Some frustrated soul on Facebook has started an “I Hate Reading” page. Even though–in keeping with the “I hate reading” theme–there’s nothing actually on the page, over 475,000 people “like” it. AbeBooks issued the following video, entitled “Long Live the Book,” in response:

Okay, so some people hate to read. Some people aren’t book people. But some writers apparently also hate to read. On the New Yorker’s Book Bench, Macy Halford writes:

[William Giraldi] teaches writing at Boston University, and has been amazed at how many of the kids possess a passionate urge to write without also possessing an urge to read. This strikes him as crazy. “There’s an analogy there that I haven’t been able to complete,” he said:

Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to ____ without wanting to ____.

He’d come up with a couple, unsatisfying answers, one involving race cars, one involving sex (he wouldn’t tell us what they were). But he threw it out to the audience to ponder, and now I’m throwing it out to you. What is wanting to write without wanting to read like? It’s imperative that we figure it out, because Giraldi’s right: it’s both crazy and prevalent among budding writers.

(Via.) Why would budding writers hate to read? Can you really write without reading? And for those of you who teach writing: if the answer is no, do you have trouble convincing your students that reading is useful?

The rise of digital culture in the past few years has thrown many of us writers into a tizzy too. Nicholas Carr told us, in The Shallows last year, that the medium through which we access information is far more influential in the long run than the content itself. The new medium—the Internet and electronic reading devices—is changing our brains, the way we think, and the ways we read and write. Carr warns that our new technological habits could “drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection.” If we become enamored with the frenziedness, the refined experience of a poem could go unperceived. The novel could disappear as we lose the ability to pay attention to a sequence of events over hundreds of pages.

So I began this summer with a simmering panic and a handful of pressing questions. What are the reasons we write and read literary works? Will these reasons remain compelling now that we have other, perhaps less demanding, means—television, video games, blogs—for experiencing language, metaphor, plot, and character? If literary reading declines, who will read the books I have yet to write?

I began my search for answers with Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature (Pantheon, 2011) because I had enjoyed and recommended her previous books Patronizing the Arts and Academic Instincts, two slim volumes that cast sunshine on worrisome issues. Garber’s latest book is not nearly as clearly organized, focused, or cheery as those earlier works. Reviewers at Slate and The New York Times have already pointed to flaws, namely that she sets up false or unstable binaries and is overly professorial. But she is tackling large questions, like “What is literature?” Often, the answers are alternately slippery and sticky.

Garber offers a useful account of the history of literary criticism and emphasizes that critical approaches shift. What we value about texts as readers, critics, and scholars changes over time. “The interpretation of literature is itself always in dialogue with its own past. The elements of philology, close reading, myth, allegory, image and symbol, history, biography, context, and reception (or, to employ another familiar formulation, emphasis upon the author, the text, or the reader) follow upon one another cyclically.” In other words, we don’t read the same way our mothers read. Garber also reacts against the recent rise of assessment practices in higher education, arguing that literary reading is distinct from interpretation in other fields. Literary readers don’t look at the world the same way social scientists do, and literary texts shouldn’t be reduced to sound bites.

Especially for academic insiders, there’s plenty to ponder in The Use and Abuse of Literature. I hadn’t thought about what the course titles “The Bible as Literature” or “Film and Literature” (as opposed to as literature) imply. Likewise, while I have thought a lot about close reading (Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer is a favorite of mine), I appreciate Garber’s attention to its history and uses in English studies. She covers a lot of interesting minutiae, and that adds up.

The oddest chapter is “Mixed Metaphors,” which attacks the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Garber notes shortcomings in their arguments about how we understand and articulate the world metaphorically. By the end, she admits that their work may be helpful in other fields, but “this kind of analysis is profoundly unuseful for the interpretation of literature.” I agree with Garber that Lakoff and Johnson may not provide a comprehensive theoretical apparatus for every field, but who does? And though Lakoff and Johnson may not provide literary critical approaches per se, it’s difficult to argue that human beings aren’t metaphorical thinkers or that literature doesn’t employ metaphor. Garber seems to throw a critical baby out with the metaphorical bathwater.

That said, The Use and Abuse of Literature began to answer my pressing questions about the future of literature. “Despite the gloomy prognosis,” Garber writes, “poems and poetry are alive and well today—in the classroom, the poetry magazine, the writing workshop, the lecture hall, the bookstore, on the Internet, and in the streets. The death of art is always being predicted somewhere, and is perhaps a necessary pronouncement to ensure the tangible edginess, the sense of delighted transgression, that comes with practicing a living and changing art or craft.” That’s what I wanted to hear: the death knell is really the alarm clock waking us up as scheduled. Garber’s meticulousness and wealth of examples give substance to her placation.

Next, I moved to Why Literature? (Continuum, 2011) by Cristina Vischer Bruns. (Cristy is my department colleague so, initially, I was hesitant to read her book, for fear I would disagree with her take on some fundamental issue.) As opposed to Garber’s authoritative manner, Why Literature? exhibits the careful tone of a first book and a methodical working-through of relatively narrowly defined questions and topics in an introduction and four chapters.

Yet this book makes surprisingly bold claims. Unlike many academics, who one-up each other at every public opportunity, Bruns talks about her (and many teachers’) failure to promote literary reading. As she revealed her frustration with early classes, I recalled the first time I taught Jane Eyre, a favorite novel of mine that flopped with almost all my students. They didn’t get caught up in the story and didn’t understand why I did. Bruns names what underpinned my frustration of a decade ago: “the lack of conception of literary value that hinders students’ opportunities to experience literary reading as worthwhile, but also the scholarly approaches taken toward texts in recent decades which constrain those encounters.” It’s refreshing to see a scholar assert that the way academic insiders treat a text doesn’t align with why readers really love literature.

According to Bruns, the future of literary reading depends on reclaiming its value. “Literary reading,” she writes, “is valuable for individuals and for society because it functions as an especially effective occasion for re-working our conceptions of ourselves and others.” Literature is formative. That’s what separates it from other kinds of texts or other fields of study. Bruns goes on to discuss how immersion (getting caught up) and reflection (critical reading) are learned processes that book lovers use to appreciate a poem or novel. But each process can undermine the other, especially in the classroom setting, where passing a test may be a more overt goal than enjoying the story. Only continued practice can make these processes interdependent and effortless.

Bruns’s evaluation of the MLA Approaches to Teaching series is another bold move. Admittedly, she used a small sample, but what she found amazed me. In Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, only six of twenty-five essays “suggest any kind of specific instructional practices—what teachers might have students do or might do with them in a class.” Bruns goes on to discuss how literary reading becomes endangered when a class is based entirely on lecture and when the students’ ability to immerse themselves in and reflect upon a text is assumed. Reading Bruns showed me why students can become comfortable reading SparkNotes instead of Jane Eyre.

The last chapter of Why Literature? offers practical applications for the classroom—or for anyone to develop reading skills and appreciation. It’s not comprehensive, of course, but specific examples Bruns draws from her own experiences as a reader and a teacher show how to talk about literary reading with students and friends. Nothing guarantees that every reader will have a formative experience with every book, but if literature is to flourish, we must create that possibility for readers and texts.

Poetry’s Afterlife (University of Michigan Press, 2010) by Kevin Stein, bolstered my new optimism about literature’s future. Like Bruns, Stein addresses some of the shortcomings of our educational practices when it comes to literary reading. In a chapter called “Why Kids Hate Poetry,” he openly admits, “Because we teach them to hate it.” Young children love poetry, but, according to Stein, high school makes them loathe it. Many high school teachers don’t bother with poetry at all, and others treat poems as “forms of penance and interrogation.” Moreover, he adds, “most teachers rely on someone else’s definition of the classics to entice students into appreciating poetry.” (Like SparkNotes, I wondered?) They also pick especially didactic poems to fit the test format.

