. Once difference finds its way to the surface of deliberations, once the institutional fog is lifted, minds can change, and usually do. But it doesn't happen overnight, hence we don't expect our provocations here to have any immediate consequence - an elementary though perhaps necessary disclaimer.~
Act 2: Getting from Here to There
In fact those issues of... that serve as the climax of Act 1 emerged, in one form or another, during our first three semesters (Fall 1999 through Fall 2000) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, when we were both busy teaching, among other things, creative writing (fiction and poetry) workshops. The questions surfaced on a local electronic discussion list that one of us runs for CU creative writing students and faculty (PPPoetics). Needless to say, the discussion of these and other issues on PPPoetics was at times animated and extended, with student participants often resisting our convictions regarding how best to reform the workshop environs.
A chief concern fueling much of the (undergraduate) student resistance we initially encountered on PPPoetics was that of the presumed goal of the creative writing classroom - for most writers, the perfectly polished and potentially publishable product (poem, story, or play). Writing students typically want writing faculty - those with the presumed expertise, and reputation (i.e., authority) - to show them the way, the truth, and the light. Provided, that is, that the way, the truth, and the light correspond to their preconceptions of "the writing life." 16 Even those seasoned undergraduate and graduate writers who understand fully the concept of revision, and who are (e.g.) intrigued by the way the writing process can instantiate itself effectively in more ragged (if not exactly raw) writing, tend to regard workshops primarily as occasions for refining product, and landing upon answers, rather than as places of informed questioning and speculation, which latter might well include collective and individual challenging of some cherished assumptions (and, it might be added, with little if any sense of instructional or narrative closure).
Further, we note in general a persistent disregard for language practice as any but the express longings of the soulful self, or of the self that has a unique story to tell - i.e., as only coincidentally material, let alone social, in nature. It's not our students' faults, either. Most of them have been taught to believe, in prior workshops (and thanks to films and novels and cultural representations like Wonder Boys) that the most urgent task of a creative writing course, portfolio or no, journal or no, is becoming a (famous?) writer, which is to say one who is capable of producing publishable work (even if publishable only in the school's annual writing magazine, or courtesy of the school's annual writing contest). Likewise, the sort of writing our students have been taught to believe is valuable (no doubt because it is eminently more publishable in the trades) is writing that, if anything, obscures its reliance on revision - thanks to the writer adopting, sometimes unknowingly, conventions that have been intensively conventionalized. So, since there has been little if any discussion in prior classes about the composing process as a socially regulated event, students busily pursue work that will be thought to speak transparently to and from their innermost selves - never mind the message of the medium, the social mechanics of publishing (new publishing, distribution, and portable reading technologies), and so forth.
We too focus our classroom efforts less on producing writing than on producing writers, but - what sort of writer is produced?
For one, insight into the novel did not end with Forster and James, anymore than did insight into poetry ended with Eliot and Ransom. 17 And for that matter, clinging unbearably to our Kunderas, whether by anecdote or out of strict reverence to a well-received set of aesthetic (and often masculinized) criteria, will likely produce only derivative writing. Further, pedagogy must somehow be made to reflect this dynamic aesthetic reality - and not simply in terms of the types of texts introduced into the classroom, and not simply in terms of the various performative means by which our texts reach their respective publics. 18
In all, we view student (and faculty) orientation toward workshop and marketplace product (whether conceived as publishable writing or writer), and the corresponding resistance to process, as variations on a theme. For us, this amounts to hard evidence of a failure to apprehend learning as a (potentially collaborative) process, much like the writing process itself. Compelling writing usually requires revision, yes, but it also requires a certain awareness on the part of the writer as to the conditions of his or her authorial circumstances - which is to say, a grasp of the context in which the writing process is to take place, and in which the writing product is to be evaluated - and writing that is written under the (interpretive and generative) constraints of the workshop is no exception. Ditto for learning: if we're not aware of how we've been taught, we're at the very least liable to repeat the learned errors of our expertise-laden instructors.
Lest this concern for collaboration and context seem in any way exotic, we ask you to ponder for a moment how any (textual) artifact reveals, upon close examination, the cultural conditions of its production - this issue being the premise of so much reception work in cultural studies. Though the more epistemic attributes of textuality generally escape any author's conscious apprehension, it is likewise the case that most venerated writing is marked through and through by careful authorial intervention into contextual realities. What's distressing to note here, in any case, is that the context of writing and reading, especially as these speak to the classroom, have been a chief concern of composition theorists since the eighties anyway; and that those of us who are keenly aware of such theories and practices, and who attempt to employ them in our workshops, continue to wage a relentlessly uphill battle. (Please hold your applause until the end.)
And yet: in truth, there is no irrevocable, or for that matter empirically verifiable, correlation between the (unconventional) writing we ourselves are on the verge of advocating in the foregoing, and one's teaching - and isn't it pretty to think so? Any number of experimental, or avant-garde, or radically unconventional texts can be "taught" via completely orthodox, expertise-derived, lecture & blackboard pedagogies - and we say this whatever the disjunctive, liberatory, or erotic potential presumed to inhere in same, and presumed to activate readers accordingly. 19 Our avant-garde writer-colleagues have been a bit remiss on this (theoretical, if not empirical) count, we think, if no more so than our more conventional writer-colleagues. (And incidentally, as if we needed to say so: our marketplace sympathies, as well as our sense of the writing that needs to be done, are decidedly with the former camps.) So while it could be the case that those who challenge the status quo in their writing are more likely to challenge the status quo in their teaching, it ain't necessarily so. And while it's true that, though learning often takes place under the most dire of conditions, there are better ways to teach (how do you like them apples?) - we would argue for a more collaborative, small group, peer review-based model, requiring something fewer than two-dozen students, thank you very much - there is after all no best way. Or even, to our way of thinking, no "way" that is beyond daily, weekly, monthly, semester by semester scrutiny, tweaking, and wholesale revision (wink).
* * *
We trust we have been sufficiently strident in advancing our creative writing agenda - which, without question, we regard as entirely caught up in the (now quite dated) postmodern impulse to "theoriz[e] its own condition of possibility," hence our many qualifications and caveats. 20 (And we are aware, as well, that we have thus far elected to cloak our little jeremiad in the robes of conventional discursive essay. Or, one of "us" insisted it was necessary to do so, in order to be heard.) With regard to creative writing instruction and as a practical matter, it's fair to say that resistance to reform has become a veritable modus vivendi. Despite the reform efforts over the years of any number of dedicated writing professionals (and despite ample cultural and historical evidence to the effect that something is seriously awry, as illustrated in Act 1), creative writing continues to flounder, and is generally considered a lost cause even by those English studies professionals most committed to educational reform. Creative writing programs have, with a few exceptions and exceptional faculty (e.g., the one tenured renegade who forges ahead on her own initiative, or the one adjunct whose teaching is eyed with suspicion), turned a deaf ear to research directed toward improving creative writing pedagogy (see e.g. Bishop and Ostrom); to the rise of reader-response and reception theories; to the introduction of computers into the writing classroom; and to the process-discovery movement that characterized composition studies of the seventies. 21 (To return to Myers's tripartite distinction, much the same may be said of the lit-scholar tribes.) At the same time, a grasp of product as the articulation of process has had implications all along not only for writing practice (as the work of any number of poets or fiction writers reveals), but for the way many composition faculty have come to think about, and assess, their teaching.
We should note here that process can itself serve as something of a monolith. 22 But as a pedagogical rubric - provided, that is, that something is done with it in terms of student-teacher power dynamics - the term has its advantages. For one, process as such suggests a transformative gradient of sorts - over time, writer (teacher) X becomes writer (teacher) X verging on writer (teacher) X+, or X-; which is not to imply a process of simple accretion or reduction, but a process that results in an altered X, an X aware not simply that transformation is necessary, even inevitable, but an X who is actively at work questioning how such transformation might best take place, and to what end(s).
And here, an issue we have glossed all along seems most pertinent: that of identity - how authors come to understand themselves as authors, as human beings, as social beings. Part of the work of teaching, seen in this light, is to help to create a context in which the learning process includes active confrontation with one's sense of self, or self-identity, which is in part a function of structural social realities (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, and so forth), as well as more individualized experience (family, place of birth, genetic factors, phenotype, etc.). If one's identity is subject even to modest change, from within and from without, one's written articulations are fair game, as well.
Presumed recourse in generative terms to writerly solipsisms, interiorities, and solitudes notwithstanding, then, a public calculus persists in confronting questions of identity, and self-identity. Hence we have now to mount a more ambitiously ideological critique of creative writing pedagogy, one that will take on decidedly gendered proportions.
