Many thanks to all of you who read and commented on the piece about workshop last week. Clearly I don’t think workshop is a good model for aesthetic education, but what I really want to argue is for a greater diversity of teaching models than currently exists. I’m open to the possibility that, in a context where critique-based models aren’t the default, where teachers and students could choose a critique-based workshop as one option among others, the traditional workshop model might have a greater chance of being helpful. If you feel that workshop is a good model, that it has worked for you as a student or a teacher, I don’t want to deny your experience. As I said in the earlier piece, I don’t want to fight with anybody! But I do think it might be helpful to clarify a couple of things.
THEME AND VARIATIONS
A few people pushed back on my characterization of the traditional, critique-based workshop model. Some of them suggested that I was stuck in a time warp; someone somewhere even claimed that no one anywhere has used such a model in ten years—to which I would say that, while this may have been your experience, it is not in fact objectively true. Alas. But of course I don’t think everybody teaches like Frank Conroy these days, certainly I don’t think I do; I’ve spent my whole career as a teacher making alterations to the model, seeking to minimize harm and maximize benefit.
In the earlier essay’s first paragraph I presented what I take to be more or less the Ur-model, the theme on which many of us have been playing variations. It’s not true that nobody still teaches this way—and not only “dinosaurs” in “elite programs,” as people sometimes like to say. I’ve taught all over the place in the past decade, in universities and non-academic programs, elite and non-elite; and I’ve visited dozens of MFA programs. Everywhere I’ve taught and visited, I’ve spoken with students and other professors about workshop, about their experience and their sense of best practices. The Frank Conroy model—if not so much his (sometimes) cruelty—is alive and well.
Of course, even in the context of that model, a teacher can make a difference. I don’t want to deny that lots of good things can happen in a workshop. The second most miserable experience I had of a workshop—I don’t just mean of being workshopped myself; I mean of the class as a whole—was in a class led by a brilliant and wise writer at the end of her teaching career. Listening to her talk, not about student pieces, or even about “technique,” but about writing as a way of life was always inspiring, always beautiful. I’m grateful to have had the experience, and the benefit of it wasn’t canceled out by the worthlessness of the workshopping. Or by the fact that she was among the cruelest workshop leaders I’ve ever seen.
People defend the traditional model in various ways, none of which I find convincing. The point of hearing all that advice coming from around the table is to reject it! some people say; that’s how you discover what you think. That seems an odd vision of education, to start with, not to mention of thinking; and also it discounts the problem of authority. The traditional workshop model fills up your head with voices, some of them powerful; and once you have heard a precept, especially if it comes from someone you admire, you can waste years trying to escape it. Even if you reject it, it can determine the course of your thought; it lays down a track and so shapes a territory. (I’m going to prove them wrong! I sometimes thought in workshop when someone said something I thought was stupid. What a waste of time.) I’m not presenting this purely as a negative, and probably it’s inevitable in any meaningful education; probably it’s baked into relationality. But it is a responsibility, or should be; we shouldn’t be cavalier about it.
My first decade of workshopping took place in the context of poetry. I had the most brilliant teachers imaginable, I was just impossibly lucky: James Longenbach, Carolyn Forché, Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips, Jorie Graham, Ed Hirsch, Henri Cole. Ridiculous. I wouldn’t undo that education for anything. But it filled my head up with voices in a way that finally I think was part of what forced me away from poetry. As I’ve said many times before, my primary experience of writing prose—and I finished my first novel before ever attending a prose workshop—was of silence, of a lack of advising voices, of feeling my way through a new landscape in the dark. Of course, as I’ve also said many times, who I am as a prose writer was formed by all that study of poetry (and not just in workshop, in literature seminars too). My switch from poetry to prose was mysterious to me, and still is; but I think part of it was that I needed a new form to escape all those propositions about writing and poems, even the brilliant ones.
Because, as I say all the time, artmaking isn’t propositional. Meaningful artmaking isn’t determined by rules or laws or even, in a narrowly verbal sense, ideas. My biggest ambition as a teacher right now is to imagine a model that gets away from propositions altogether, that promotes a different kind of thinking and making. Of course that can’t ever be absolute, nothing in education (or life) is absolute. But I think we can get a lot closer than the traditional workshop model allows.
THE BEST I CAME UP WITH
I talked in the workshop piece about making variations on the model, but I didn’t describe what they were. So here are some of the changes I made to the traditional model in my own teaching.