Stein knows what he’s talking about because, as Illinois Poet Laureate, he has visited schools across the state. Despite his assertions about the proliferation of poetry-loathing, he offers positive examples and suggestions throughout the book and has implemented some of them in his role as the state’s poet. Audio and video foster literary reading. Often, hearing a poem read aloud by the author makes a person want to read the printed poem. Talking with the poet about the poem and the writing process deepens a reader’s engagement and appreciation. Poetry’s Afterlife suggests there are really important reasons to read poetry: “It’s something closer to solace and communion, joy and revelation, some sustaining reason to click off the TV.” Experience communion or joy a few times, and you will probably want more.

In some chapters, Stein examines why he likes certain poets and how his top-ten list has evolved, the role of revision, and the fate of paper(s) in the digital age. The chapters that focus on poetry outside the academy are an important contribution to the conversation about literature’s future. “A Digital Poetry Playlist” is very optimistic about that future, pointing out that video and new media poetries are reinvigorating literature. The creation and reception of a poem is changing, and that gives poets new visions. I thought of Kate Greenstreet’s The Last 4 Things, which comes with a DVD featuring two short films; the online journal Blackbird; and some of the digital humanities projects I’ve seen over the last year. Stein points out that a different kind and level of interactivity and also evolution of a given text is newly possible. We have only just begun to explore digital possibilities as writers (and by extension, as readers).

Stein reads in schools, prisons, nursing homes, and wherever else will have him—and it turns out people want him. Sure, getting one kid to appreciate poetry doesn’t change the world or ensure a prosperous future for literary reading. But as Poetry’s Afterlife concludes:

If we will listen, we will hear poetry’s surprise hidden track regale us in the manner of a compact disc we think is done but is not. We will hear poetry’s music alive after its ostensible ending, song layered with and after silence. Poetry is dead. Long live poetry. Thus, it is the obligation of the practicing poet, laureate or otherwise, to incite in others and to embody in oneself poetry’s afterlife.

Literature’s death knell is actually just an empty track. There’s more, if you just wait a few seconds—and if you tell somebody else it’s there.

David Orr, author of Beautiful and Pointless (HarperCollins, 2011), doesn’t actually care about the death knell. His book “will not focus on events that may or may not have occurred ninety years ago that may or may not have lost an audience that poetry may or may not have possessed; nor will it attempt to determine whether poetry is dead or alive, comatose or just feeling a little woozy. Poetry may be any or all of those things.” Orr’s tone indicates straight away that he’s not writing for academic insiders or poets themselves (though he is, because we read these books, and he knows it). He is concerned with “the relationship that exists—right now, not fifty years ago—between contemporary poetry and general readers, as well as the kind of experiences that such readers can expect from modern writing, if they’re given a chance to relate to what they’re looking at.” He wants literature to succeed in the future.

In a chapter about form, Orr gives a tongue-in-cheek summary of the history of American poetry over the last century (a summary that is even more entertaining when juxtaposed with Garber’s overview). He begins with the influence of traditional English forms; recaps modernism in a paragraph about poets sticking “random bits” of this, that, and the other thing into their poems; discusses the inexplicable rise of W. H. Auden and a reclamation of form; turns to the realization by poets that “they’d been caging the Inner Selves” and needed to be Beats or deep; describes the poetry of the 1980s (when I started taking it seriously) as neither here, nor there, and “the poetic equivalent to the Eagles”; summarizes in a paragraph the simultaneous emergence of New Formalists and Language Poets; and ends with today: “We have either a gorgeous mosaic or a big mess, depending upon whom you ask.” If you ask Kevin Stein (or me), it’s a gorgeous mosaic. Of course, for someone who isn’t a literary reader, it must look like a big mess (but is someone who doesn’t read much going to read this book?).

At times, Orr is incredibly funny, as when he helps his father, who has suffered a stroke, regain speech skills. Orr’s father struggled with pacing and emphasis, aspects of language poetry depends upon. Orr writes, “Here is something I learned very quickly: Do not attempt to get a stroke victim to read Hopkins.” If you’re a poetry lover, you’re chuckling aloud right now. And you can probably guess the poet to whose work Orr turned: “We did a little better with Robert Frost. Frost is one of my totem poets, not because he’s approachable, but because he is, as Louise Glück once put it, ‘demonically manipulative.’ No American poet has better understood the snares and sinkholes of our way of talking.”

For those of us in the academy, Orr touches some nerves, not just by asserting that Frost is really good at something, but because he discusses the kinship between poetry and the university in a chapter titled “The Fishbowl.” As he puts it, “The difficulty with treating poetry as if it were a subsidiary of the academy isn’t so much that doing so risks turning poets into English professors, but that doing so risks turning them into second-rate English professors.” Ouch, that’s me he’s worried is second rate. He goes on to recount scandals in poetry contests, sticky problems with blurbs, and insider gossip. He acknowledges that poets and editors are mostly good people, and why should we expect the poetry universe to be very different from the real world?

I appreciate a variety of poems and am glad other poets are doing things I’m not. Beautiful & Pointless appealed to me, on the whole, because it offered different reasons readers enjoy different poems. A Frost poem works for particular reasons and for particular readers. In his chapter “Ambition,” Orr discusses different ways we read different poets, including Jorie Graham, Geoffrey Hill, and Derek Walcott, whose work is described with words that conjure largesse, and Kay Ryan, whose style is quieter and deceptively small. (I agree with Katie Umans, in her review of Orr’s book, that Ryan is too easy an example and that a Poet Laureate can no longer be an iconoclast, but I like that Orr mentions poets whose books potential readers can find in the few physical bookstores that remain.) In the end, Orr notes, “There is no ‘true’ way to be ambitious, just as there’s no ‘proper’ way to write poetry; we exist in a flurry of possibilities that will bring to mind snowflakes or bullets, depending on your disposition.”

That variety both imperils and ensures the future of literary reading. There’s something for everyone, but a given reader isn’t going to like everything. Katie Umans’s review of Orr’s book is guided by the question of why she writes poetry, a good question that she finds Orr doesn’t answer. My question for Orr is about literary reading. Though I fear poetry gets packaged as one thing for readers beyond poets themselves, Orr answers that one of poetry’s strengths and appeals is its variety. When I saw Kevin Stein read several years ago, he noted that people who say they don’t like poetry feel comfortable dismissing the lot of it based on a few samples. Instead, he suggested that it’s like music; you may like jazz and not opera, and you may have a few favorite songs or groups.

Having read these four books, I’m beginning to think that the future of literature depends upon people like me, Christina Bruns, and Kevin Stein, who teach college students. There are plenty of avid readers who don’t get a college degree in literature or an MFA, but creative writing programs, which have proliferated over the last three decades, are filled with people predisposed to appreciate writing and reading. The various reports on the state of literary reading indicate the under-thirty crowd doesn’t read much, but those of us who teach have a potential future audience sitting before us.