(Aside)
(Before we do though: It seems even to us that our exposition thus far, at least as far as pedagogy per se is concerned (and despite those Xs above), has been a bit...facile. Let's have a look at how Gary Tate et al. begin their recent and eminently useful volume, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies: Pedagogy is among the most commonly used, yet least defined, terms in composition studies. In our professional discussions, the term variously refers to the practices of teaching, the theories underlying those practices, and perhaps most often, as some combination of the two - as praxis. (vi) (So far, so good. Now, Tate's volume consists of a dozen essays, each of which surveys a specific writing pedagogy, as follows: process pedagogy; expressive pedagogy; rhetorical pedagogy; collaborative pedagogy; cultural studies and composition; critical pedagogy; feminist pedagogy; community-service pedagogy; writing across the curriculum pedagogy; writing center pedagogy; basic writing pedagogy; and technology and composition pedagogy. An unfortunate, though perhaps unavoidable, ramification of such compendia is that the various essays might leave readers with the impression that committing to pedagogical purpose is not unlike picking & choosing a textbook. But it's clear, in reading through the essays, that there is a good deal of overlap among these presumed pedagogical emphases (to state the matter as un-emphatically as we can). As we read in the editors' Preface: We chose to begin with process pedagogy because the turn to process represented for many teachers a defining moment in the discipline - and in their lives as teachers. And because process and expressive pedagogies are so closely linked, we decided to pair them before introducing rhetorical pedagogy, which, in a very real sense, underlies all the others. The close ties between critical and cultural studies pedagogies led us to place them together. Finally, the very important role that many writing centers play in writing across the curriculum programs encouraged us to pair these two essays. (vii) (No mention made here of the essays on collaborative pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, or community-service pedagogy (the latter two follow Ann George's fine dance through the minefields of critical pedagogy). We would ourselves understand all three emphases as having much to do with our concerns here. We note also that creative writing as such presumably doesn't warrant its own chapter (expressive pedagogy comes closest - in theory anyway). Further, in the book's handy author/title/subject indices, we find no authors/titles/subjects to suggest a focus on creative writing as such. (Now on to the minefields themselves - and we trust our readers won't mind if we proceed here rather casually, first by identifying five challenges, as we imagine those who resist our agenda might pose same (and apologies if this constitutes a liberty taken): (-1- How should instructors treat the problem of agency in the creative writing classroom? (-2- If we really do believe in the liberatory potential of critical teaching, what exactly do we think we're liberating our students from? And who do we think we're liberating, anyway? (-3- Does the fact that we are ourselves working professionals - professionals who live rather ordinary, hence in some sense conservative lives, and who earn their bread & butter courtesy of an institution ostensibly dedicated to preserving (if advancing) knowledge - render our more radical (if progressive) educational agenda mere wishful thinking? Or, How can non-radicals hope to radicalize others? (-4- How do we ensure - even, or rather especially in the creative writing classroom - that written product is of passable quality, literary or otherwise, and that writers will emerge from our classrooms with marketable talents as writers? (-5- What, exactly, does feminism have to do with critical pedagogy in the creative writing classroom? (-1- As to agency (and please see note 11, below, for a discussion of voice in this regard): First let us admit to some anxiety as teachers, and as writers. Though this essay has thus far been an exercise in nothing if not sustained exertion of critical aplomb (so we say!), rest assured that we experience at every margin the limits of our experience and knowledge. We suspect that it takes a great deal of optimism to be a teacher, that teachers must have ample faith in human ability. But to be a critical teacher requires, as well, no small measure of self-doubt, and a corresponding desire to do better. Seen in this light, the classroom - perhaps (to be formalist about it) like the page, like the screen - is a place not simply for students or teachers to assert their respective self-identities, but a place to negotiate, to trouble these identities in order to reach tentative, provisional understandings of texts and contexts and the issues surrounding same; a process in which participants' grasp of what's at stake in doing so will, to varying degrees, reflect a heightened sense of awareness and commitment. Education as education about education, with both students and instructor working together to challenge learning structures: the circularity here is necessary, and a necessary starting point. And starting here, the paradoxes of our ostensibly democratic sphere will appear at each and every pedagogical and creative turn, regardless the texts and textual methods employed. If we think of ourselves as individual beings, does this mean that our articulations should themselves be understood in singular terms? Does creativity imply uniqueness? Why do we value the (modernist?) new, the innovative, the original, the unique? If we are in some sense the product of our social experiences, how can we transcend, to any significant degree, our social conditioning? Does one's ability to express oneself mean that one should express oneself? Express oneself to what ends? What obligation (if any) does the artist have to her society, or community, or collective? To what extent does our sense of agency invoke a sense of urgency? (-2- As to liberation: It seems to us that critical teaching in creative writing classrooms here in North America in the early 21st century can, and perhaps should, be less about us empowering students, or us liberating students from false consciousness, from hegemony, etc., and more about us helping students (to help one another) pursue alternative forms of social and artistic thought and experience alongside their more conventional leanings and learnings. Most writers who enter our classes are, by most counts, relatively conventional artists - our poets compose primarily 20-40 line, left-margin poems in the first person, and our fiction writers plot their sentences and paragraphs via a linear, frequently cinematic understanding of narrative. But thanks in part to peer evaluation techniques (e.g.) - in which students discuss what they value, and why, and only then attend to (and grade) the work of their conventional and unconventional peers; thanks in part to discussion of texts and techniques that produce unconventional artifacts; thanks in part to reading and discussing critical work, and attempting to write about their own work critically; thanks to these and other practices, our writers inevitably feel freer to seek out for themselves a broader range of written products and processes. But before embarking on such an ambitious program, we might do well to ask, How well do we know "our" students, and how well do they know us? For example: Do we know their average household incomes? Do they know our annual salaries? If we shared this personal data, would such a (partial) unpacking of economic class (e.g.) help to situate our collective efforts, casting critical light on what will invariably be our varied, at-odds approaches and sensibilities regarding written product, and the production of same? Does this constitute a form of liberation? For students and teachers? (-3- As to non-radicals radicalizing others: This question strikes us as perhaps the most telling example of composition practitioners' tendency to conceive of writing pedagogy in restrictive, even disabling terms. We're all familiar, on the one hand, with the stereotypical mad artist, or poète maudit, or tipsy scribe whose addiction and related sociopathic behavior is inextricably linked to his (and we do mean his) "inspiration" or muse; at the same time, few would imagine such a social being as suited to the institutional demands of the classroom. Hence, to argue for radical being - as opposed to radical doing, or radical pedagogy - risks invoking, at the very least, a misleading and in our view damaging stereotype of artistic production. And this is setting aside a not unrelated complication: that teachers-who-write or writers-who-teach are often thought, even by themselves, to have failed as writers simply and profoundly because they haven't generated through their publications enough cold hard cash not to have to teach - not to have to do anything but write. But before we head too far down that path: we do not wear sandwich boards to our classes, and we would imagine that the last thing the classroom needs at this point are self-modeled classroom heroes/heroines, vociferating from atop holier-than-thou soapboxes to lead their epigones to that way, truth, and light referred to earlier. We have already discussed at some length the vexed status of the artist in the US university. Here we would like to add, for what it's worth, that we don't see as all that radical, finally, our classroom advocacy of long-term social change, and our commitment to social justice (even if asking for same in the creative writing classroom does constitute what we earlier called a "radical reconfiguration"). Further, our (relatively secure at present, thank you) status as working professionals should not ipso facto be taken to mean that we are not dedicated to institutional reform (and we assume we needn't quibble over the latter term). Finally, though both of us having produced at times what might fairly be regarded as radically unconventional writings does not imply that we are radical social beings (whatever they might be); and though we would hardly wish to hallucinate over our presumed success, via our writings or our teachings, in altering even the literary values of those of our literary community (whoever they might be); and though our own struggles to remain professionally solvent are surely no mark of authentically radical conduct (whatever that might be); we nonetheless believe that discounting the social possibilities of artistically-conceived endeavor - in particular, of writing published on the small presses (as opposed to writing that reaches the Oprah Winfrey Show or the mainstream bestseller lists) - is to discount writing that does in fact perform valuable cultural work at local levels (the perils of local essentialisms notwithstanding). And we likewise believe that asking writers in our classes simply to contend with the unconventional is a worthy demand (whatever they end up writing themselves), if only because most are already, as we say, saturated with the conventional. Whether any writer may step resolutely outside of increasingly interlinked and, yes, hegemonic networks of consumption and production - of objects, subjects, and subject positions - well, aren't there various degrees of acquiescence to these networks? (If not, it would seem we're all equally corrupted. And how then to address such corruption if not by attending, first, to questions of agency, as above?) Finally, we understand, as we trust our readers will, that there really is no conclusive evidence to prove, for once and for all, the positive social value of art (which for us is axiomatic, or nearly so, if certainly not beyond critique); we think it a distinct possibility as well that the arts comprise, all told, a productively destabilizing potential within the US postsecondary edifice, and particularly within English studies. (-4- As to quality, and marketability: In some sense we've just addressed the marketplace conundrum. Poetry in particular seems to problematize any discussion of use and exchange values (say) simply because poetry tends not to generate income - even if poets, too, garner cultural and/or symbolic capital as a result of their efforts. Much the same could be said of most small press ventures - which are, in so many ways, labors of love, if part & parcel of a status-conscious network. Still, some writers - journalists, screenwriters, fiction and nonfiction writers, some academics (by virtue of publish-or-perish strictures), technical/professional/promotional writers - do make a living off of their writing, hence one might posit a quality imperative arising from the marketplace (never mind for a moment the aesthetic complications - whether technical writing is as "artistic" as fiction writing, etc.). Within the creative writing classroom, the question of how to produce writing that works - however it works - is usually dealt with in terms analagous to those one sees in orthodox composition classrooms, where adherence to grammatical/organizational niceties (the well-formed sentence, the topic-stringed paragraph) or preestablished forms (the five-paragraph essay) is (even today, yes) often taken as the basis upon which evaluation (?) will be rendered - by the instructor, naturally. The creative writing version of this highly standardized approach to literacy generally requires submission to variously neoformal forms - the stubbornly ubiquitous sonnet (which form, as all forms, can surely be used as a basis for more challenging writing, but - ), the carefully modulated first-person lyric, the three-act Hollywood script (cf. this essay), the linearly-plotted narrative of full-blooded characters. Of course we don't believe that any approach to the writing classroom can guarantee effective writing, not least because we can't seem to locate an adjective - including "effective" - that is uncontroversial or unproblematic in all contexts. The question here turns, as we see it, on expertise - and we're willing to allow, for the sake of argument, that whatever expertise is, instructors tend to have more of it than students. Still: how, in a classroom of even a dozen students, are instructors to oversee/assess student writing? Do we assume merely that (workshop) instructors will exercise their expertise by marking up/commenting on student writing so as to bring it in line with what they know to be "better" work? If we assume so, what sort of learning takes place, and what sort of learning community emerges? If such learning is a matter of prescription, what is the heuristic value of such prescriptive logic, when handed down by instructors? (For more on prescriptive vs. heuristic, see Mitchell and Smith.) At the same time, do students themselves possess any expertise? - any at all? Is it possible (possible) for students to use what expertise they do have, under instructors' guidance, to help one another with their writing? What sort of learning takes place under these conditions, and what sort of learning community emerges? If such learning is a matter of prescription, what is the heuristic value of such prescriptive logic when shared by peers? If we use our (creative) writing classrooms to help students develop a critical sensibility (among other things), shouldn't this sensibility be brought to bear at some point on the writing that students actually do? As instructors, we can intervene in this process as we wish (requiring individual student conferences, say) - but (to move squarely now to our agenda) wouldn't it be more energizing perhaps to turn a certain quotient of responsibility over to students, and not to intervene at each and every step? Won't most issues of literary quality tend to take care of themselves, over time - through classroom and online discussion, reading, peer feedback, immersion in writing culture (attending readings, art openings, films, etc.), and instructional intervention? If there persists some question as to the quality of the writing produced, isn't this concession (if you will) a far cry better than forcing student writing into neat little assessment packages, whose fate is to be determined by marketplace mechanisms entirely beyond the ken of critically-sheltered writers? (-5- As to feminism, critical pedagogy, and creative writing: Please see Act 3, and note 23.
