teaching creative writing

As the increasing number of administrative e-mails appearing in my inbox suggests, another academic year is upon me—in fact, some of my colleagues elsewhere have already begun theirs. I'm currently re-reading Pound's ABC of Reading, and reading for the first time Ron Padgett's Creative Reading (now out of print, though one can find a digital scan of a rather low-res photocopy here), both of which I may excerpt for my creative writing students this semester—even if only to quote an aphorism or two from the former, or to enact a strategy or two from the latter.

When I began teaching creative writing in 1997—thirty years after the formation of the organization now called the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, and the same year that US News & World Report first published its rankings of MFA programs—such classes were, of course, already a huge draw among students, and in the decade since, after further popular cinematic versions of writing workshops and ever-increasing demand for spots in (and sound-and-fury about) MFA programs (see Seth Abramson's long-running blog, which has already spun off an MFA handbook and, more recently, a much-commented-upon consulting firm), creative writing workshops have come to seem as much a part of the entitled academic landscape as dorm wi-fi, espresso bars, and professional-sports-team-quality gyms. I don't know what percentage of students currently attending liberal arts colleges such as the one at which I teach take one or more creative writing courses, but I would imagine it is very high; last spring, more than two-thirds of the students in the two creative writing courses I taught were not English majors (who can count creative writing courses toward their major requirements), but were taking my course as an elective.

Earlier this summer, Louis Menand, in a review of Mark McGurl's book The Program Era, wrote about the teaching of creative writing in the New Yorker. Menand's essay invokes many of the usual writing workshop tropes (the question of whether writing "can be taught," the workshop as "a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers," the hard-drinking writing professor, etc.), before mellowing into a sentimental conclusion about his own undergraduate experiences in creative writing classes, but I'm interested in this passage:

...a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

Menand's understanding here seems limited to the historical (and/or cinematic) version of the creative-writing classroom (and what classroom isn't, to some extent, an "unscripted performance space"?). Reading, apart from the manuscripts of one's peers, does not seem to be part of this description of the writing workshop, though it's interesting that he mentions the act of writing as part of what the workshop enforces, as generally the act of writing has been understood as something entirely apart from the venue of workshop.

Too often, students asked to name a few favorite writers or books on the first day of a creative writing course can cite only books assigned in other courses, or movies. I share Frank O'Hara's belief about the "forced feeding" of poetry ("Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes..."), though of course feel that any student interested in writing will be interested in reading as well (Barbara Guest: "To be a poet requires that one also be a reader"): ideally, I'm less involved in manufacturing that interest than in directing it in ways helpful to a particular student. And while Pound's pronouncements in ABC of Reading about learning from the masters are rigid and proscriptive in a way that seems mostly quaint in 2009, certainly many beginning students need some models for writing, if only to learn a broader range of possibilities for their own work.

In the typical studio art course, students spend hours of class time during the semester actively painting, sketching, and making art, as well as critiquing the resulting efforts; of course, much of this fact is due to issues of materials, equipment, and the physical space required, e.g., to paint in oils, or to make prints, but I still think it important that the writing workshop duplicate the studio art course's attention to the act of making something during class time. Some framework for writing—and the transmission of some practical knowledge—should always have been part of the "curricular script" in a writing workshop.

Students electing my introductory creative writing course this fall will be reading these books—hopefully none of them qualifies as meat and potatoes—during the semester:

Paige Ackerson-Kiely: In No One's Land (Ahsahta).
Geoff Bouvier: Living Room (Copper Canyon).
Kyle Buckley: The Laundromat Essay (Coach House).
Barbara Guest: The Countess of Minneapolis (Burning Deck).
Harryette Mullen: Recyclopedia (Graywolf).
Frank O'Hara: Lunch Poems (City Lights).
Zachary Schomburg: The Man Suit (Black Ocean).
Charles Simic: The World Doesn't End (Harcourt).
Allison Titus: Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State UP).