Recently on Fiction Writers Review, Cathy Day, Stephanie Vanderslice, and I talked about our responsibility as teachers. As Cathy put it there, “Creative writing programs, in their current manifestation, are conceived of as laboratories in which writers are cultivated, but I like to think that we’re also cultivating future readers and teachers and editors and bloggers and book reviewers and book buyers—citizens in the vast literary culture.” Maybe my greatest success as a teacher is the student who mentioned that, to her family’s bemusement, she put poetry books on her holiday wish list.  You don’t need a degree to appreciate poems and stories, but my summer reading forced me to rethink my teaching goals. After all, if the English majors of this world don’t keep reading for a lifetime, who will?

My reading—The Use and Abuse of Literature, Why Literature?, Poetry’s Afterlife, and Beautiful & Pointless—helped me to better understand why I read and write and better articulate a variety of compelling reasons anyone should engage with literature. I’m not sure any one of these books accomplished that completely, but together their arguments carry weight. No one thinks a literary golden age is around the corner, and many point out there never was a literature bubble (and therefore no collapse). Literary reading will survive because (if) some of us enjoy it deeply. Maybe it’s possible for more of us to love literature if we take the ideas in these books to heart, talk about them with others, and put them into practice.

Further Links and Resources

• Here are the books discussed in this essay:
  –Garber, Marjorie. The Use and Abuse of Literature. New York: Pantheon, 2011.
  –Bruns, Cristina Vischer. Why Literature?: The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching. New York: Continuum, 2011.
  –Stein, Kevin. Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
  –Orr, David. Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
• Visit Anna Leahy’s website to learn more about her scholarship, or the blog she co-writes, Lofty Ambitions.
• Read Anna Leahy’s conversation with Stephanie Vanderslice and Cathy Day about creative writing pedagogy, here on Fiction Writers Review. This conversation appears in two parts: One / Two.
• Read Katie Umans’ essay “‘We have poets? Do they wear capes?’: A sort-of review of David Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless (and some meditations on poets and poetry)“—part of her column “Poetry for Prosers”—here on Fiction Writers Review.

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Editor’s Note: Part II of a conversation between creative writing teachers Cathy Day, Anna Leahy and Stephanie Vanderslice. Please click here to read Part I, including an introduction to the entire piece in which the writers lay out their questions about the methods, practice and changes emerging in the new creative writing classroom.

Conversation, continued

Stephanie Vanderslice: Rubric has become a distasteful word, hasn’t it? Rubrics might work in program assessment, but narrative response is much more effective for individual evaluation. We shouldn’t lean too much on rubrics in creative writing (music to many readers’ ears!), in part because they can be overly fault-finding, which doesn’t help writers at any level. The writers who are doing well don’t really find out why and even what they, individually, could be doing better, and the writers who are having problems don’t get those individual problems addressed.

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I’m becoming very interested in different types of response and how they help writers advance. This is especially important because I teach undergraduates for the most part right now, and response needs to be very formative at this stage. As opposed to summative response, which is the grade the student gets at the end of a unit or semester that gauges the student’s mastery of a skill or discipline, formative response is the actual feedback that helps the student to improve over time. In teaching creative writing, my thoughtful oral and written response to student work is much more important to their growth than the grade I record or the boxes I check on a rubric.

But I’m noticing anecdotal differences in how students receive the response styles of the different teachers in our creative writing program, and that’s really something worth investigating: how students receive response and whether and how they implement it to improve their work. The sooner students learn how to use feedback well, the better for their work and their development as writers.

Anna Leahy: I find it crucial to distinguish assessment, a term I use to refer to program appraisal, and evaluation, which describes grading student work. And formative response is yet another distinct activity. The British seem to use assessment to describe all of it, but we shouldn’t conflate a curricular program with individual student writing.

Bobby Knight, via Flickr

When we respond to student writing, we must strive to be neither a Bobby Knight (Mary Swander dismantles that approach in Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom¹⁵) nor a Pollyanna. Both extremes involve, to too great an extent or too directly, self-esteem. As I’ve written elsewhere, echoing John Gardner and Wallace Stegner, the self is always already part of the writing process, but can and, I think, should be mostly beside the point in workshop exchanges. That’s not easy, though.

Colleagues who’ve observed my classes have been surprised that students energetically discuss weaknesses. Narrative feedback—written or oral—can open conversation and potential. Because the real challenge in my courses is the revision I require, talking about weaknesses or obstacles becomes a mutual leg-up—motivation—students give each other to face that challenge. Students learn not to be afraid of making mistakes generally; they become more comfortable being shown shortcomings so they can work on them. Playing to our strengths isn’t bad, but cognitive scientists assert that we learn from mistakes even better. That’s a good habit of mind for students to carry beyond earning their degrees.

Cathy Day: We do need to consider what our students will do after graduation, and what experiences will help them succeed later. One area in which we might look to composition studies is digital media writing, but creative writing programs seem slower to do so than our colleagues down the hall teaching composition. Why is that? Over the last few years, my students’ work has become increasingly multimodal. They tell stories with pictures and graphic novel frames and drawings and links to YouTube videos. They tell audio stories and video stories that ask us to read in a different way.

Rather than prohibit this hybridity, I’ve challenged myself to catch up, to understand and utilize new modes of expression—in the classroom and in my own writing. Many schools offer composition courses in digital writing (narrative via blog, podcast, video, and website). I’ve been closely following what’s happening at Stanford’s undergraduate creative writing program, where creative writers Adam Johnson and Tom Kealey teach a new media writing course titled “Storytelling Through Any Means Necessary.” A considerable generational divide exists between those comfortable and conversant in old media vs. new media, and I’m interested in trying to bridge that gap somehow by creating a textbook (Burroway 2.0?) or a conference (Breadloaf 2.0?). Actually, this is a big reason why I accepted a new position at a school dedicated to emerging media initiatives.

Image Credit: Flickr

Anna Leahy: I’m dabbling in digital media when I can, but not yet confidant enough in my skills to bring it into the classroom much. At a basic level, while I use PowerPoint only occasionally, I’d like to see whether the nonlinear Prezi could be useful for mini-lectures, to generate discussion, or to allow students to document the writing process. Or now that I blog, I’m thinking about how a private class blog might work.

Recent discussions in popular venues and books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows¹⁶ make me leery of embracing digital projects part and parcel right now. Some initial studies in brain science indicate that digital modes may be at odds with some habits of mind—curiosity, concentration—I’m working to cultivate. It’s not that I’m against digital modes, but until I understand them better, I don’t want to inadvertently introduce contradictions into my pedagogy.

Stephanie Vanderslice: Digital media is something I’ve only begun to incorporate in my creative writing courses. I’m learning about it through my National Writing Project (NWP)¹⁷ work. The NWP has really embraced digital media and web 2.0 in teaching writing; in fact, they have a term for this aspect of their organization, “Digital Is”—as in, digital just is in the 21st century and we need to get used to it.

It was reading the book Teaching the New Writing¹⁸, co-published by Teacher’s College Press and the NWP, that I came to understand that it’s absolutely essential that we catch up and understand that multimodal composition needs to be incorporated into courses at every level—not only because students must know these skills in order to communicate in the 21st century, but because they are already using them outside the classroom. Since reading this groundbreaking book, I’ve made changes to all my courses to include some kind of digital component. For example, I have always required my introductory creative writing students to read a book on the writing life (from a list I provide) and present it to the class. Now, these presentations must be digital. In my creative writing pedagogy course, students must write a literacy autobiography; now I require that these be digital stories or digital literacy autobiographies. In moving toward this component, I have learned that there is actually an online archive of digital literacy autobiographies. Not surprisingly, most students are remarkably enthusiastic about these components and often have a greater facility with the technology than I do. I might give them suggestions, like Prezi, Glogster, or Microsoft’s Digital Storyteller, to get them started, but they usually find on their own the technology suited to the story they want to tell.