* * *
Act 3: Is There a There Here? [Curtain reveals woman standing alone.] I (the she of we) intend here to argue that the contemporary creative writing classroom, with its emphasis on the traditional workshop model of teaching, actively suppresses both feminist radical writing and avant-garde writing, and therefore is complicit in the more general tendency of academic institutions to perpetuate the racist, sexist, elitist, and heterosexist status quo. [Cough.] Whether you agree with me may well depend upon what your meaning of the word "radical" is. So let us, with good old-fashioned collegiate verve, parse this premise: "The contemporary creative writing classroom actively suppresses both feminist radical writing and avant-garde writing." I begin by consulting that Book-of-the-Month-Club loss leader, that most authoritative of authorities, The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (magnifying glass included). There, "radical" may be understood thusly: "Of or pertaining to a root or roots. 1. In medieval philosophy, the humour or moisture naturally inherent in all plants and animals, its presence being a necessary condition of their vitality. 3. Going to the root or origin; essential and fundamental. 5. Philol. Of or belonging to the roots of words." From my Cassell's French Dictionary, "avant" is a preposition meaning "before, in advance of, such as of time and order." "Garder" is a verb meaning "to keep, to preserve, to watch over, tend, take care of." Thus, loosely, the avant-garde are the tenders of advancement, the preservers of progress. Back to the OED. "Active": the earliest application of the word was vita activa. "1. Opposed to contemplative or speculative: Given to an outward action rather than inward speculation. 2. Opposed to passive: Exerting action upon others." (Here is not really a digression: "Activist" does not appear in the BOMC OED. Not even with magnifying glass. According to Webster's Collegiate, "avant-garde" enters English in 1910, followed in 1915 by "activism." American women won suffrage in 1920. Hmm.) "Suppress," it seems, is related to "surprise." "1. To put down by force or authority. To cause (a proceeding, an activity) to cease, e.g., to quell (a rebellion)." Also, "3. To keep secret; to refrain from disclosing or divulging." (This may seem like a digression, but we'll come back to it later: "Suppress," it also seems, has been used as an analogy for rape, as in, "He it was, that earst would have suppressed Faire Vna." ) "Argue": From the Latin "argutare," meaning "to make clear, prove, assert, accuse, blame." "Argument: 1. Proof, evidence. 4. A connected series of statements or reasons intended to establish a position (and hence to refute the opposite)." Having parsed, we grasp my intention to provide a connected series of statements that will blame someone for something like this: The workshop classroom, since it is not - of course not - led by passive contemplatives, exerts an action by authority, which action, surprisingly, keeps secret and quells writing that challenges the root and fundamental humour necessary to the vitality of society as it now exists, as well as writing that tends the progress of that society. And now, a series of (actual) digressions. You will note that I, of woman born and bearing, have chosen not to parse "feminist." Ideological conservatives have labored to appropriate this term, leaving us in a state of faux confusion. In fact, the great achievement of feminism is that most United States citizens, when polled by Gallup, can identify the basic tenets of feminism. I won't pretend feminism has not achieved that level of mass comprehension. You will note also that I have chosen to separate into two categories "feminist radical writing" and "avant-garde writing." Despite the historically persistent presence of "experimentalist women writers," the category "avant-garde" still tends to connote a white male community, who, I would suggest, arrive at experimental writing from a different beginning of emphasis. As Hal Foster has said about the postmodern visual arts, there exists a postmodernism of reaction and a postmodernism of resistance. The avant-garde has tended to tend the progress of society, has tended to react to (conventional and/or modernist) forms; while feminist radical writers have tended to resist forms, to effect revision of society's root practices. True enough: differences between avant-garde and feminist radical writers tend to be nuanced, and so alliances have tended to form. But these alliances are shaky. To explore this shaking, and this digression, a bit further, I turn to a recent contribution to the field of writing about avant-garde writing, Ronald Sukenick's Narralogues: Truth in Fiction. Sukenick writes, "Postmodernism in fiction may be considered, in part, a rebellion against the constraints of mimesis in favor of a return to the rhetorical tradition." Which rhetorical tradition? He recognizes that "rhetoric can be the blunt instrument of power" and that "forms of discourse embody our most profound, if veiled, political investments." Most resisting writers would agree with these observations, but shouldn't the vestments of that rhetorical tradition be undone? "Fiction is a matter of argument rather than of dramatic representation." Well, OK, fiction emerges from an author's authoritative point of view and should therefore be considered a persuasive document, I agree - but why argument? Why that most masculinist of rhetorical battlefields, rife with proving, asserting, accusing, blaming? "We can judge the truth of fiction in the same way we can consider the persuasiveness of any argument." Is that still true when the fiction attempts to resist (in ways This Essay will not) a combative structure such as persuasion? Tidbits: "A Narralogue is essentially narrative plus argument...giving full play to the element of action that is essential to narrative...the action in question, of course, is the action of mind mediating event...the quarrel of consciousness with time...the unfolding of argument through time...." Reactors, who strive to unconstruct such notions as argument and time, take as their primary artistic tool action, even enaction, and so we resistors share the same homepage here. But still, argument is a reaction whose primary goal is to differentiate, rather than to unite. Argument tends to be comprised of serial, refutational monologue - possibly dialogue, but usually not. Indeed, the "dialogues" of masculinist argument are often ad womanem in nature. For instance, D. W. Fenza, in a "dialogue" staged in the May 1993 pages of The AWP Chronicle, intimated that a doctoral candidate named Kassie Fleisher might well be a "deranged psycho-babbler." Evidence of her possible hysteria was her "argument" in support of the view that (in Fenza's paraphrase) "meanings are indeterminate." Fleisher had been invited (oh, so collegially) by Fenza to defend the usefulness of literary theory to creative writers. Yet Fenza seemed bent on deeming Fleisher's "willful misreading" of another contributor's piece an "hallucinatory speculation," and scolded her for having misspelled "bogeyman," doubtless because he thought she was one. Fleisher is rumored to have abandoned all hope of AWP's becoming a more inclusionary community, and canceled her membership. (For This Essay, she was unavailable for comment.) More subtly than Fenza's bushwhack, the "dialogues" of Sukenick's narralogues, dead-head-on as they often are about art, are pseudo-Socratic in structure - and that's a structure which requires hierarchy, an uneven distribution of power between the knowing and the quizzed. In the narralogue "Chat," Sukenick's Waldo meets up with a "jeune-fille" who wins "a point in her favor" when she says she likes Rabelais. Their (clearly competitive) conversation is narrated from Waldo's point of view, so jeune-fille is subjected to his gaze (we're not told what this "plain and pious looking" student with a "pneumatic fleshiness" thinks of Old Fart Waldo who judges people by whether they like Rabelais and are fleshy). Having accepted her presence, and her interest in his status, Waldo "took her into the woods. It was late spring...." And since we know Sukenick knows what he's doing, we know he knows what he's doing when pseudo-Socrates "takes" an American college student into the woods in late spring. It's clear from the narralogue that plain Jane (that's her name, natch) is less knowledgeable than The Big Bad Wolf, and so she has less power, sexually and intellectually: When the self-ironic narrator prompts her to be less "Socratic," she replies, "I'll try, but I don't even know what you mean exactly." Ultimately, Waldo has done with Little Red Riding Hood: "He left her standing there, mouth open as if to say something which, luckily, he would never have to hear." And while Sukenick happily spoofs intellectual and sexual traditions like Plato's Dialogues and that thing to which an old man's fancy turns in the woods come spring, the "suppression" (i.e., rape) of any-Jane and her open mouth (i.e., what women want to say in our jejune and oral way) are cultural structures that go unresisted in "Chat." And since we know Sukenick knows what he's doing, we know that if he had intended to resist these structures, he would have done more than represent them. Not that there's anything wrong with his choice. But while the notion of fiction as competitive serial monologue and "judgment" of "persuasiveness" does constitute reaction (within a contemporary context), some resistors seek manylogues, a root activist tongue of rebellion. And that would be rebellion with a cause. And the cause would be: saving ourselves (and other Others) from continuing suppression, of the open-mouthed, silenced variety. Which is to say that action, and reaction, is not the same as activism. Hence the booty-shaking of the alliance. As noted earlier, D. G. Myers asserts that creative writing had its origins in "conservative reform." He argues that it ultimately promised, among other radical changes, more participation for women, thus "putting an end to" women's exclusion "from the literary profession." And here is not a digression: I will not assume the same promise held for people of color, gays, and the working classes. And: Myers's trumpeting of the "end" of the exclusion of women in creative writing remains...trumpeting...not least because our institutional emphasis on affirmatively actious "inclusion" has been rightfully challenged by third wave feminism and thinkers of color. Yes, the first master's thesis accepted at Iowa in 1931 was written by a woman (Mary Roberts's Paisley Shawl). Yes, white women have been the primary benefactors of affirmative action, and women now receive the majority of master's and doctoral degrees in English. Women also hold the vast majority of non-tenure track non-jobs in English, and are widely outnumbered among the ranks of tenured faculty. But alas, this is not simply about numbers, not least because affirmative action has aided the erasure of marginalized activity. In the 1980s, the problem was defined by some of us as the "Sandra Day O'Connor Syndrome"; shortly thereafter redubbed the "Clarence Thomas Syndrome"; soon to be redubbed [insert Bush Supreme Court nominee here]. To wit: institutionalizing a sexed body, or a skin-colored body, does not necessarily diversity make. Does not necessarily "inclusion" make, if we mean by inclusion an expansion of modes of thinking, reading, talking, resisting. Which is to say, hiring or promoting (thus including) a woman does not necessarily mean hiring or promoting a feminist. Not to mention a radical feminist. Affirmative reaction has altered the face of the institution while sub-alterning the thought; has served, as Gayatri Spivak has argued, to institutionalize essentialism, to enforce homogeneity of aesthetics and ideology. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose an alternative, nomadic thought which aims to resist the hierarchical control of representational identity - to resist an identity defined by the state's intensifying of difference, rather than honoring of difference. And we know difference is a constant in workshops. We know this because last week, she liked that poem and you didn't. Spivak, Deleuze and Guattari, and many others, suggest that discontinuity and fragmentation (tools shared by reactionary and resistant writers), while perhaps uncomfortable to some, are perhaps uncomfortable because they are the real opponents of the hegemonic control of Who We Are and What We Stand For. I would add that when avant-garde thinking and aesthetics do occasionally find a home (a johnny's paycheck) in creative writing, that (institutionalized) aesthetic is often a reactionary one and not a resistant one; is one that privileges (say) literary sentence-play over (say) literature of social revolution. Thus, the reactionary avant-garde risks being used as yet another normalizing institutional tool, yet another means of pretending "inclusion" while excluding foundational threat. The reactionary avant-garde risks becoming a force that does not guard advancement so much as a force that guards what came before - i.e., itself. All of which to insist that Myers, while well intended, I'm sure, is ill equipped to expose the "place" of resisting artists in the industry that is creative writing. Counting noses will not do it. Continuing, then: Myers reports, again, that creative writing emerged within English studies as a matter of conservative dissent. I'd add that the industry, given its refusal to welcome the study of contemporary theory - a study that would encourage consideration of difference - has matured to codify that conservative dissidence. Where we have supported patriarchy, and instituted essentialism, we have a responsibility - especially as educators - to reform ourselves, and not just for the sake of argument. As educators, we might address the question asked by transformational pedagogues: Since education changes a student (not to mention faculty), one way or the other and whether she wants it to or not, shouldn't we structure an educational experience that changes her (us) for the better? I would assert that, in the case of creative writing, we could provide a change for the better by providing a study of language. Its ideology, and its history as a technology. As a tool of all trades, thus master of all work. Our students don't know a tenth of what they need to know about language. For instance, most students do not know that language experiences differ across gender/race/class/etc. lines, nor do they know that these differences may result in differing aesthetics. Consider these tidbits from Julia Penelope's Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers' Tongues. White men benefit directly when we believe their words are harmless.... Languages are systems of rules.... In general, women aren't Speakers in the Patriarchal Universe of Discourse (PUD). We may speak English, but men rarely feel what we say is worth listening to. English does more than hinder and hurt women: it proscribes the boundaries of the lives we might imagine and will ourselves to live. The many ways the language obstructs our ability to conceive of ourselves as agents in the world or capable of rebelling against male tyranny go beyond mere hurt to emotional, intellectual and physical immobility that keeps us men's easy prey.... Penelope points out that men treat language and women similarly: both are commodities that can and should be controlled. This control is an exercised illusion: both language and women change, have been changing, while the rules regarding their behavior remain largely static. Consequently, the means of maintaining that control has also had to change, become more deceptive; patriarchs have pretended to accept, for instance, the "controversial" existence (say) of Black English, or (say) a Virgin Mary's fertility expressed in dung, or (say) the rare academic avant-gardist; but the illusion that perpetuates control remains in place, itself perpetuated by normalizing rules. To "succeed," speak this way; paint this way; sentence this way. And these rules, as language historians have pointed out again and again, are ridiculously arbitrary, often to absurdity. English "grammar" does not reflect how the language is used, but rather how a few empowered men decided it must be used. Thus there is significant slippage between prescription and actuality, with the prescription serving to separate the Men from the Boys, which is to say, the Socially Acceptable from the Socially Unacceptable, Success from Failure. Ironically, girls tend to learn the Socially Acceptable Practices - grammar - more quickly than boys, because they are more motivated to absorb those rules in order to succeed in the patriarchal competition. In fact, as Mary Daly once observed, patriarchy has successfully bribed women to take on the work of enforcing those rules - even while despising "schoolmarms" who perpetuate those rules. But having both adopted and accepted charge of said rules, we don't exercise them the same way. My pitch is higher, I pause more, I use rising intonation even when I'm not asking a question?, my diction and enunciation is more precise, I could use more modals to qualify my level of certainty, I definitely use more intensifiers, I ask tons of questions, I spend most of my verbal capital encouraging others to speak, I listen more than I talk, I use fewer imperatives, I compose longer sentences of which this is one, I interrupt only to express affirmation, and I submit more thoughts to tag questions - isn't that right? And of course all of these practices are valued less than their authority-grabbing alternatives, and because I practice these inferior structures, I am thought by many to Lack Authority. To Fail. (But don't believe me. If You Just Don't Understand, see the work of Deborah Tannen. Reread Mary Field Belenky et al. if you're curious about Women's Ways of Knowing.) For instance, un-authoritative me does not care much for the mode of This Essay. "Argument essays," "persuasive essays"
- these are verbal hairshirts for me. I far prefer serial questioning, modes of exploration - any structure that permits a tempering of certainty. I don't like to quote other scholars, or footnote, as these suggest Mastery Of Material, perpetuating a Knowledge Model that often results in territorial pissing contests. And usually I sit down to piss - but to earn my Ph.D. I chose to stand up and take aim. Thus, I am multi-lingual. I speak masculinist and feminist, and languages between/around. Feminist is my native language, but for survival reasons (when in Rome...) I have become fluent in masculinist. (It's not hard. Just puff up your chest and blow.) I regret that most men are monolingual. I think the entire world would benefit if our male leaders were to broaden their linguistic horizons. World peace might even set in. But hey - that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. And now I'll be accused of the very essentializing and ghettoizing that concerned Spivak. Permit me to aver that these crimes are not my real misdemeanors. Observable differences do exist in language practice tendencies, and I won't quibble over whether those tendencies are caused by nature, nurture, or narture. I do worry about segregating Women's Writing, since in our competitive society, categorizing = hierarchizing = trivializing. But somehow (I insist) we must acknowledge and negotiate the presence of una frontera (see Gloria Anzaldúa), a time/space between/among/around differences/conflicts that exist between/etc. hegemonic discourses and marginalized discourses. Tannen and others have suggested that female language users often avoid conflict; this need not be the case. "Feminist" language artists, since we are not monologuists, are well positioned to develop a new way of engaging la frontera, of articulating difference non-accusingly, of suggesting terms for conflict that are less oppositional than relational. Creative writing classes, as they study different language practices, might also consider heterology (see Michel de Certeau) - how we view AnOther - AnOther's aesthetic, AnOther's experience of language. So anyway, feminist, woman, and Otherized, I Lack Authority. And isn't "authority" a key issue in classrooms? Me Teacher, You Student; Me Taught, You Stupid; Me Waldo, You Jane? And isn't "author-ity" particularly an issue in creative writing classrooms, where students struggle to authoritatively make the choices authors make, to boldly go where infinitives may be split, their apprentice selves looking reverently to the choices made by the master? Don't apprentices look to the master for the right way to make a poem? And isn't this issue of authority further aggravated when aesthetic authority is attended by gender, race, or class divisions - when the apprentice daughter looks to the master father for "what works" in her narrative? Once upon a time, in a land far away, a master-father castrated his daughter's long, apprentice sentences. Our tale begins in the master's dark, wood-paneled office, autumn leaves dashing against the ivy clinging to his window. He spends hours gripping red pen, pouring over the apprentice's promising young "stories." His eyes blur, his family calls (he is, of course, married)...but the daughter's "stories" would be saved. They would be trimmed, sculpted, sliced to order. She could be the new Ann Beattie, the clitorized Carver, if only he could make her so. He toils and he sacrifices, gives the apprentice hours he could have applied to his own clipped, taut, Vintage(d) work. When she objects to the bloody scars on her manuscript he strokes his beard and sighs. If only she understood his sacrifice of time, of logos. Finally, she, Vintage-awed, in search of her father's agent, relents. She slashes sentences, minimalizes, inserts his projectile plot structures, offers in jest to add his name as coauthor. And ok, yes, she fucks him once or twice, since that is what the stroking of logos can lead to (see Waldo and Jane, above). Then she leaves his tutorial. And her sentences, like the vines near his window in spring, begin to grow back - to cascade in waves like Virginia's crashing orgasms. Another true story: What's a daughter to do when she comes to workshop and her instructor says - and I quote - "We all know you're gay already - why don't you write about something else?" Which brings us from the question of form to the question of content. Feminist scholars of autobiography, including Sidonie Smith and Estelle Jelinek, have explored the typical differences in subject matter between male and female authors; I think we may safely extrapolate some tendencies in the content of poetry as well. Women, and others whose "articulations of self" are uttered from a "subhegemonic" social position, tend to utilize reportorial tones and self-deprecating humor when confessing bad news; subaltern authors often assume that their readers are part of their own marginalized group, and so often make the subjected the subject; women affect an intimacy with the reader, speaking as one would to a close friend about what one would tell a close friend. And, as Patricia Myer Spacks has observed, women's selection of subject matter often "exploits a rhetoric of uncertainty...partly as a mode of self-denial." The exhausting contradiction between urges toward self-articulation and self-denial is of course reflected in subject matter, and content selection should be read and understood on such terms, rather than dismissed, as has historically been the case, as "domestic fiction." As Joanna Russ vows in How to Suppress Women's Writing, "The Double Standard of Content is perhaps the fundamental weapon in the armory.... The trick ... is to label one set of experiences as more valuable and important than the other." Or, as Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own, "A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop." Disclaimer: I'm not here to argue for a realist representation of "subject matter." But whatever your conventions of choice - and as that workshop instructor revealed recently - the little shop of lesbian sexuality is less valued than the battlefield of male heterosexual fantasy. This sort of authority-ridden classroom, rampant in creative writing, is a deceitful classroom. It allows the uncontested acting-out of binary oppositions that in practice are neither useful nor healthy. The teacher/student binary hides the fact that teachers often learn from their students, that students often do not learn from their teachers, and that an artistic community of colleagues may be formed between both. The right/wrong grammar binary, with the works/doesn't-work aesthetic binary, hides the fact that language can and should contain multitudes of usages and receptions (fragmentation being the primary opponent of... [see above]). The conventional/experimental binary results in the dismissal of the alternative language practices and subject matters developed by women, gays, people of color, and the working classes - especially those many who do not rely on hegemonic, "realist" expressions of their disenfranchisement. The insistence upon sole authorship, an historical development closely related to the commodification of art - and the resultant competition for survival that plagues many artistic communities - still plays out in workshops today, hiding an activist world of anti-corporate co-laboratories such as the one that produced This Essay. And another deceit: Isn't it time we finally understood Eric Torgerson's point, made (oh, so long ago) in 1988 in the AWP Newsletter, about the transference loop also rampant in workshops? Which is to say, it's (usually) not really us they want to make love to. (Duh.) Radical (resistant) writing undercuts these authoritative structures at their roots. So does radical teaching and learning. Thus we conclude: Non-radical teaching - teaching that does not address these root institutional deceptions, and does not engage la frontera amidst different aesthetics and ideologies - will but of course inherently stifle radical art intending to illuminate that difference, especially the resistant writing of women, gays, people of color, and the working classes. How to reclaim the vita activa? [Insert here title of forthcoming book on radical methods for teaching creative writing, because "how to" questions seem to be the only questions we receive when presenting our ideas - despite our insistence throughout that the whys and whos of teaching should prefigure the whats.] The means of reclamation will vary from practitioner to practitioner, but one central classroom feature must be undone before any reclamation is possible: the fundamental master/apprentice, father/daughter, het/gay, have/not imbalances in the teacher-student relationship. In its place, language theory, heterology, critique of institutional roles, and exploration of the reader-writer's reception of his/her/Other's writing. In the future, we may perhaps avow with good old-fashioned collegiate verve that the creative writing classroom, home of resistant makers of enacting-art, exerts an action which critiques authority, which action, unsurprisingly, preserves the advancement of writing that challenges the root and fundamental humour necessary to the vitality of society as it might be, transforming the student writer, the teacher-student, and the writing community, in ways that tend the many progresses of those many logos in society.
