Should creative writing be taught?
Another great article from the June 8, 2009 New Yorker - Louis Menand reviews a book that charts the history of post-secondary creative writing programs in America after 1900. Iowa fans (my wife's alma mater) will be happy.
Here's my fav. passage:
John Gardner, another workshop legend and Iowa graduate, took a different view of the business. He believed in what he called a “fictional dream,” a vivid, continuous, and believable alternate reality. His book “The Art of Fiction,” published posthumously in 1983 (he died in a motorcycle accident in 1982), concludes with a list of writing exercises, such as:
2. Take a simple event: A man gets off a bus, trips, looks around in embarrassment, and sees a woman smiling. . . . Describe this event, using the same characters and elements of setting, in five completely different ways.
4b. Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder.
4c. Describe a landscape as seen by a bird. Do not mention the bird.
27. Using all you know, write a short story about an animal—for instance, a cow.
No doubt Gardner had success with this method of instruction, but the exercises have nothing to do with establishing an “intense acquaintance.” They are about acquiring a knack for adopting different styles and assuming different points of view. And for many writers writing is a job, or a way to escape from oneself. Those writers would not be happy in a Stegner workshop.
On the other hand, Gardner was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples. Stegner, on the other hand, hated informality and disruption. He quit Stanford after students in the nineteen-sixties insisted on lying on the floor, and he resented the fact that he was famous for having been the teacher of Ken Kesey. Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn’t matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.
Check it if you have some time....
Here's my fav. passage:
John Gardner, another workshop legend and Iowa graduate, took a different view of the business. He believed in what he called a “fictional dream,” a vivid, continuous, and believable alternate reality. His book “The Art of Fiction,” published posthumously in 1983 (he died in a motorcycle accident in 1982), concludes with a list of writing exercises, such as:
2. Take a simple event: A man gets off a bus, trips, looks around in embarrassment, and sees a woman smiling. . . . Describe this event, using the same characters and elements of setting, in five completely different ways.
4b. Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder.
4c. Describe a landscape as seen by a bird. Do not mention the bird.
27. Using all you know, write a short story about an animal—for instance, a cow.
No doubt Gardner had success with this method of instruction, but the exercises have nothing to do with establishing an “intense acquaintance.” They are about acquiring a knack for adopting different styles and assuming different points of view. And for many writers writing is a job, or a way to escape from oneself. Those writers would not be happy in a Stegner workshop.
On the other hand, Gardner was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples. Stegner, on the other hand, hated informality and disruption. He quit Stanford after students in the nineteen-sixties insisted on lying on the floor, and he resented the fact that he was famous for having been the teacher of Ken Kesey. Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn’t matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.
Check it if you have some time....
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Teasley on
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Ryan:
Thanks for bringing this article to the attention of the Ningers. I think many English teachers will enjoy it. I stopped reading it after a few pages--not because it wasn't good (it's quite provocative), but because I think he focuses on the wrong question. He seems to suggest the debate is "Can creative be taught--yes or no? If so, how?" Because some--but not all--admired authors have come out of "writing programs," an MFA certainly doesn't guarantee that the grad will produce great literature--or even mediocre-yet-published works.
What if the questions were: "Is writing a learned behavior? If so, can teachers help?" Of course we wouldn't spend five minutes debating this proposition, because the answer we English teachers would give is "Heck yeah!" So the next set of discussions would be about how we can best design class experiences and how we should act as the leaders of these classes.
My experiences as both a teacher and a writer (not of fiction or poetry, I hasten to add) suggest that to learn to write well, you need to do it regularly, present it to readers, and get feedback of some kind. Does it really have to be more complicated than that?
Alan -
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