This issue seems to present itself urgently as the next frontier in creative writing pedagogy. How and why do we assign it? How do we assess it in terms of creative writing? A lot of programs are quite far along in this endeavor; in fact, Virginia Tech requires a digital story in a student’s exit portfolio. We need to start experimenting with the workshop model to accommodate digital modes and writing about it.

Anna Leahy: Based on my own experience and on anecdotes from librarians, students have a surface-level, casual understanding of the technology they use. That’s a reason to bring technology into the classroom: to help students think critically and creatively about technology they’re already using.

Image Credit: Flickr

Digital modes are not a replacement for what we’re already teaching, though. Instead, they offer new, additional — often nonlinear — ways to tell stories, use imagery, and think creatively. Chapman University’s digital humanities guru showed faculty some spectacular projects, including the journal Vectors¹⁹ — you have to see it to understand its scope. The potential is huge, but these projects raise concerns: Higher education struggles to embrace, support, and “count” collaborative work. We cling to traditional relationships between form and content, and haven’t learned how to read or value content in innovative forms without worrying that we’re merely being dazzled. We resist valuing archival work, even when a digital archive offers new ways to ask critical questions. Importantly, going digital requires time and money—that’s my biggest obstacle: time.

Stephanie Vanderslice: Time—time to learn technologies that are arriving at an exponential rate. This was probably the main factor in my reluctance to include much technology in my courses; I didn’t have the time to keep up with everything that was out there and that kept on coming. Teaching the New Writing convinced me that I didn’t have to learn a new technology in order to assess my students’ use of it and gave me some tools for assessing digital media in general.

Cathy Day: Lately, even putting digital modes aside, I’ve been going through a bit of a paradigm shift anyway and asking myself a lot of hard questions about teaching fiction and the efficacy of the workshop model for different traditional modes. Why do we call a class “Fiction Workshop,” if it’s really “Short Story Workshop”? Does the workshop model privilege the short story over the novel because it’s a more manageable form, akin to the paper? Can we tinker with the workshop model to accommodate “big things” as well as short stories?

Perhaps I’m asking these questions because I’ve just finished a five-year stint teaching in an MFA program. Most of my students arrived in my classes already craft proficient, ready to embark on larger projects. A thesis, a book, a big thing. The budding novelists told me they considered workshop courses a hindrance. They try to workshop novels-in-progress and submit early chapters, and then are required to revise and resubmit, which they do, over and over again, sometimes never moving forward. Others said they “go through the motions” by writing short stories about which they don’t particularly care, in order to fulfill their workshop requirement, while working privately on their novels, only sharing their real project with their thesis advisor and perhaps a few trusted readers. What is the point of pursuing creative writing instruction if that instruction gets in the way of writing the book you’ve always wanted to write?

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Anna Leahy: We must consider how labels and goals shape course structure, in-class activities, and students’ learning. Also, the semester timeframe and class meeting schedule are arbitrary constraints imposed upon us. It’s challenging to figure out how the workshop model can be adapted for different course topics and levels, as well as for these timeframe configurations. How, for instance, might a novel workshop function more like the writing group that many published novelists have? At least one of my fiction colleagues requires little, if any, revision; his course is about production.

Cathy Day: I’m trying some new methods in graduate and advanced undergraduate workshops, organizing them more like group independent studies. I ask my students to write up an independent study proposal and share it with the entire class on what I call a “process blog,” which they maintain throughout the semester. I’ve also stopped asking for stand-alone stories. Now, I ask for pages. When we ask for stories, not pages, our students respond as if they are writing a paper, trying to meet page requirements and page limits—swelling very small stories, shrinking very big stories—rather than working to find the right and appropriate form for the particular story they’re trying to tell. Sometimes, I’ll require a 50-page manuscript as the final project, which can be the beginning of a novel, a novella, a few connected stories, a few unconnected stories, fifty one-page stories, etc. They only have to workshop 20+ of those pages, but they must present it to us like a book manuscript: cover page with title and contact information, table of contents, epigraph, even maps and photographs, if they wish.

And this fall, I’m going to try something new: whole class participation in National Novel Writing Month²⁰. They’ll write 50,000 words during the month of November, but revise just 25 pages for their final grade. I guess you could say that my current pedagogical stance is about figuring out how to teach my students that writing isn’t just something they do for school, but is a way of life. For a long time, I just taught craft, which is what most of us do, I think. Now, I’m also interested in showing them how to create a literary life for themselves, if that’s what they want.

Stephanie Vanderslice: It’s wonderful that you’re doing that National Novel Month project. More and more programs seem to be getting involved in NaNoWriMo, and having participated in it myself and having seen even my undergraduate students getting involved on their own, I see the value of what NaNoWriMo communicates: getting pages drafted is an important part of the daily writing life. That project also communicates the value of process, of exploring and writing those pages, even though some of them might not ever see the light of day. But they’re all part of becoming the writer you want to be, rather than fussing over an individual story or poem to make it perfect. Both approaches are needed in the creative writing classroom, but we often don’t have enough of the former: the process, the messy part.

Cathy Day: Because process is hard to grade.

Anna Leahy: Poetry workshops are often structured as one-poem-at-a-time because a collection of disparate poems can get published. I’ve sensed a trend toward the cohesive collection, though, and I’m interested in sequences in my own writing. When I was an MFA student, Stanley Plumly launched a workshop with John Keats’s odes defined as a series. John Tribble, editor of Crab Orchard Review, hosted an AWP panel focusing on coherent collections. Beth Ann Fennelly has written about “the winnowing of wildness”—or lack of disparateness—in first books.

In this wake, I developed a graduate course with a chapbook as the final project. Ordering the Storm²¹ was a great resource; we also read several chapbooks. What students appreciated most—and which I expected them to appreciate least—was the requirement to submit a formal proposal. They could revise proposals, so no one was stuck with a project that changed as they drafted and revised. Students were motivated by having articulated a big thing up front. The course had a different kind of energy.

On the other hand, maybe such a course overemphasizes professionalization and the goal of publication, when I want students to take risks and attend to language and form in each poem.

Cathy Day: You’re absolutely right. My graduate students were extremely professionally motivated, and I’m sure I was responding somewhat to their anxieties—helping them get their books ready for agents and editors.

Stephanie Vanderslice: Programs like the one at UNC-Wilmington recognize that, for better or for worse, the market is heavily focused on longer works and thus several courses there help students to create longer pieces in innovative ways. In addition to several courses that address varying approaches to writing the novel, they also offer a course in documentary poetry that focuses on collections and a course focused on “award winning first collections,” which serves the additional purpose of helping students become aware of the first book awards out there. Finally, they have an introductory and advanced courses in book design that, while more focused on the publishing industry, give budding authors a sense of the process of book publishing. Curricula like these demonstrate there’s room in the curriculum for both kinds of courses, those that focus on longer works and those that focus on stories, essays, or poems, as well as those that focus on exploration and invention.

Anna Leahy: When we discuss these issues, we need to keep teasing out the differences between MFA and BFA or BA curricula. Because of the risk of professionalization or narrowing, I wouldn’t structure an undergraduate course around a chapbook project, though a series or sectioned poem might fit an advanced undergraduate course. We can’t accomplish everything in every workshop, and I want my undergraduates to experiment and try things just to see what happens, not merely find a single voice or style that works.