So anyway, we were talking about Grady's cinematic power tripp. We all know our lines: "She needs to work on her voice," "He needs to work on his craft," "We need to workshop our poems," and our favorite, "But I don't want to know what I'm doing, whether writing or teaching": if it's not too awfully censorious to come right out and say so, there should probably be a moratorium on such expressions - excepting that last declaration, which in our crankier moments we would wish to see stricken from consciousness as such - until the classroom reveals itself as fully equipped to address those foregoing issues: of classroom authority Why shoot-from-the-hips feedback, with instructor as final arbiter of literary-aesthetic value? Why not peer review and evaluation based upon criteria and procedures emerging from sustained classroom discussion of literary value - of the overarching rationale that supports why we like what we like, what it is that gives us pleasure, pain, etc.? (If we find ourselves, student or faculty member, utterly incapable of articulating such a (provisional, tentative) rationale, isn't the classroom a good place to begin the necessary dialogue?) To subvert classroom authority, shouldn't instructors turn their attention, first and foremost, to the grading system? Can't a certain amount of authority be delegated to students in this regard - say, 50% - leaving the instructor to police absences, missed deadlines, extenuating circumstances, and the like? Can't instructors create a grading safety net, with a minimum grade of B (e.g., and save for attendance or deadline problems), in order to provide incentive to class participants, who are then asked to grade their peers' work, to employ the full grading spectrum of A, B, C, etc., along with narrative evaluation? Isn't this wee bit of "grade inflation" more than offset by the benefits associated with class participants attending to one another's work with care, honing their critical, editorial, and collaborative talents, and learning something about one another in the process? Shouldn't instructors be emphasizing the learning process, and not product, in any case? If some modicum of faith buttresses instructors' assumptions about learning - not blind faith, no, perhaps empirical faith, yes, but faith nonetheless - wouldn't instructors be better off directing class energies toward the many activities outlined in their syllabi (reading, writing, attending readings, online discussion, etc.), and shouldn't this latter structural device itself be viewed as aiding and abetting the learning process? Finally, wouldn't it be wise in this regard for instructors to provide individual feedback only after student work has received peer evaluation, and only for those students who are willing to meet their teachers halfway - say, those who are willing to drop by during office hours (or by appointment)? of community In order to avoid the social and intellectual pitfalls of mutual admiration and overweening conformity, shouldn't community (term used advisedly) turn on open dialogue among those who share similar interests? Isn't nurturing as such a function of a healthy community? And doesn't one vital aspect of "the writing life" - again, we think a more helpful construction would be writing culture - have to do with forging a support network to answer both to personal needs (which working as a writer or artist today generally intensifies) as well as professional demands (such as publishing)? So shouldn't we be directing our teaching energies toward helping to build a sense of community - among our colleagues, our coworkers, our students - wherein trust emerges from honest and sustained critical engagement, along with the joys and tribulations associated with just plain hanging out (in whatever medium)? Shouldn't the classroom be the place for considering the ways in which writing culture need have little to do, ultimately, with academic (not that there's anything wrong with that) lifeways, if not exactly new bohemianisms (not that there's anything wrong with those)? And shouldn't we encourage the proliferation of new student-based communities and organizational entities? of critical engagement Even if we take it on faith that Myers's "constructive art of literature" is worth pursuing in its own right, doesn't what we do as writers have some goddamn thing or other to do with literary criticism, literary theory, aesthetic theory, textual scholarship, and cultural studies - with the work of our (many) colleagues in English studies? Must an emphasis on aesthetics per se, and an accompanying focus on spiritual-affective-experiential matters (life, death, love, loss, aging, grief, joy, wonder, etc.), negate any more vigorous consideration of those material and social factors that shape written work? (We would pose the converse of this question to our colleagues in English studies who are not creative writers, and insert Raymond Williams's term, "structures of feeling.") Though we would concede that writing of any sort, whether beautiful, pleasurable, disturbing, or annoying, constitutes a profound critical engagement with (at least) some writing and reading processes - including editing, revision, translation, and collaboration, among others - isn't the classroom a place in which to pursue this engagement with due consideration for other arts, other disciplines, and other everyday practices? of social responsibility Are writers the only sentient beings on the planet whose imaginative work is not to be addressed, at least ex post facto, in terms of its social contribution, or lack thereof? Are creative writing faculty the only sentient workers on the planet whose motivation (as opposed to "inspiration") is said to derive solely from some preciously stubborn embrace of solitude, and not from those social exigencies that ultimately support, or fail to support, our work, and the work of others like us? of education as such Shouldn't the creative writing classroom be insulated to some extent from the increasingly competitive demands of an increasingly merger-prone, option-saturated publishing sphere? In order to ensure an educational experience less invested in indoctrination (and training) than in learning, isn't it of fundamental importance that the varied mechanisms of education - including the history and structure of the workshop itself, its place within the broader historical context of literacy as a democratic educational imperative (and public policies attending thereto) - be rendered legible to students? At the same time, shouldn't students be encouraged, with our guidance, to learn something about the business of publishing, to find ways to constructively negotiate the professional quagmire (as above) of societies and organizations and publishers and agents that they're likely to confront as writers? Don't the risks of professionalization and careerism require, finally, a delicate instructional balance between the needs of learning - and learning to write other than that which conforms solely to marketplace demands - and the needs of surviving professionally? of poiesis If the workshop is to be a workshop, a place of poiesis, of making symbolic artifacts of whatever sort - which is to say, and somewhat against our grain throughout, a place of métier (if not exactly craft), as well as a place to challenge, via alphabetic-symbolic technologies, even the most egalitarian of fictive constructs (including the educational beta version 1.1 we've promoted throughout) - wouldn't a fully equipped computer classroom provide a more contemporary venue (yes, venue) for such activities, a venue more in line with the sorts of digital and networking activities that students will ultimately be doing? Doesn't the conjunction of communications technologies (synchronous, asynchronous, etc.) with the word/image/sound/archival processing presently represented by the computer provide at least the potential for a more collaborative - indeed, more playful - understanding of (artistic, scholastic) process and product, across genres, across media, across disciplines, and across geopolitical boundaries? Whatever the classroom technology (as it were), shouldn't any such engagement with writerly métier be facilitated (yes, facilitated) with an eye and an ear toward the various critical and theoretical concerns we've been yammering on about? Even as we explore the classroom possibilities of newer educational technologies, shouldn't we be particularly sensitive to the ways in which corporate and nationalist motives work their way into educational and community agenda? Whatever the classroom technology (as it were), shouldn't the sticky matter of classroom authority (as above) be of prime pedagogical concern? of content and form Does instruction in creative writing constitute a radically different engagement with the word - epistemologically, ontologically - than instruction in writing in general? Are creative writers really a breed apart, and do fiction writers, poets, playwrights, journalists, graphic novelists, hyperfiction scribes and essay writers, albeit employed in producing markedly different forms, thrive when such activities are treated as entirely discrete curricular entities? Are we well-represented by the widespread curricular assumption that writing courses, as opposed to literature courses, are "content-less," especially with the rise of a public sphere chock-full of "content providers"? Might we writing instructors, of all stripes, do better to structure our courses around an actual topic, rather than view our respective writing activities as "instruction in how to write such & so," where "such & so" (whether novel, poetry, play, article, technical report, graphic novel, hyperfiction, or essay) is so ambiguously broad as to inhibit active grappling with social, critical, and historical factors? And might we writing instructors do better, as a rule, to foster a sense of risk in our writers - which requires not only a nurturing community (again, community for us implies both nurturing and challenge), but a community informed by any number of contextual realities - such that writers come to view learning and writing as contingent upon stumblings, falterings, dead ends, mistakes, formal excesses, and informal constraints? By encouraging our students to take risks, and by permitting them to fail in a setting that supports their efforts - and by permitting instructors to fail, perhaps by risking too much and expecting too much in return, in a setting that supports their (our) efforts - don't we thereby differentiate classroom risk from the more damaging corporate varieties? And isn't this a good thing, in the end? 24 Progressively Circuitous Notes ^1. For an excellent critique of cinematic classroom heroes, see Bauer. And for a fine discussion of literary and pop-cultural representations of graduate student life, as these may be brought to bear on controversies surrounding the Yale graduate student strike, see Newman. ^2. As a white, heterosexual, disillusioned male, Grady joins a growing number of white-collar fictionalizations of (male) Bobos, among which recent Hollywood versions we may count Kevin Spacey in American Beauty and Edward Norton in Fight Club. Grady's personal redemption via tuning in & dropping out of the workplace, though more professorially temperate than these others (e.g., he gives up pot, or turns off), is no less problematic, if only because the economic security he apparently eschews by relinquishing a tenured position is made to seem the proper sacrifice for once and future authors. We write apparently, for at film's conclusion Sara has evidently continued on in academe as breadwinner to support Grady's writing. (In the novel version of Wonder Boys, Grady's professional fate is somewhat less resolute: Sara accepts a position as dean of students at another college, and arranges to have Grady continue to teach there on a part-time basis.) ^3. For a thorough critique
and history of the university as an emerging transnational corporation,
see Readings,
Aronowitz, and
Chomsky et al.; for responses to Readings,
see Delany,
LaCapra, and
J. Hillis Miller; for an early account of university
privatization, see Ridgeway; for an attempt
to think the university as a site of knowledge work,
see Alan Liu; for a history of the (US) major
research institution, see Geiger
and Kerr. For reports from the trenches,
see Amato ("Technical"),
Caesar,
and Fleisher (Suffer).
