Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?

Dianne Donnelly

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781847692689
• eBook ISBN: 9781847693969
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the effectiveness of the workshop in the Creative Writing classroom, and looks beyond the question of whether or not the workshop works to address the issue of what an altered pedagogical model might look like. In visualising what else is possible in the workshop space, the sixteen chapters collected in 'Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?' cover a range of theoretical and pedagogical topics and explore the inner workings and conflicts of the workshop model. The needs of a growing and diverse student population are central to the chapter authors' consideration of non-normative pedagogies. The book is a must-read for all teachers of Creative Writing, as well as for researchers in Creative Writing Studies.

SECTION ONE
INSIDE THE WRITING WORKSHOP MODEL

Chapter 2

Workshop: An Ontological Study

PATRICK BIZZARO

Recent scholarship in creative writing has been descriptive. As early understandings of an emerging field, such descriptions enable us to do the important formative work of determining creative writing's place in English studies. These studies have focused chiefly on three areas: classroom activities (Ritter & Vanderslice, 2007; Moxley, 1989), epistemological foundations (Bishop, 1990; Haake, 2000; Starkey & Healey, 2007) and creative writing's indebtedness to other subjects in English studies (Myers, 1996; Mayers, 2005; Ritter, 2001). This last arena of study — influences on creative writing — interests me most because of the uncertainty it has left us with concerning creative writing's place in English studies. The few understandings we have reached about creative writing as an autonomous field have been influenced to a large extent by this uncertainty. In an effort to unravel some of this confusion, this essay begins where other recent studies of creative writing's disciplinary status have thus far ended, with English studies as 'a field divided into at least three parts — literature, composition, and creative writing' (Mayers, 2005: 6, see also Myers, 1996: 10–21, my emphasis). Because it elevates creative writing's place in English studies to the same level as literature and composition, this statement differs from other longstanding views of English studies. Susan Miller's (1991) Textual Carnivals and James Berlin's (1987) Rhetoric and Reality assert the belief that English studies is divisible into two parts only, literature (or the poetic) and composition (or the rhetoric). An ontological study of the workshop such as this one intends us to see creative writing as a product of influences from literature and composition but also as a field of study independent of the two. Saying so is no easy task, however, since we are at the start of research in creative writing and must develop methods consistent with the values and emphases of our field. Studies of workshop as a teaching strategy historically linked to creative writing do exactly that: provide a starting point.

After all, if it were possible to simply subtract literature and composition from English studies and use the label 'creative writing' for whatever's left, we would easily complete the task this essay has undertaken, to place creative writing, once and for all, in its proper relation to literature and composition. Unfortunately, such an analysis will not render much useful information, beyond what we already know: that literature and composition, like creative writing, are separate fields of inquiry which address their problems in very different environments and by use of very different data. This statement of difference characterizes 'disciplinarity'. A discipline, from this perspective, is distinguished by what it construes as evidence, and its evidence further clarifies its epistemology. While there is no widely agreed-upon method for a study such as this one, I propose to study a teaching activity historically linked to creative writing, the workshop, and then to determine what its epistemological bases are. As a result, this study of the workshop shows both what creative writers might learn when literary and composition studies are used in a creative writing class but also in what ways literary and composition studies impede learning in a creative writing class. And this examination gives us the chance to further explore creative writing as a discipline. While I believe the connections scholars have made between creative writing and composition have been important and far-reaching, in the end I believe creative writing and composition are separate disciplines, discrete fields of inquiry. A study of the workshop as a method of instruction linked historically to creative writing, with emphasis on what it might profitably borrow from composition and literature and what it must reject, ought to lead us to some conclusions concerning the epistemology from which each discipline in English studies arises. An understanding of the starting points or foundations of creative writing will enable us to better examine the relations that characterize English studies. From this vantage point, then, creative writing is more than a hybrid of literary and composition studies; it is an autonomous field with a right to its own history, epistemology, and classroom activities. A study of the workshop, in particular, will more clearly enable us to see the disciplinary nature of creative writing.

Interpretation in the Workshop: The Literary Emphasis in Creative Writing Studies

For the purpose of exploring issues associated with the workshop method of instruction, I will use a definition forwarded by D.G. Myers (1996: 118) in the following statement from The Elephants Teach: 'The method of communal making and communal criticism is the workshop method' (my emphasis). Such an undertaking must invite participation from students, to be communal. Typically a workshop requires that the community take one of three actions, typifying pedagogical approaches: interpretation, evaluation, or a combination of the two. To make workshop truly communal, then, teachers must consciously prepare their students to perform the two tasks central to workshop: interpretation and evaluation. Creative writing's long association with literary study makes the act of interpretation a natural and even inevitable undertaking where examination of literary texts is concerned, even of unauthorized (that is, unpublished) literary texts. And creative writing's association with composition in recent years has provided creative writing with tools for evaluation. The key question is how, exactly, to make these elements of literary study and composition coalesce in that staple of creative writing instruction, the workshop. And, when they do, what limits must we place on the influences literary study and composition exert on creative writing? For if creative writing is an autonomous field of study, it will differ in some fundamental ways from literary and composition studies and reject some of what is taught in those classes, if not their methods of instruction themselves.