Image Credit: Flickr

I wonder whether the mistaken (or outdated) concept of a monolithic workshop and, as Donald Hall called it, McPoem, exist because we haven’t articulated enough of what we actually do in different courses. In May, Inside Higher Ed ran a piece about an innovative approach to teaching by a Duke University English professor that “attracted attention nationwide.”²² The course was structured around contracts, standards, peer response, and revision—all pedagogical elements long used in creative writing. Cathy Davidson said that the experience exceeded her expectations and that “students took more risks,”²³ participated, and pushed each other to improve. She admits that she “worked like a dog,”²⁴ commenting right along with her students on every blog post that was a short essay on the week’s topic. Good for her, but I’m flummoxed as to why creative writing teachers aren’t lauded daily, since this stuff is old hat to us.

Oddly, one measure of the approach’s success was that Davidson expected every student to earn an A (15 of 16 already had when the article was posted), because students revised work that didn’t meet the standards. In some ways, I’d dealt with the so-called easy A in Can It Really Be Taught²⁵? For Davidson, there were no cries of grade inflation, but rather an acceptance that students rose to the course’s rigorous challenges.

Stephanie Vanderslice: That story does sound familiar. An overwhelming theme of Does the Writing Workshop Work? is that undergraduate workshops really benefit from a combined approach that introduces students to peer review but also introduces them to the various forms of invention. My students and I do a significant amount of in-class writing, especially exercises around a concept I’m trying to teach, like rhythm or structure. For example, we might work individually on pieces (and they can be in any genre) that must all incorporate the same line a certain number of times. It’s worth remembering, too, that, as they come to us with different backgrounds in writing, sometimes even advanced students could do with a little instruction in invention and recursive revision before they develop the assumptions that lead to writers block—i.e. good writers don’t need self-assignments, their work is always the result of divine inspiration or the dictation of the muses.

Anna Leahy: More than a little instruction, I’d say. Larissa Szporluk and I have a conversation essay in the recent Mid-American Review about imitation, invention, and deep imagination.²⁶ Revision is an important aspect of my approach as a teacher, which scares students at first, but almost always ends up making them proud of their work—and interested in others’.

Stephanie Vanderslice: Actually, that essay is a great example for new writers of the all the ways in which a piece of work is born, via a combination of practices and habits of mind. Most illuminating for students are the many ways in which juxtaposition—of inspiration, forms, ideas, subjects and on and on—almost always leads to interesting new work.

Image Credit: Flickr

Cathy Day: Something else I’d love to see grow or be added to our curriculum and/or co-curriculum is an emphasis on what Dinty W. Moore calls literary citizenship²⁷. Many programs require creative writing majors to take a course that’s akin to service learning: tutoring young writers, administering a visiting writers’ series, partnering with community organizations, etc. According to AWP, there are more than 800 degree-granting creative writing programs in this country—an amazing number!—so it’s important to think about how we, as writers and teachers of creative writing in those hundreds of programs, can channel all that interest constructively. Creative writing programs, in their current manifestation, are conceived of as laboratories in which writers are cultivated, but I like to think that we’re also cultivating future readers and teachers and editors and bloggers and book reviewers and book buyers—citizens in the vast literary culture. I’ve been trying to be more conscious of this role we have as creative writing teachers, but I’m sort of making it up as I go along.

Anna Leahy: I’ve been using the term nerd to refer to the habits of mind that I want to cultivate in my students, because I want them to be curious, to think divergently, and to try new things. I want them to be creative thinkers generally.

Literary citizen may be a more discipline-specific term, but broader, too, in the sense of connecting with the larger community and culture. Isolation, because it’s required to do the writing itself, can all too easily be viewed as the most important part of the endeavor. With tens of thousands of students, creative writing programs can nourish a culture that appreciates the arts and humanities as human endeavors.

Stephanie Vanderslice: Literary Citizenship! What a great term.

I could have used it as I was finishing my current book, Rethinking Creative Writing in Higher Education. The whole last chapter is about that issue, about how creative writing programs need to connect with the community and form a sense of civic responsibility among the next generation of writers. A brilliant example of this, which exists completely independent of creative writing programs, is Dave Egger’s brainchild 826 Valencia, now 826 National²⁸. This project oversees the community writing centers run by writers in cities all over the United States. These kinds of connections are mutually beneficial, for the community and for the writer. And, they help to create the next generation of readers!

Literary Citizenship: this term must become part of the creative writing lexicon. I’m going to start using it right away. The next generation of writers and pedagogy scholars can take this up and see where it leads us.

Anna Leahy: We’ve proposed several areas for future investigation: the real position of pedagogy in the profession, the rise of assessment, what’s really going on in our programs and classrooms, ways to respond to student writing, incorporating digital media, adapting workshop structures to fit different goals and constraints. Literary citizenship, though, may be the most pressing issue of all. That’s likely what will determine the future of writers and creative writing teachers for generations to come.

Further Links and Resources

Image Credit: Flickr

Image Credit: Flickr

In the conversation …

Cathy Day is a writer and Assistant Professor at Ball State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate creative writing courses.

Anna Leahy is a poet and Associate Professor at Chapman University, where she teaches in the MFA and BFA programs and directs Tabula Poetica.

Stephanie Vanderslice is a writer and Associate Professor at the University of Central Arkansas and directs the Great Bear Writing Project of Central Arkansas.

[Click Here for full bios of each on the Contributor page]
The three authors in this conversation essay contributed to Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom (edited by Anna Leahy), which launched the New Writing Viewpoints series in 2005.

It’s time to get on with creative writing pedagogy. Can creative writing be taught? Yes, we’re not charlatans, though teaching looks different here than in other disciplines. Should college-level teachers of creative writing be practicing writers? Yes. Though being a great writer doesn’t make you a great teacher, creative writing teachers are strengthened by engaging in the practice themselves. What’s the relationship between creative writing and composition studies? While creative writing is not in opposition to composition studies, neither is it a variation of or sub-discipline within composition studies. Should we grade creative writing? If we are working in institutions that require grading, of course. There exist ways to approach the evaluation of students’ skills and written work that can be minimally intrusive on the writing process and even useful. Is the workshop monolithic? No, the workshop is an adaptable model.

Why do thousands of creative writing instructors who teach courses professionally — who speak and write about teaching creative writing — proceed as if this growing body of pedagogy doesn’t exist? We need this conversation — we need it now — to examine the current state of creative writing pedagogy and propose several areas for further investigation. Let’s get started.

Conversation

Anna Leahy: Some of the body of knowledge in creative writing as a field is pedagogical, some verges on “how to,” and some is akin to literary scholarship. Our body of knowledge is the equivalent of what other fields call theory. It’s tricky to call it theory, though, because we are a practice discipline.

I recently read James Wood’s How Fiction Works¹ and Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir.² Wood analyzes third-person close point of view, for example, as “free indirect style,” grasping that author and narrator share certain sentences. He’s not just offering a tried-and-true textbook definition, but adding to the understanding of this element of fiction. Birkerts discusses, among other things, the difference between autobiography—a kind of historical writing—and memoir as creative nonfiction. These examples are theoretical and similar to literary scholarship. It’s not the New Critical close reading; it’s reading closely from the writer’s perspective.

Cathy Day: This kind of “writing about writing” is what Tim Mayers called “craft criticism” in his book (Re)Writing Craft. He defines this body of work as “critical prose written by self- or institutionally identified ‘creative writers” in which “a concern with textual production takes precedence over any concern with textual interpretation.”³ He includes pedagogy and how-to in this category.