For a general history of the US university,
see Veysey. And for inquiry into those
economic and cultural conditions that have served to place English studies
in a perceived state of crisis (we too perceive it thus),
see Bérubé,
Bérubé and Nelson,
Kolodny,
Nelson (Manifesto, Will Teach),
and Scholes. ^4. We are indebted to David Baptiste Chirot for alerting us to this French expression (and related references) via posting to the Poetics online discussion group. And we are indebted as well to Diane K. Olson, whose ongoing online exchange with us concerning the curricular possibilities of writing culture has proved most fruitful to our research. ^5. See esp. Mearns's Creative Youth. For a popular primer in progressivist teaching methods c. 1928, see Rugg and Shumaker. For historical background on the teaching of literature and composition, see Katherine Adams, Applebee, Michael, Graff (Professing), and Vanderbilt; for critique of Graff from a rhetoric-composition perspective, see Friend; and see Ohmann (English) for a more openly polemical history. We might note here Wendy Bishop's early and constructive account of the shared institutional history that marks creative writing and composition (see "On Being"). ^6. This includes those campus writing programs that ground their approach to composition in more traditional rhetorical models, emphasizing communicative utility, or expediency. For a history of utility as a curricular locus, see David Russell 101-32. And for a damning account of rhetorical expediency, see Katz. ^7. For a helpful debunking of the academic canard that graduate student labor is historically anchored in a medieval model of craft guild "apprenticeship," see Watt. And for a related discussion of the (postwar) public mission of higher ed as informed by the "dual imperatives of access [to basic skills] and research," and correlation in the humanities with graduate education as "training" in teaching, or "induction" into "the specialized role of intellectual knowledge worker," see Gilbert et al. 17-22. Myers doesn't directly address the much-vaunted notion (at least since the sixties) that the M.F.A. in creative writing is primarily a "studio" degree, modeled on the M.F.A. in art - an influential notion, perhaps, but one that nonetheless says little about creative writing's real origins. In fact the M.F.A. designation for creative writing at Iowa first appeared in the University of Iowa Catalogue in 1938-39, seven years after the first creative master's thesis (more on this later), and only one year after the M.F.A. first appeared in the Catalogue for master's level work in "music, dramatic art, and art" (see Wilbers 58, n. 25). As Singerman indicates, "[t]he first M.F.A.'s [in studio art] were awarded in the mid 1920s," but such M.F.A. programs "did not become widespread ... until much later" (6; he points to the early forties). As to the term "workshop" itself: as Myers indicates, George Pierce Baker used this term - with which his Harvard colleagues had decades earlier classified their playwriting courses - to describe his graduate course in advanced composition, "The Technique of the Drama"; perhaps not surprisingly, Baker's famous "47 Workshop" evolved over time into an applied course for aspiring dramatists (see Myers 68-9). For more on arts education, see Efland, Mary Emma Harris, and Soucy and Stankiewicz. ^8. Following is a broad sampling of work that prefigures, elaborates, presumes, borrows from, extends, or explicitly resists progressivist-critical pedagogies: Aronowitz and Giroux, Berlin (Refiguring), Berthoff, Bizzell, Mary Ann Cain (Revisioning, "Situating"), William E. Cain, Castells et al., Corkin and Frus, Dewey, Dewey et al. Elbow, Freire, Freire and Faundez, George, Gless and Smith, Giroux, Giroux et al., Giroux and McLaren, Graff (Beyond), hooks, Hurlbert and Blitz, Illich, Jay, Kecht, Knoblauch and Brannon, Kozol, Kumar, Levine, Luke and Gore, McLaren, McLuhan et al., Richard Miller, Olson and Gale, Postman and Weingartner, Ravitch, Salvatori, Shor, Shor and Freire, Shor and Pari, Shaughnessy, Tai and Kenyatta, Tate et al., Tompkins ("Pedagogy"), Ward, Yancey and Weiser, and the journals Radical Teacher, Works and Days, and Writing on the Edge. (If we had to pick one of the foregoing as an entry into the discussion we imagine, it would Tate et al., which we will have occasion to discuss in some detail.) For two authors who worry the language-thought-writing complex in useful ways, see Emig, and Vygotsky (Mind, Thought); for a cognitivist approach to these matters, see Flower and Bruner. As to bringing a philosophy of language to bear on linguistic production, we have found Volosinov's theorizing ("of the utterance" etc.) most helpful. We do understand that many writing instructors conceive of their workshops primarily in terms of writing exercises and the like. While we don't ourselves embrace this way of structuring the writing classroom (for reasons that should become clear as we proceed), we do concede that thorough immersion in a wide range of formal (creative, making) processes has its place, and might even work to upset those typically constraining logics parading under the banner of assessment; we recommend Collom and Noethe's Poetry Everywhere and Bernays and Painter's What If? for fine surveys of possible approaches. We might as well add here that we are only too aware of the potentially coercive aspects of critical pedagogy - but we will maintain a firm position against more traditional pedagogies (as well as those that would seem to invoke process, rhetoric, etc.), which are generally, let's face it, even more coercive, while doing little to offset their own coercions, and little to enhance participatory learning practices. More as we proceed. ^9. And on this latter point, we concur with Gudding (we think), and would like as well to refer our readers to an eye-opening elaboration of the production and consumption of self-regulating poetic selves, Rasula (American 424-26). For Mearns's reliance on a conceptual and practical reorientation from product to process, see Myers 118-9. And for a thorough account of the alienation experienced by US writers, artists and intellectuals even as creative writing took hold in the academy (and, we might note, against the backdrop of Depression-era isolationist fears), see Hofstadter, esp. his conclusion, "The Intellectual: Alienation and Conformity" (393-432). ^10. We use "art" to designate ways of seeing and making such that artifacts and practices so construed and constructed provoke active consideration of formal and aesthetic attributes - and we mean to include popular arts (and crafts) in this designation (which is not to downplay the need for aesthetic judgment). The twentieth century stipulated (in effect) to the notion that anything can function as a work of art - but this certainly does not obviate ongoing consideration of the cultural and aesthetic work that art does. As we see it, the values assigned to art works are a matter of informed, historically contingent and ideologically fraught discussion - and we don't mind saying that we would like to see more art produced (or, promoted) that registers the difficulties of living in such a complex "global" age. For considered discussion along more philosophical coordinates, see Carrier and Danto; and with regard to poetry in particular, see Perloff (Wittgenstein's). For helpful inquiry into specifically activist arts projects, see Felshin. ^11. <-- back to agency We write "fuzzy" because we have yet to meet a single creative writing student, graduate or undergraduate, who can, when prompted, provide a considered definition of voice (i.e., aside from the physical variety, and aside from such common figurative uses such as "giving voice to"). What one gets, instead, is sincere gesturing toward some unmediated and authentically personal (if not private) agency that somehow inhabits text - which is not to say that "voice" may not be made to denote, or connote, actual alphabetic attributes (i.e., conventions), or spiritual immanences. See Leggo for a nice romp through conundrums of "voice." The problem is that voice as a locus of agency already holds such enormous, and often critically unexamined, appeal in classrooms structured around expressivist (if no less coercive) aims. Hence we are questioning its utility as a teaching locus - and we might note here that we have no wish ourselves to agonize over real or imagined binaries such as craft vs. theory, workshopping vs. critique, voice vs. discourse. Though we are interested (in every sense of the word) in promoting dialogue at the expense of clearcut generic or intra/interdisciplinary borders and boundaries, we are surely not advocating a collapse or erasure of all such distinctions. Rather, we would prefer to suspend our disbelief as to the value of such distinctions in order to see what might emerge therefrom. More as we proceed. ^12. For a brief discussion of creative writing in this technological context, and with particular focus on the vagaries of craft, see Amato ("We Interrupt"). For relevant background on the history of work and technology, see Marcuse and Zuboff. We direct those readers who are interested in exploring how newer media technologies are rapidly shaping new literatures (and alternative reading-viewing experiences, and alternative communities) to the (recently launched) Electronic Literature Directory. Following is a broad sampling of critical, historical, and theoretical work relating to media, film, the arts in general (including architecture, the digital arts, vr, and related social and educational controversies): Aarseth, Adorno, Amerika, Andrews, Atkins, Attali (Noise), Baker, Barlow, Basalmo, Benedikt, Berger, Birkerts, Bolter, Bolter and Grusin, Boyle, Stewart Brande, Caws, Chipp, Clover, Collins et al., John Corbett, De Lauretis, Dery, Dixon, Douglas, Edmundson (Nightmare), Eisenstein, Warren Ellis, Feigen, Felshin, Philip Fisher, Fiske, Fleisher ("Fucked"), Gaggi, Gombrich, Clement Greenberg, Guilbaut, Havelock, Hawisher and Selfe (Evolving, Passions), Herman and Swiss, Herrington, Ellen Johnson, Johnson-Eilola, Johnson-Eilola and Selber, Jones, Joyce, Kac, Kahn and Whitehead, Kaplan, Kauffmann and Henstell, Kawin, Kramarae, Landow, Langer, Lanham, Loomis, Markley, Moholy-Nagy, McCloud, McLuhan, McLuhan and Fiore, Monaco, Janet Murray, Theodor Nelson, Papert, Penley and Ross, Perl, Postman, Rheingold, Ronell, Tricia Rose, Rosenberg, Ross (No Respect), Paul Ryan, Selfe and Selfe, Seltzer, Singerman, Sondheim, Tabbi and Wutz, Taylor and Saarinen, Toffler, Tu et al., Ulmer, Venturi, Welch, Zim and Shaffer, Zizek, and the journal Postmodern Culture. (See also the texts cited in notes 16 and 17, below. We've had a tough time separating each cluster of works from one another, but what the hell.) ^13. There are, to be sure, prominent exceptions, four among which are Blitz and Hurlbert, Jarrett, Owens and Syverson. We continue to be nonplussed by theorists of composition (and our colleagues in English studies in general) who, for example, have never heard of Small Press Distribution; or have never visited the SPD web site; or have never pondered the social mechanics of small press publishing; or, having never aspired themselves to placing a work of their own with a small press, would treat small press publication as a zoological oddity. For those of our readers readily familiar with, say, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, New Literary History, Representations, and Social Text; or with, say, College English, College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, ADE Bulletin, and Journal of Advanced Composition; or with, say, MLA Newsletter, Chronicle of Higher Education, Lingua Franca, and Academe; but readers who at the same time have little knowledge of non-mainstream