Though there are still very few reliable histories of creative writing, those that exist agree that creative writing came into existence to 'serve' literature. In his institutional history of creative writing, Creative Writing and the New Humanities, Paul Dawson (2004: 8) notes that creative writing developed as a response to difficulties in the way literary studies had been taught. Myers makes a similar point:

Although ... [creative writing]... was founded by writers, it was not created to give them (in Howard Nemerov's words) a quiet life and a fairly agreeable way to make a dollar. Instead it was an effort on their part to bring the teaching of literature more closely in line with the ways in which (they believed) literature is genuinely created.

It is commonly believed that for nearly 100 years, then, creative writing served literary study in most English departments in the United States and abroad as a way of helping students see literature as something immediate, something people actually make, literature treated 'as if people intended to write more of it' (Myers, 2006: 4). Four influences from literary study have served to benefit creative writing teachers, especially those who aim to prepare their students for workshop.

The first is itself ontological. Literature helps us organize creative writing in terms of fields of study. Unlike rhetoric and composition and technical and professional communication, emerging fields in English studies that purport to stress acts of writing, creative writing is understandable in terms of the field coverage model of organization long common in English departments. This model divides literature into time periods and genres, enabling us to envision creative writing, too, as a field with specific areas that must be 'covered'. Our most fundamental notions of creative writing as a field, then, come from literary study, reflecting, perhaps, a hundred years or more of literature's dominance over the shape creative writing has taken, the shape of its container, the kind of influence composition and technical communication have successfully resisted.

As a second and related matter, the study of literature gives us a basis for describing the kinds of texts we write and want our students to write. Efforts to make creative writing a teachable subject, one might argue, were enhanced by the development of the New Criticism; an 'objective' approach to literary study has certainly given teachers language they may use in discussing various features of poetry, fiction and drama (and nowadays creative nonfiction) with students.¹ That language is commonly taught to students in literature courses but it is also often used in creative writing courses so students too can talk about literary texts. These efforts, for right or wrong, tend to make creative writing rule-based and, therefore, teachable; they underscore the teacher's need to find a language for discussing writing. When we assign readings for students in preparation for the workshop, we find ourselves using language that describes literature as literature, descriptions of a genre's elements, most often including, in a poetry writing class for instance, simile, metaphor, imagery, symbolism and other features individual teachers believe students will need to know. Where a literature course is not required as prerequisite to a creative writing course in a particular genre, students should be asked to read and discuss their reading assignments by using this language so that later, in workshop and in describing what they, themselves, have set out to accomplish in their writing, they will have the language to do so. To that end, we should assign readings to elucidate genre, but also to foster understanding of the era in which we write.

Likewise, in selecting texts to be read in preparation for workshop, we should consciously prepare students to write particular types of poems described chiefly for the writing class, what we might call subgenres or pseudo genres. In a poetry writing class, one well known pseudo genre is the 'list poem'. In helping students write one, we are wise to begin with a reading assignment, such as James Wright's (1990) 'Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota'. When we discuss the poem, we do so in an effort to devise just that set of 'rules' or characteristics that result in a list poem. We then describe the poem as a list of things the narrator sees while lying on a hammock and then similarly choose a vantage point — say a bed in the middle of the night or a street corner in Phoenix or Chicago — from which our students make a similar list of things seen, heard, felt, touched and maybe even tasted. Communal criticism of a list poem, as just one example, will be an active application of 'rules' established for examining that poem, best accomplished by using a procedure called primary trait scoring.

The activity involved in the making of a list poem is fairly typical of what might go on at the 'front end' of creative writing instruction, the portion of the course in which beginning students are encouraged to write with some regularity so that they will have something for examination during the workshop portion of the class. The front end also provides us with time to further prepare students for workshop. For instance, creative writing teachers often employ writing prompts similar to what Richard Hugo calls triggering devices, which help students begin drafts of poems that may be 'workshopped' later. These writing prompts most often employ models, activities, or a combination of the two (Bizzaro, 1983), the Wright poem serving as an example of a model.

The third major influence on the workshop from literary study involves the use of critical theory. It is possible, for instance, to employ methods of reading typically reserved for published literary texts in examining and interpreting student poems (see Bizzaro, 1993). What's more, we should teach students in poetry writing classes how to read using those interpretive tools. What we borrow from literary studies when we prepare students for workshop is a rich and interesting array of reading methods that show them who they may be when they read. These methods help students demonstrate to themselves that their poems, stories, essays, or plays might be read from a variety of perspectives. Vantage points for these readings might include the new criticism, but also reader response, feminist, Marxist, and even psychological perspectives.