Stephanie Vanderslice: Susan Bell also uses this approach in The Artful Edit,⁴ which discusses the editing of great literary works in terms of what writers can learn about craft. For example, she introduces the concepts of micro-editing and macro-editing via a close examination of the actual editing of The Great Gatsby. Interspersed between The Artful Edit’s chapters, moreover, are testimonials from various writers on the ways in which the editing process works for them. Reading this book, I saw great possibilities for structuring a whole course around it and books like it that help student writers develop an editorial consciousness beyond the nuts and bolts. Certainly, I wish I could have had that kind of course in my creative writing education. This growing body of knowledge can shape the future of our academic field.

Anna Leahy: We agree that this body of knowledge is growing, but we also agree that there remains resistance to pedagogy in our publications and professional venues.

Cathy Day: Honestly, I think one reason why more creative writers aren’t engaging in this pedagogy conversation is because of that word: theory. These days, there’s a distinct polarization between the critical and the creative, and this discipline—creative writing pedagogy—sits on that divide. One side thinks we aren’t theoretical enough, and the other side thinks we’re too theoretical. We need to bring more writers from both sides into this space.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to hear James Kincaid speak about this subject. He’s the Aerol Arnold Chair in English and Professor of English at USC, a serious literary scholar who also writes and publishes fiction. He said that bridging the critical/creative divide doesn’t necessarily mean that writers in academia must learn to “talk theory,” but rather (or also) that English departments should incorporate creative writing into the foundational experience of English studies.

Stephanie Vanderslice: When thinking about the place of creative writing in English studies, it’s important to remember that the role of creative writing varies from institution to institution, from a general education requirement at some schools that encompasses thousands of students, to a small, single course requiring instructor permission to enroll. This same variability is present in the range of courses available; smaller departments may have one multi-genre creative writing course, perhaps one in fiction and poetry, larger departments with a creative writing major may have a large number, including genre-specific workshops, forms courses, new media courses, and so forth. We shouldn’t talk of the field as if it’s uniform throughout.

Whether creative writing should be foundational in English studies deserves further examination. It would be worth looking at the benefits of this approach through the perspective of the professors who teach such foundational courses and the students who take them. In the UK, creative writing is definitely considered one of many lenses through which English majors study literature, but I’m not sure they’ve written about this practice much; the benefits seem to be rather assumed there.

As a member of a writing department that is, in my university, separate from the English department, I would advocate for a creative writing course in the general education curriculum. Books like Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind⁵ convince me that in the post-information age, the ability to convey information via a compelling sense of narrative and story will be a critical skill for all college students. Examples of this phenomenon are everywhere; from digital storytelling to blogging, narrative is at the core of information in the 21st century.

Anna Leahy: The rich variety across institutions and the continuing growth of programs extend what has already been deemed a boom time for creative writing. Mark McGurl’s recent book The Program Era opens with the assertion “that the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history.”⁶ Some see the ubiquitous creative writing course as the downfall of literature. But Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class,⁷ though it isn’t about creative writing per se, argues that creative thinking is crucial for our future world.

Cathy Day: While some see the exponential growth of creative writing programs and online writing communities as a harbinger of doom, I think it’s a cause for celebration that so many people feel authorized to write and are interested in learning to do so. As Richard Hugo wrote in The Triggering Town, “A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.”⁸

Anna Leahy: That idea of mattering reminds me of an article in The Writer’s Chronicle, in which Steve Healey scrutinizes the position of creative writing in the academy. He ignores much of existing pedagogy work: “the field has tended to avoid thinking about how it teaches.”⁹ But I’m glad he asks us to think about dreaded capitalism, whether our teaching goals match students’ life goals, and how other fields can benefit from our practices. We still need more documentation of what’s really happening in our programs and classrooms. We matter, but how exactly?

Image Credit: Flickr

Cathy Day: One thing I enjoy about being on Facebook and being “friends” with lots of other creative writing teachers is sharing information about what we do in the classroom, but occasionally swapping syllabi or lesson plans isn’t enough. A few months ago I wrote a 5,000-word essay about moving from writing stories to writing books. It was part craft, part form/genre theory, part pedagogy. I faced two problems. One, there was no clear body of knowledge within which to frame my discussion, and two, I had little idea where to send this essay. We need more journals, more opportunities to talk to each other professionally about teaching.

Stephanie Vanderslice: Two venues for this sort of work are New Writing published out of the UK, and the Australian online journal Text. There are some great conversations happening about creative writing in these journals, as well as in an online journal about teaching creative writing in the UK called cwteaching.com.¹⁰ Some up-and-coming American writers have had essays published there, including Kate Kostelnik; they are an incredible resource and they’re readily available online. The articles in them are just what we’re talking about: not just about craft, but about teaching craft. We need to develop an awareness of those venues here in the United States.

Anna Leahy: I’m glad we’re talking across oceans. But because the British and Australian educational systems are different from ours, it’s also important to develop visible venues here too. Pedagogy is a journal about English studies generally that is open to pieces about creative writing. AWP launched a spot for some of this work a few years ago; it’s a small batch of essays in the members’ e-link section of the website.

Stephanie Vanderslice: In the absence of our own national journal devoted to creative writing pedagogy, College English and College Composition and Communication have also provided some space for these discussions. But creative writers shouldn’t have to rely on those venues exclusively.

Cathy Day: This issue isn’t solely related to the lack of journals out there, of course. There exists another reason why writers who teach creative writing are not more fully engaged in these issues: they can’t afford to be, because at some institutions, working in this area doesn’t “count” towards tenure and promotion in the same way as publishing creative work.

Image Credit: Flickr

Stephanie Vanderslice: Joseph Moxley has a wonderful essay in Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?,¹¹ in which he talks about why he hasn’t engaged much in creative writing pedagogy since he published Creative Writing in America¹² more than twenty years ago. Apparently, his institution told him he would get zero credit for editing that important book and that he should spend his time on more established critical disciplines for promotion and tenure.

I am fortunate to be at an institution where I am encouraged to do both creative and critical work. We need to remember, as we discuss professional and pedagogical issues, that different institutions have different missions and environments. We need to continue to legitimize the field of creative writing pedagogy. It shouldn’t be in competition with the rest of our pursuits as writers.

Even so, teacher-writers are still responsible for knowing what’s going on. At my institution, for example, the teaching narratives in our promotion and tenure packages must be grounded in the pedagogy of the field. Many institutions require these sorts of teaching descriptions from individuals. These kinds of documents, then, could also demonstrate a teacher-writer’s engagement with his or her teaching discipline.

Anna Leahy: I wouldn’t encourage any creative writing teacher to devote all her professional development time to pedagogy scholarship, at the complete expense of, say, poems or a novel. But even in institutions that value publication over teaching, most of us are teaching regularly. As long as we’re teaching, we remain responsible for articulating not just what we do, but also how and why we teach the way we do.

Stephanie Vanderslice: In articulating what we do and how we do it, one of the most interesting and, perhaps, important issues to discuss as we go forward are the ways in which we respond to students’ creative writing. There exists much more to examine about how we respond—in writing and orally—and especially why. What leads to the most improvement? This issue is an old staple, in some ways, but it is newly complicated by the rise of program assessment as part of institutional accreditation over the last decade or two.