poetry-poetics based journals, following is a baker's dozen, plus one "ecovillage"/small press collective that exists physically in West Lima, Wisconsin, but boasts a substantial virtual presence as well: Aerial, Chain, Crayon, Cross-Cultural Poetics, Facture, The Iowa Review Web, Jacket, New American Writing, Raddle Moon, Samizdat, Sulfur (last issue Spring 2000, sadly), The Temple, Tinfish, and (the collective) Dreamtime Village (which publishes various media projects under the Xexoxial Endarchy imprint). And to name but four review organs relevant to this community: American Book Review, BookForum, electronic book review, and Rain Taxi. And though we wouldn't wish to make it a bone of contention in this piece, we have been struck of late by the (long-awaited) reversal of fortune experienced in the past decade by the rhetoric and composition establishment, whose practitioners during the sixties and seventies were treated as operating "beneath" the (salaried) radar screen of "literature" faculty; yet who now seem to enjoy something of an administrative edge in the still-depressed job market (good for you, but - ), what with so many campuses seeking to instate a Writing Program Administrator or equivalent. We must admit to being a bit wary of those WPAs who seem at times hell-bent on imposing their administrative (and not simply bureaucratic) ethos on colleagues lacking such supervisory aspirations, especially in light of these privatizing times. ^14. For an incisive and profound revaluation of the teaching-research-service triad, see Mahala and Swilky ("Remapping"). For a thoughtful reworking of the work that we English faculty actually do, see Watkins. And for discussion of the ways in which self-professed writers think differently about their work than self-professed professors, see Elbow, Bartholomae et al., and Amato ("Moonlighting"). Our advocacy of North's pragmatic approach to knowledge production - as applicable to creative writing pedagogy - coincides rather nicely with Myers's understanding of creative writing instruction as a largely "constructivist" pursuit (i.e., instruction in how to make literature). But a common problem raised by such pragmatically conceived reform agenda is the relative ease with which they can be neutralized within university structures predicated (again) on hard and fast instructional expertise - a further reason why literary celebrity has served as a tacit antidote to genuine reform. In our view, pragmatism must be aided and abetted by the insights of critical pedagogy (and correspondingly activated student populations) in order to counter prevailing institutional tendencies, which tend toward hyperprofessionalization. For general insight into professional culture, see Abbott, Bledstein, Bazerman and Paradis, Larson, and Robbins; Robbins's unearthing of the more positive aspects of professionalization is especially instructive. We might add here that we don't find especially compelling a totalizing, unreconstructed Marxist metanarrative in which any save more rigorously enacted oppositional pedagogies are understood merely as promoting an "oppressive bourgeois pluralism" and furthering corporate-university collusion (see Morton and Zavarzadeh, Ebert, and Schweickart). To be sure, we are not entirely free of the oppositional bind ourselves, as we would like to imagine "our" students leaving "our" classrooms ready, willing, and able to combat any number of social injustices. Yet, while we always enjoy hearing from our colleagues on the (self-professed) far left, and while said leftists invariably have something valuable to say about liberal agenda, they occasionally position themselves via our-way-or-the-highway rhetorics that would shut the door to potentially productive reform strategies, not all of which reek of compromise. Without wishing to add to the customarily divisive nature of leftist politics (nostra culpae), we would observe simply that such views tend to downplay the possibilities of localized resistance and everyday radicalized practice in the face of encroaching globalization (e.g. and most pertinent to our concerns here, the small press world, and the communities that support it against all odds). To borrow from another discursive domain: it's likely that the revolution we envision, at least here in the US, will in fact not be televised, hence we believe sights must be set accordingly. ^15. See e.g. the (in some ways dated, but) still useful collection of essays edited by Moxley, and especially the more recent collection edited by Bishop and Ostrom, the latter one of the better stand-alone resources for exploring the issues we broach in this essay (it includes a helpful bibliography). Though we find formidable Paisely Livingston's attempt to de-marginalize literary production by re-theorizing its epistemological status - hence presumably placing "literary knowledge" on firmer social (and academic) footing - the result strikes us as ultimately subjecting the literary to a social-scientific, and in some sense cognitive, agenda (see Livingston). As to the cognitive-rhetorical agenda per se, see Turner. While we generally enjoy the rigors and urgings of theoretical speculation, under Livingston's and Turner's theoretical gazes the possibilities (both cognitively and socially) of literary (and artistic) endeavor seem entirely too circumscribed by theories of same (and in this regard, see also Varela et al.). ^16. Much the same circumstances prevail in technical writing classrooms, as one of us discovered to his perennial dismay during nearly a decade of teaching same. For useful antidotes to this reductive conception of the scientific/technological (not to say technical) vis-à-vis literary and cultural artifacts, and for helpful background on science and technology in general, see Amrine, Bazerman, Bazerman and Paradis, Crary and Kwinter, De Landa, Ellul, Fearing and Sparrow, Feyerabend, Foucault (Discipline), Daniel S. Greenberg, Gross, Hacker, Haraway, Harding, Hausman, Hayles, Heidegger (Question), Heims, Jacobus et al., Kaplan and Squier, Keller, Kuhn, Latour, Paisley Livingston, Longino, Maines, Pirsig, Popper, Porush, Rasula ("Textual"), Richards, Rouse, Serres, Serres with Latour, Steinman, Allucquère Rosanne Stone, Sypher, Tichi, Tuana, Tufte, Whitehead, Winner and (again) Zuboff. ^17. Following is a broad sampling of instructive history, criticism, theory: Allen and Tallman, Altieri, Amato (Bookend), Andrews and Bernstein, Peter Baker, Baraka, Bartlett, Beach, Bee and Schor, Bernstein (Content's, My Way, Poetics, Politics), Bérubé (Marginal), Benjamin, Blaser, Bugialli, Bürger, Byrd, Cage, Codrescu, Damon, Danto, Davenport, Davidson, Delville and Pagnoulle, Doody, Drucker, Duncan, DuPlessis, Duplessis and Quartermain, Easthope, Easthope and Thompson, Epstein, Eshleman, Faigley, Federman, Foster, Fredman, Golding, Grossberg et al., Harrison and Wood, Hartley, Hassan, Heidegger (Poetry), Heller, Hoffman and Murphy, Hollo, Howe, Irvine, Jones, Kalamaras (Reclaiming), Kermode, Kittler, Klinkowitz, Kostelanetz, Lemke, Levertov, Lukács, Lyon, Mackey, McGann, McKeon, Merleau-Ponty, Michaelson, Monroe, Cary Nelson (Repression), Nielsen, Charles Olson, O'Neill, Ortega y Gasset, Ostroff, Perelman, Perloff (Poetics, Radical), Phillips et al., Preminger and Brogan, Quartermain, Rasula (American), Stephen Ratcliffe, Robbe-Grillet, Ross (Failure), Rothenberg and Joris's trenchant editorial apparatus, Charles Russell, Schiffrin, Schultz, Scroggins, Shaviro, Silliman, Sontag, Stein, Steiner, Sukenick, Thomas, Todorov, Tuma, Vendler (Music), Von Hallberg, Waldman and Schelling, Ian Watt, Watten, Wilson, the journal Modernism/Modernity, and the entire Impercipient Lecture Series. (If we had to pick one of the foregoing as an entry into the discussion we imagine, it would be Rasula.) See Golding (70-113) for a cogent analysis of Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, "the single most influential poetry textbook published in this century" (102). For a devastating critique of the institutional disparities at work in the production and circulation of literary criticism and theory, see Sosnoski; and for a fine-tuned analysis of the declining status of theory and associated ramifications, see Bové (In the Wake). In addition to Rothenberg and Joris's stunning assemblage of international poetries - and pace more historically comprehensive literature anthologies, which are generally valuable, if somewhat limited in aesthetic scope as regards the latter twentieth century (see e.g. the Norton anthologies by Gates and McKay and Gilbert and Gubar) - we have found the following edited collections helpful in coming to terms with a fuller range of writing practices: Anzaldúa and Moraga (fiction by women of color); Caddel and Quartermain (British and Irish poetry); Feinstein and Komunyakaa ("jazz poetry"); Gizzi (international poetry and prose); Hartwell (international science fiction); Johnson and Ashby (Russian poetry); Lew (Asian North American poetry); Liu (gay US poetry); Mazza et al. ("chick-lit" fiction); McCaffery ("avant-pop fiction"); Messerli (North American language poetries); Montgomery et al. (US fiction); O'Sullivan (North American and UK women's poetry); Rasula and McCaffery (poetry and prose); Potts (Pacific northwest poetry); Rothenberg and Clay (poetry and prose); Schwartz et al. (contemporary American poetry); Silliman (U.S. language poetries); and Sloan (North American women's writing). Both Hoover (US poetry) and Geyh et al. (US fiction) provide classroom-friendly compilations; and while we have reservations regarding Nelson's editorial handling of the last few decades of "Modern American" poetry, his volume, especially as compared with the US poetries in Ellman and O'Clair, at least offers readers an expansive range of poetries, many of which have not enjoyed wide circulation (see Nelson Anthology, and Amato's review of same, "It was"). Five other recent anthologies of note: Weinberger's volume includes some intriguing selections, and is useful in some sense because of what it excludes; Morrow (advertised as "spanning three generations" of poets) and Jarnot et al. strike us as valuable in collecting together the work of several communities/alliances of (US) poets, rather than presenting any more comprehensive "[s]tates of the art" or "new (American)" tendencies, respectively; Algarín and Holman displays both the exhilarations and drawbacks of transcribing poetries tailored to an oral forum; and Hollander et al. (Volumes 1 and 2, Volume 3 in preparation) looks to be perhaps the most comprehensive, if most expensive, of the lot, fortifying a new canon while reinforcing elements of the old one. Finally, and in addition to those few texts on postmodernism we've cited (above), and the entire line of Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia titles (which vary somewhat in quality): though Woods's Beginning Postmodernism is intended as something of a classroom text, it provides an outstanding critical overview of postmodernism in the arts, hence we cite this latter as a gateway to the flood of fine books bridging postmodern waters. ^18. The historical eddies - and embodied materialities - of performance and performance-based aesthetics are not to be underestimated, though; nor are the obvious merits of exploring performance in a classroom setting, and as a means of (yes) building community. For three essay collections focusing on the oral/aural aspects of modernist and contemporary writing (and arts) practices, see Bernstein (Close Listening), Kahn and Whitehead, and Morris; and see Parker and Sedgwick for general theoretical inquiry. For an outstanding video compilation of poetry performance, see The United States of Poetry; and for an outstanding compilation of sound poetries, see Scobie and Barbour. ^19. For helpful discussion of collaborative