Thus, we can teach our students how to carry on the work of interpretation in a workshop and, indeed, we should let them do that work once we have taught them how. But my fundamental point is exactly this: teachers must show students how to do the work of the workshop — to interpret and to evaluate. My favorite activity in teaching students how to read from varying perspectives is to use a poem that is amenable to examination from various perspectives. For that specific purpose, I often use 'Everything: Eloy, Arizona 1956' by Ai (1973). I do not ask students to prepare their readings of the poem prior to class. Instead, I hand out the poem during class, face down on their desks. When they turn over the poem, I ask them to cover it with another sheet of paper and then to move the sheet that covers it only as I tell them to. My goal is to address this poem one line at a time. By doing so, I enable my students to predict what will come next, employing in this way a reader-response approach to reading based upon their prior knowledge of subject and form.² Once that is done, I provide an oral protocol in order to model for students other types of readings.

But applying critical theories in reading to prepare students for involvement in workshop is, at best, only part of what our reliance on literary theory enables us to do in creative writing classes. Rarely do we study literary periods without reading poetic and aesthetic documents written by authors to explain what they have set out to do (i.e. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent,' or Shelley's 'A Defense of Poetry,' or Frost's 'The Figure a Poem Makes'). These documents represent self-reports that the teaching of writing, especially of creative writing, is based upon, though self-reports as such have been summarily devalued in recent years, as I will briefly explain below. But the fact that they continue to help us in creative writing suggests that creative writing is taught from a different epistemology altogether than are courses in literature or composition. By using a self-report, for instance, we might help students determine if they have viable subjects for their poems and do so on the basis of what other writers say they do when they write. William Wordsworth, for one, helps us help students determine if they have a viable subject for a poem since a concern with subject is essential to his explanation of the experiment called Lyrical Ballads. And his famous statement provides us with an excellent example of how writers' self-reports might be used in preparing students for workshop. In '"Preface" to Lyrical Ballads,' Wordsworth gives us these famous words that affect a poet's search for a proper subject: 'poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.' This advice taken in isolation has rendered some awful poems and stories based upon powerful feelings. But when we let Wordsworth finish what he wants to say, we find that the initial impulse by itself is not enough. No, these feelings must be 'recollected in tranquility.'

What saving words! Some subjects are, indeed, too close to the writer to be profitably explored in poetry. But Wordsworth helps us understand that the experience that generates both an immediate feeling AND, when recalled later, generates a second feeling is the experience worthy of a poem.

Why do I value authors' self-reports as I do? Among other things, authors' self-reports help us help our students and bring authority to our responses to what they have written. But there are many other pieces of advice that students should know about. I believe an entire pedagogy could be constructed for teaching creative writing based upon the reports writers have made of their writing processes. What's more, pages of AWP's the Writer's Chronicle are filled with such reports in the hopes inexperienced writers will benefit from finding out what experienced writers do when they write. This vital connection between literary study and creative writing, though, is one composition scholars in recent years have tended to deny as useful in the teaching of writing, a point of distinction between creative writing and composition studies. In this particular regard, then, creative writing has more in common with literary study than with composition: cognitivist approaches to research, which studied what experienced writers do when they write, have been rightly rejected as models of research because they are fraught with problems related to race, class, and gender. Nonetheless, composition offers tactics that creative writing teachers have employed over the years to make the workshop an activity that students can profitably participate in by employing innovative evaluation strategies.

Evaluation in the Workshop: The Composition Connection in Creative Writing Pedagogy

As Tim Mayers (2003: 98) points out, the 'composition' referred to in histories of English studies, such as the ones devised by Myers, Miller, and Berlin, is not the field we now know as rhetoric and composition: 'Myers uses the term composition primarily to describe a type of course taught in English departments.' Indeed, according to Mayers' account, no one ever intended 'for creative writing to be separated from other activities, such as criticism' (2003: 98). Composition and creative writing seem naturally — maybe even inevitably — allied as fields of writing. But the basis for pedagogies in each discipline differs. But when Mayers and Kelly Ritter argue for institutional changes to coalesce composition and creative writing, their position requires us to view the fields as linked epistemologically; if we cannot make this connection, one field must come to dominate and change the other. My question is whether such an alliance at this juncture in the development of creative writing as a discipline in English studies will do much to help the field's emergence. What's mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Foreword: On Experience
• Introduction: If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix it; Or Change is Inevitable, Except from a Vending Machine
• Section One: Inside the Writing Workshop Model
• Section Two: Engaging the Conflicts
• Section Three: The Non-Normative Workshop
• Section Four: New Models for Relocating the Workshop
• Afterword: Disciplinarity and the Future of Creative Writing Studies