Image Credit: Flickr

As a faculty member in an independent writing program, I have been occupied with assessment from the beginning. Our program was founded in 1996 under some controversy, so the issue of whether we were producing “results” was a factor early on. We’ve looked at the issue in a number of different ways and have finally settled on an exit portfolio system from our general education writing courses, our writing major, and now our creative writing major. I give our Assessment Committee significant credit; this is not an easy issue to grapple with, and many faculty can be very suspicious of the A-word. While we’ve finally come up with assessment plans, they are constantly evolving as we continually ask ourselves what we are actually assessing and what we want to see in our students’ work. That’s the key to assessment, I think. Once formed, the models require ongoing reflection and fine-tuning.

Cathy Day: I hope we aren’t losing readers at this point, just because we mentioned assessment. Stick with us, reader, because we’re covering a lot of ground.

Assessment has been good for creative writing programs, because it’s forced what I’ll call first-generation writers in academia to talk openly about what they’re doing in the classroom and why. The three of us represent that second generation, whose journey into academic teaching was informed by our shared experience teaching composition as TAs. And it’s fallen on our generation to handle the assessment tasks.

I’ve observed this process at two different schools, and both times, the experience was ultimately enriching. Once you get past the jargon—learning goals, outcomes, rubrics, and matrices—you discover commonalities among colleagues and develop a shared sense of purpose. About ten years ago, I was teaching at a college that ramped up its assessment at the same time that I was developing a creative writing minor. I had to articulate a rationale for course levels, and that document, created out of bureaucratic necessity, became a list of craft proficiencies—basic, intermediate, and advanced—that I’ve used every semester since then to explain my expectations and grading policies. My students appreciate this transparency, and it’s allowed for a better learning environment in which they can thrive. At both schools, we ended up—after some fussing and resistance—with a far more cogent curriculum than the one with which we started.

Anna Leahy: The catalog and syllabus are legally binding documents, so, even just in practical terms, it’s a good idea for us to back them up with what happens in our courses. When creative writing programs were being formed a couple of decades ago, conversations about how it all adds up must have occurred, but discussion fell off, or wasn’t carried on across institutions, and a great deal became taken for granted. Assessment reinvigorates that conversation about pedagogy and the profession.

Image Credit: Flickr

That said, I have grave concerns about how assessment is practiced, namely that current practices encourage us to loosely apply social science methodology to the arts and humanities. I hesitate to turn to composition studies for guidance because that field is heavily influenced by social science methodology (and also because there’s a practical risk in aligning with a so-called service discipline, or one often without a major). We shouldn’t start with the tools of another trade. Instead, we should begin with issues in our body of knowledge, then develop methods and tools to answer our field’s questions.

Cathy Day: My general impression is that the best way to get so-called cred in academia — and now that, in part, means assessment — is to model ourselves after composition studies, but by doing so, we lose touch with our identity as working artists.

I think we should look outside the English Department and turn to studio art departments for further guidance. As Madison Smartt Bell says in the introduction to his textbook Narrative Design, “The teaching of music and visual art as crafts in some systematic fashion is centuries old; it goes back as far as Renaissance ateliers, even to the medieval guilds. There is no long-standing tradition of guilds or ateliers for fiction writers.”¹³

Stephanie Vanderslice: As Wendy Bishop would have said, “There’s an essay in that.” We’ve been referencing other arts for years. It’s time for someone to really take a look at how other arts, like music and the visual arts, are taught and how some of these methods might be applied to creative writing. I’ve considered doing it, but I’d love to see a new scholar-writer take it on.

Anna Leahy: Every discipline has its own priorities, and ours tend to be habits of mind. That’s a good reason to talk across the creative arts (or even medicine is a practice discipline, in which advanced students learn by doing). It’s easier to measure, say, acquisition of terminology in biology than to measure thinking for oneself, which Classroom Assessment Techniques¹⁴ lists as one of the three top teaching goals English faculty report having. Faculty lead busy lives, so it’s tempting to assess what’s easiest to measure instead of what’s most important. Narrative assessment must be taken seriously.

AWP has begun to tackle assessment, with some conference panels. Such an organization could provide us with guidance that can be adapted across institutions. I fear we’ll each cobble together something do-able that satisfies given administrators, without taking advantage of doing something really useful for the discipline as a whole.

Image Credit: Flickr

Cathy Day: Let me step away for a moment to approach the fourth wall—to step outside our conversation with each other. You — YOU, reader of this dialogue — I fear that right about here in this pretty important conversation we’re having about what we do — about what you do for a living — your eyes are glazing over as you encounter words like assessment and rubric. Am I right? Well, how would you feel if your physician skipped the boring stuff at her professional medical conference? How would you feel if the Journal of the American Medical Association stopped publishing because the jargon got too dry to keep doctors’ interest and because they figured each doctor could figure it out on his own?

That’s the sort of thing we’re talking about here. We’re talking about issues that matter. We’re talking about our professional obligations. In common parlance, don’t be part of the problem. Be part of the solution. Okay, let me slip back into the conversation.

Editor’s Note: Slip back into the conversation tomorrow on FWR for the second half of this discussion, including:

How do different kinds of feedback allow a student to progress in their own goals?

How can the classroom experience better prepare the writer for the realities of life beyond academia?

What role should new digital media – video, illustration, sound – play in creative writing programs?

All that and more on Friday.

Further Links and Resources

Citations

James Wood, How Fiction Works, New York: Picador, 2009.

Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir, Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2007.

Tim Mayers, (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 33.

Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2007.

Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, New York, NY: Riverhead, 2006.

Mark McGurl, The Program Era, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

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Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York, NY: Basic Books, 2003.

Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Steve Healey, “The Rise of Creative Writing & The New Value of Creativity,” The Writer’s Chronicle. 41.4.

Creative Writing: Teaching Theory & Practice in cwteaching.com.

Joseph Moxley, Afterword: Disciplinarity and the Future of Creative Writing Studies, Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?, Ed. Dianne Donnelly, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2010. 230-238.

Joseph Moxley, Creative Writing in America, Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1989.

Bell, Madison Smartt, Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 3.

Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques, Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 1993.

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Author Elizabeth Benedict, editor of the recent anthology Mentors, Muses, & Monsters, discusses her experience being forced to unplug:

Finding this blank book already so full of hope and history — from Hemingway’s to my beloved sister-in-law’s — was a bit like encountering a bear in the woods: it was just the two of us, and it was up to me to save my skin. I couldn’t hide, couldn’t escape to the computer or connect anywhere but in its cream-colored pages. I began by rereading the manuscript pages from the novel — and I winced two dozen times. It was all too complicated, and there was no through line. There were voices but no story — or too many stories, and I only needed one — one with enough power to drive a novel. [...]

I wrote three pages. By hand. With a pen. Later that day, I wrote two more. I woke up early every day for two weeks and wrote this way. It was primitive and thrilling, like cooking over a campfire, like celestial navigation. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I was on a journey, and it felt natural, instead of cramped, for the first time in years.

In my own experience, I find it harder to write by hand than to type; because writing longhand is much slower than typing, I can’t get the words on paper fast enough and end up losing my train of thought. But Benedict’s essay may encourage me to try again sometime.

What about you? Do you ever feel the need to disconnect—from the Internet, from cell phones, from your computer itself? If faced with nothing but a blank Moleskine and a pen, do you think your writing would benefit?

Ad Reinhart / photo by Robert Lax

“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

– a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

About twenty years ago an artist friend mentioned this quote to me in a moment of liberation. He’d been doing a lot of reviewing of art shows, getting his name out in the Colorado art community, writing a column (not unlike Quotes and Notes) for a local paper, etc. But he got tired of writing about other people’s work and having to evaluate their shows because it stole attention from his own work. He quoted Ad Reinhardt’s simple, one-line journal entry as he announced a personal moratorium on reviews, interviews, community-building efforts, and other such activities.