writing practices, see Bruffee, Forman, Fuller, Howard, LeFevre, Leonard et al., Lunsford and Ede, Reagan et al., Schleifer and Spigelman. There is much to be said for collaboration, the possibilities it augurs for creative-critical work, and for a more dialogic grasp of the public domain. For our part, and to be a bit self-conscious about it, we would like to think we're taking up this question of collaboration primarily by example (or perhaps, unwittingly, counterexample!). For us, collaboration suggests an actively activist dimension, but we pinpoint same less in product (again) than in collaborative process as such - and we lament the relative absence of collaborative learning processes in the vast majority of English studies classrooms (which is not to be taken as an argument against more solitary endeavors). As to the sorts of texts we might recommend for the classroom (and this despite our insistence to the effect that classroom text is not equivalent to pedagogy): for a recent collection of left-leaning pieces that should help to unsettle the inertia we've often experienced when initially confronting social issues in the soi-disant "non-content" composition classroom, see Griffith; we've also had much success with Bartholomae and Petrosky's tried-and-true Ways of Reading. And please - no scuttlebutt about our proselytizing (or advocating) to students in our (writing) classrooms. "Fair" and "objective" and "balanced" are only fair and objective and balanced given a level social playing field, which for our money doesn't exist on this planet, and never has. To author-ize ourselves just a tad: In our combined twenty-five years of teaching in varying capacities (adjunct, visiting, tenure-track) at, what?, fifteen different institutions (public and private, community colleges and universities, etc.) from the Hudson Valley to (North Dakota's) Red River Valley, from the prairies of the Midwest to the foothills of the Rockies, from the slopes of the Wasatch range to The City That Works, we've encountered, with relatively few exceptions, students who, thanks to their K-12 experiences (including home-schooling), are well-educated in more centrist-conservative social and economic agenda (and corresponding mythologies), yet who, despite initial resistance to leftist ideals (or if you prefer, mythologies), ultimately appreciate having the opportunity to confront these seemingly unorthodox and unconventional ideas about social justice, activism, etc. (which latter, we fear, are presently being colonized by administrative efforts to promote "service learning"). For our part, we are mindful, again, of our classroom authority - we strive to decenter ourselves as teachers, but we can never relinquish entirely our pedagogical status, and in fact we would never want to - hence we ask only that our students confront leftist agenda, otherwise we would be preaching. In fact we often use more conservative texts (e.g., Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory), side by side with more liberal tracts. Left of right, or right of left, the point in any case is not to indoctrinate, but to provoke. Should our students resist us - which they often do - our job becomes one of surfacing their resistance in productive ways. ^20. See Jameson's eminently useful formulation, ix. Much as the steam engine famously predates the science of thermodynamics, and the toaster predates sliced bread, we may expect theories of writing and learning to lag behind actual practice (but which practices?). Thermodynamics helped engineers devise more powerful and efficient engines; we hope to contribute to more humane and responsible teaching (and writing) practices. Indeed, though beyond the scope of this essay, a survey of US popular culture today suggests that the time is ripe for a wholesale rethinking and reworking of any number of antiquated postsecondary edifices (again). Moreover, newer (again) methods and motives will likely be greeted with initial resistance from students, many of whom, while believing themselves to be the "customers" or "clients" that P.R. branches of colleges and universities make them out to be, exhibit an understandable desire for a steady supply of sliced bread in an increasingly volatile economy. Yet these selfsame students are, in our experience, likewise collectively aware that change is in the offing - whether by administrative fiat or through the conscious efforts of an informed faculty (naturally, we prefer the latter scenario). ^21. Some composition researchers are now referring to "post-process" theory; see the collection edited by Kent (we might wish to consider this question of "post" more closely - but we'll leave it for some other time). For a compendium of essays that give some idea of the sweep of current composition theory, see Bloom et al. And for a thorough historical account of how computers gradually found their way into composition practice and theory, see Hawisher et al. Readers will be sure to note the irony implicit in the creative writing classroom's virtual abandonment of those conceptual and practical struggles (e.g., the vexed relation of composition to literature) that marked its curricular emergence as such (see Myers's account of late nineteenth-century English studies reform, 15-76); and it's worth noting, too, that this emergence as such coincides with the curricular inception of a distinctively "American literature," a literature that (among other things) could help mold a newly-minted immigrant population in the ideological image of the postbellum nation-state. That said: we would surely not wish to underestimate the difficulty of enacting our institutional agenda - but as a number of us have discovered, to attempt in our more individualized practices to open up creative writing to composition (and vice versa), composition to English lit (and vice versa), and English studies to the arts (and vice versa) brings with it the enormous pedagogical surplus of having made legible some rather creaky educational apparatus. Perhaps our riding roughshod over more precious, if professional, mythologies will not help us in our effort to forge disciplinary alliances - but we've been to one too many bad (really bad) poetry readings, and one too many bad (really bad) conference presentations, to desire anything less than serious reform of our public status as scholars, artists, and writers (Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice (SAWSJ) is a helpful development in this regard; see also Bourdieu "Scholarship" and Chomsky "Paths"). ^22. Process as procedure is another matter. See the procedure-driven writings collected in Osman et al. Discussing procedural methods in detail, and permitting writing classes to produce procedural work, is one of the best antidotes we've hit upon for upsetting the craft-voice cart. ^23. For the statisticians among you, a few numbers: comparing the years 1971 and 1993, the percentage of women who earned master's and doctorate degrees in "English language and literature/letters" increased even as the number of degrees conferred decreased. In 1993, 65.8% of the English master's degrees conferred went to women, along with 59% of the doctorates, the latter more than double the 1971 percentage - which is likely to place more women with PhDs on the job market, if not in tenure-track jobs (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1993, Table 303). In fact, from 1980 to 1997, the percentage of women with PhDs in English who held tenure-track jobs dropped from 41.6% to 32.8%, roughly paralleling the 48.4% to 37.7% drop for tenure-track men; however, men saw only a 2.5% increase in non-tenure-track jobs during this period, whereas women saw an increase of 8.4% in non-tenure-track employment (see McCaskill et al. 194, Figure 2). This suggests at the very least that the profession's ongoing percentage decline in tenure-track employment is serving to place a higher percentage of women than men in lower-ranking, non-tenured positions, despite purported institutional efforts to attain gender parity. Question: Given this more recent data, what might we conclude as to Myers's allegation that "[t]he emergence of practical criticism [i.e., creative writing as constructivism c. 1935] desexed literature by inverting the categories and values of the older literary and educational establishments" (140)? In Myers's relatively optimistic view of this "desex[ing]" process, the new emphasis on technique undermined the old "genteel male preserve" by promoting a knowledge available to each and all, encouraging both enrollment of women in creative writing programs as well as a number of books lauding the possibilities of creative expression for women (albeit while often endorsing feminine experiential stereotypes of domesticity and the like, and rejecting more "arty" writing). It's noteworthy in this regard (and we shall say this twice) that the "first creative master's thesis" to be accepted at Iowa was written by a woman - Mary Roberts's Paisley Shawl, submitted in 1931 (see Wilbers 57, n. 22). But to claim that books such as Adele Bildersee's Imaginative Writing (1927), which cited numerous contemporary women authors as models for student writers, "could not help but be feminist in implication" by "calling into question ... the traditional canon of male writers" (Myers 142) - and also by implication, that the "categories and values of the older... establishments" were "invert[ed]" by a "practical criticism" attentive to the newly canonical - well, given current professional realities alone, isn't this a bit of a stretch? No doubt, as Myers argues, the steady, school-sanctioned airing and debunking of creative writing - revealing literature neither as "holy mystery nor a body of historical data on which to conduct minute scholarly investigations" - was a factor in women both "giving and taking courses in writing and criticism" as early as the mid-thirties (145). Such is only half the tale, however, whose telling demands a more bracing account of feminism as such. ^24. An earlier draft of this essay (i.e., in paper) was first presented at the "Craft, Critique, Culture" conference held at the University of Iowa 29 September-1 October 2000. We are grateful to the conference organizers, David Banash and Anthony Enns, for providing us with a valuable forum for feedback and critique, and we thank Thomas Swiss for referring us during our panel exchange to Singerman's eminently useful study. We are grateful as well to Tenney Nathanson, whose invitation to present a second draft of this essay at the University of Arizona (23 February 2001) provided us with yet another valuable opportunity to test our ideas. Our friend and colleague Steve Tomasula's careful reading of this essay and corresponding notes also helped immensely in revising it for publication. We would like to thank graduate and undergraduate workshop participants at the University of Colorado at Boulder for their willingness to share their thoughts with us regarding many of the ideas discussed in this essay. Thanks in particular to Brian Kenney for alerting us to the Koerner article. And special thanks to Daniel Mahala and Jody Swilky, whose provocative conference paper ("Disrupting") sparked us to embark on this project. 25. (Yes, we have no bananas, we really are chewing the scenery, and we note that there is no note 25 in the body of our essay. We also note - for those reading this (someday?) in print - that there is but a paltry Works & Names Cited, which includes only those texts & names actually cited in the body of our essay (sans these notes); further, we note that - for those reading this online - there is an extensive, color-coded Citation Mill. Those reading this in print may access the Citation Mill at the electronic book review web site,
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