Aesthetic experiences. Several years ago, in part as an attempt to diffuse authority, in part as a way of building context for student work, I started asking students to speak more explicitly about their sense of beauty. This took several forms over the years. In some workshops we started each class with a kind of show and tell—the ideal of aesthetic education, I sometimes think: just sharing with others something you love. I asked one or two students a week to bring in a song or poem or painting, anything at all that they found beautiful, and to say a little bit about their experience of it. In my NYU workshops, I began each class by asking students to share aesthetic experiences from the past week—having aesthetic experiences being the whole point of an MFA, so far as I’m concerned, especially if that MFA is in New York.
Last semester, I made this both a little more formal and a bigger part of class. Workshops at NYU have a kind of awkward duration, I think it’s 2h40, which (with a ten-minute break) always felt to me a little too long for two workshops and a little too short for three. So I decided to ask one student each week to bring in a third story for the class to read—a published story, I mean; the only criterion was that it should embody some value for them. I think I phrased this as a story that made them feel inspired to write. After we had all read it, I asked them to speak a little bit about why they loved the story and what that value was. This was wonderful, I wish I had done it more often. It expanded the sense of aesthetic possibility in the class; and it helped us understand at least a little bit where each student was coming from in their own work.
This was in addition to something I tried to do in most of my workshops (sometimes scheduling made it difficult), which was to read a novel together in between rounds of workshop. (Last semester it was Remains of the Day.) I also aspired (though we sometimes ran out of time) to read and discuss a poem in every class, which is something I think everybody who teaches prose workshops should do.
Observation and organization. The most important variation I made to the traditional model was the structure I imposed on workshop conversation. In part this was due to my frustration with the formlessness of the conversation in workshops I experienced as a student, where often the teacher would just open things up for people to share whatever thoughts they had. But the bigger motivation was that I wanted to prioritize observation, objective description of how a story was working, over evaluation.
For the first half of workshop, I challenged students (and myself) to avoid all evaluative language, to instead just make factual observations. This is really hard, and at times it felt, probably in a way that is a little problematic, like policing language. If a student started a comment with “I liked,” I would stop them and ask them to begin again. Very often “I liked” just became “I noticed”—a cosmetic change but one that actually I guess I don’t think is meaningless. If nothing else, it gave us something to laugh about.
This objective half of workshop was organized around craft elements. We began with a précis, a short summary of the story or excerpt. This is really helpful, just to establish the facts of the story—so often someone (often enough me!) had missed something or gotten something wrong. One student—the other student whose work was up for workshop that day—would start this, but it would quickly become collective. If there were questions of fact, something in the story that wasn’t clear, the writer would have an opportunity to fill in or correct information if they wanted to.
After this, we cycled through craft elements, spending time on 1) POV and character, 2) Conflict and plot, 3) Time and structure, 4) Style, and 5) Theme. In their workshop letters, I asked students to dedicate a paragraph to objective observations of whichever of these elements seemed to them most activated in a story, so ideally they all came to class having tracked one of these elements through the entire piece.
Only after all of this did we turn to evaluation. This was organized more loosely: I made space for students to share what they thought was working best in a piece, and then I asked them to share their most important questions. I did encourage them to present potentially critical evaluative comments as questions, but it wasn’t a strict rule.
I think this worked pretty well. Some students were annoyed by the structure, but the feedback I received on the model was overwhelmingly positive. I think it helped us avoid the formlessness that often annoyed me in workshops I had as a student, and also ensured that we talked about some important things (especially structure and style) that often go unaddressed. I think it maximized what people often feel are two genuine benefits of workshop: 1) helping students to see their own work more clearly; and 2) teaching students how to read in a writerly way, paying attention to how a piece is put together.
But I came finally to question both of these benefits. I think that my model helped us all see the story under discussion more clearly, yes; I think it ensured that all stories were taken equally seriously; I think it emphasized something I talked about in my earlier essay: the fact that it takes a lot of work to be helpful to another artist. But I also think it emphasized one of the great negatives of workshop: I worry that it increased the pressure put on new work; and I worry that it made us all invest a great deal of time and effort in a story, when the writer might have been better served by treating it more lightly. It resulted in an awful lot of feedback—and fundamentally I question the value of so much feedback.
So maybe my variations made workshop better. Maybe they also made it worse.
Lots of people feel that much of the value of workshop doesn’t come from being workshopped, but from workshopping others. I agree, and I think that the variation on traditional workshop I ended up with maximized that benefit. Writers need to learn to read closely, in a writerly way, which isn’t exactly the same as a scholarly way: it isn’t the same kind of reading you learn in an academic literature seminar. But this need is infinitely better served, I think, by reading great work. Exerting all this effort and attention on Hemingway, Proust, Morrison, Eliot, Lemebel, Cheever, Erdrich—that’s where real aesthetic education occurs, in the intensest engagement possible with works of art that seem to you great. It’s why I was so happy teaching my seminars at NYU, classes in which I felt absolutely sure that we were all engaged in a meaningful endeavor. It’s why I would love for all of you to join me in my James seminars starting next month.