It was a declaration of independence, a separation of the self from the art-world machinery, and it struck me because I wanted to do the same thing. At the time I ran an art-house film series and was constantly “hanging other people’s work,” mostly by trying to get media attention for their movies. I longed for a life in the arts that didn’t require so much administration, that showcased my work instead of other people’s. After his announcement my friend had a terrifically fertile period in which he produced a lot of new work, but then he got lonely and a little bored and reached out to the community again—doing reviews, building communities, etc. When he did that, it seemed perfectly natural—a development rather than an about-face. It made me wonder if Ad Reinhardt ever went back to hanging other people’s art, and if so, how many times he reversed poles over the course of his career.

It also makes me wonder if Reinhardt would (or could) declare a permanent moratorium on “hanging other people’s art” in today’s world, facing a vastly different socio/creative landscape. New York in the mid-20th century bustled for artists like few places in history, but it seems quaint and provincial compared to the Internet-fueled, endlessly interwoven creative world of today. When Ad Reinhardt was an up-and-coming artist in the 1930s, he had a different game to play because his scene was predominantly local (though with global ramifications). Now we have global scenes, with people who’ve never met interacting across continents, and this has changed the nature of creative life and careers entirely.

So when I think about Reinhardt’s decision to stop hanging other people’s art, I simply can’t put it in today’s context. Can an artist of any stripe realistically build a career now without, in some way, doing a bit of that hanging? This question is especially apropos for writers, since the medium through which we increasingly publish (the Internet) is also the medium through which we build our communities. The landscape of our endeavors is, in this way at least, narrowing. The writer’s job description is fundamentally changing so that fewer and fewer of us will have the option Reinhardt described. We are no longer merely in the business of creating content, but in the business of sharing content (a.k.a. “hanging other people’s work”) as well, whether the “hanging” we do takes the form of doing reviews, writing blurbs, or simply flagging a friend’s book as TO BE READ on Goodreads. The idea that one can cocoon in the isolated creative life and then surface into the public one at will has largely been destroyed by the very same online communities that we build—including, for instance, the online community you belong to as you read this column in Fiction Writers Review.

I would love to say that I’ve found a balance between creating and hanging, but I haven’t and I don’t know if I ever will. Almost everyone I know who lives a literary life spends a fair amount of time bouncing between those two poles, usually focusing on one and doing the other in crammed, spare time. One month there isn’t enough time to work on the novel because of the reviews we’ve promised, the teaching we do, etc; the next month, there isn’t enough time to generate even a paragraph-long blog posting about a mentor’s latest book. When I think about my ideal job description as a writer, I picture a perfect, continuous balance between those poles. This balanced me will set aside enough time to delve into my characters without worrying about what time it is, and after he’s satisfied with that he’ll write a column like this one, do one of the reviews he’s promised, or write some queries about an editorial project. He’ll figure out the formula someday, find the perfect balance that will allow him to be productive in his writing room and still participate meaningfully in the literary community.

But this best-of-both-worlds scenario is almost guaranteed not to happen. Instead I’ll spend most of my writerly life feeling out of balance, like I’m leaning too far in one direction or another. I’ll cocoon until the pile of community-building work gets too big for me to ignore, then plunge into it so fully that I’ll forget where I was in whatever creative project I’d been pouring my energy into. Sometimes I kick myself for trying to find a balance at all, instead of finding some solace in the rhythm of these alternating currents in my life. Ultimately it may not be a balance that’s meant to be struck at all—not an ideal equilibrium point that one achieves and maintains, but a series of push-pulls, of sometimes jerky adjustments to one’s creative mojo. Maybe we’re not meant to be comfortable with this dual life at all, but meant to struggle with it and continuously find an always-new path through the two poles.

Or maybe it’s just me, being a stick in the mud about the Internet and pining—self-sabatogingly—for some imaginary “good old days” when I could do what Ad Reinhardt did and declare myself done with hanging other people’s work entirely. But nobody can get away with that anymore; it smacks of arrogance and selfishness, of a star system that places some artists above the fray and others directly in it (with the ones “stuck” in the fray struggling to prove themselves worthy of rising above it). I don’t think the writing community works that way anymore, if it ever did. As the Internet “flattens” the landscape, converging the ways we publish our work and the ways we hang other people’s, readers are going to assess us based on how we participate in the community. So are publishers and publicists, who seem hell-bent on quantifying our potential markets based on the size and demographic nature our platforms, as well as the number of “clicks” we can generate.

But more importantly, our fellow writers will assess us based on our level of participation and on whether we place ourselves above the fray or within it. Can anyone really afford to act above the fray anymore, save the most established writers out there? Yet as I say this, I have to face my own failings in this regard. I haven’t logged on to Goodreads in over a year, though I’ve read plenty of books in that time. (Having to assign “stars” to everything doesn’t help.) I haven’t taken the time to navigate Fictionaut, a dynamic online fiction community, and I haven’t become an online reviewer on Amazon. I fail to leave comments on almost all the literary blogs I read, fail to respond to (and sometimes even fail to notice) what people say about the things I’ve written.

What’s stopping me from doing all these things? I look around at writers who do a lot of “service work” by staying involved in online communities, and sometimes that work seems more like politicking—building up “clicks”—than community building.

Then a moment later it looks selfless, participatory, and part of the new model of the writer’s job description that we need to accept and embrace. It looks like people engaging in the kind of aesthetic discussions that Ad Reinhardt might have come to blows over during his heyday, and I feel like I’m missing out. I find myself envying people who to the community thing naturally and effortlessly, and I wonder how they have the time and energy to do it and still be creative.

So I ask you, readers of Fiction Writers Review. How do you strike your own balance between cocooning and surfacing, between creating work on your own and hanging the work of others? Tell me your secrets. I’ll read the blog posts. Teach me.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. In 2010-11 he will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

1. You need a plot. You really, really do. A Good Idea (”What if it’s the future! And robots are the boss of everything and this hot non-emotive dude has to find this kid who is actually his dad and send him back in time before the robots kill everyone!”) is an excellent start, but a Good Idea is NOT sufficient to carry the entire vehicle of your novel. We don’t care how highfalutin’ your concept or your prose is; you leave out the plot and you are going to bore us out of our skull, and not because we are too stupid to comprehend the brilliance of your talent. You REALLY EXTRA-ESPECIALLY need a plot if you are working in genre fiction. Bonus points if your plot MAKES SENSE (see No. 2).

Can anyone think of a kinder way to phrase Dickens’ letter, which justifies breaking a social engagement in order to write? I’ve often longed to say something like this; hell, maybe the key to prolificacy is not worrying about the “kinder” bit.

Teachout’s response:

I like to think that after firing this off, Dickens burst into tears, then got on the computer and played Web Sudoku for an hour.

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences. [...] The idea is to instill in the would-be writer a fear of not writing.

Depending on the mode you choose, consequences are:

* Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.
* Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.
* Kamikaze Mode: Keep writing or your work will unwrite itself.

Apparently one of the “unpleasant sounds” in Normal Mode is…Hanson.

Take a lot of Xanax in the morning to really calm the hell down. Try to wake up no later than 11. Work from 11:30 to 4:30, then go see the shrink, then meet some friends for drinks. Find a good bar where everyone knows your name and you can get a nice buyback. Try to relax. This is the major problem. Writing is both boring and stressful, it’s the worst combination. Sometimes I go to the gym, but it’s very hard to lift things there, because they’re so heavy.