Exerting all that attention and effort on new student work is unlikely to be so educative. On occasion it is—I have been very lucky to have brilliant students, and every once in a while we had a story in workshop that seemed to me genuinely great. But who would ever expect that to be the norm? And even in the case of a great story, workshop seemed to me pretty unhelpful for the writer. I just couldn’t help feeling that there were better ways to use our time.
The cone of silence. Some readers pushed back against the idea that student writers are still expected to be silent during workshop. I do think this is still the norm in a lot of workshops. And there are good reasons for it! Nothing is less helpful for anybody in the room than a writer reacting defensively to critique. And almost all of us respond defensively, which isn’t a character flaw—it just means that we have good reflexes. As I always told my students, my first reflexive response to even mild criticism is to say Shut up! you don’t know anything!, which is unlikely to be productive. If anything good is going to come from critique, you have to hear it first.
In the workshop model I developed, I tried to balance disciplined listening with opportunities to respond. There were three opportunities for the writer to speak built into the structure, where I would turn to the writer and give them the floor: 1) After the précis, to correct anything we missed or got wrong; 2) after the objective half of conversation, again to correct anything we missed or anything that seemed to them wrong, and also to offer any guidance they wanted us to have as we turned to the evaluative portion (“I know X isn’t working, so you don’t need to focus on that,” for instance, or “I’m most confused about Y, please talk about that”); and 3) at the end. When I gave them the floor at the end, I would ask them to focus especially on questions they had for us, not on rebuttal or justification. It was never obligatory for a writer to speak, at any point; they could always pass.
Otherwise, the expectation was disciplined listening. With one big caveat, a general rule: If you’re suffering, I told them, something has gone wrong. I wanted students always to feel they could interrupt and redirect if they felt things had gone off the rails.
This model was the result of ten years of modification and experiment in teaching fiction workshops. This meant dozens of classes, not just semester long courses but workshops at summer programs and retreats, and also independent workshops taught online. Of course there are ways it could be made better, but I think it’s pretty good—probably, as I said in my piece, about as good as I’m capable of making it, given my limitations.
I still think it’s a bad model of aesthetic education. I came to feel, and this was something of a crisis, that I was engaged in an enterprise that finally seemed to me fraudulent—that all the modification in the world, all the variations on the theme, finally wouldn’t fix the traditional model. A local paper here in Iowa seized on that word “fraudulent” in a pretty disappointing way, trying to make the earlier essay seem much more sensationalistic than it was. I don’t regret the word, because it’s true of how I feel, and it’s why I feel I shouldn’t teach workshops anymore. I felt at the end of last semester, precisely because I found myself still doubting the enterprise even though the class had gone so well, that were I to continue teaching workshop I would be acting in bad faith.
I’m talking about a subjective experience, an individual conviction. I am not accusing anybody else who teaches workshop of acting in bad faith.
Some people asked why I felt moved to say this now. In part this was because of my feeling at the end of last semester’s workshop that I didn’t want to keep teaching according to a model I don’t believe in. (Again, l cannot emphasize enough how wonderful my students were last semester, how excited I was by their writing, and how much I enjoyed being in class with them—all of that is why the experience felt so decisive.) But the bigger motivation for the essay was positive: I felt moved to write it because my experience of teaching a different model at the Collegeville Institute was so powerful. The piece came less from my frustration with the traditional model than from my excitement—and my relief—at having found a better way forward.
THE QUESTION OF FEEDBACK
My fundamental contention is that any model centered on the practice of twelve or fourteen people commenting on student work is likely not to be great—that even if it is structured in a way to minimize harm (only questions! only positive comments!), it is unlikely to be a meaningful model of aesthetic education. The model itself inculcates false beliefs about art, in all the ways I argued in my last post. The theme still sounds, whatever variations we play. I stand by that. I think filling a writer’s head with voices, with other writers’ opinions, is unlikely to help her make her best work.
To say it again: it is really hard to be helpful to another writer, and it gets harder the more specific the help becomes.
Even many people sympathetic to that view still feel that feedback is important—that at some point, even if generative models of class were to become the default, students would need to get concrete feedback on concrete work. I think it’s true that we need feedback on our work; I also think we should be careful where we seek it. (Nothing good ever comes from reading Goodreads, for instance.) I’m skeptical of the idea that we could formalize or routinize feedback in a way that wouldn’t finally be unhelpful, if not actively harmful. So much of our ability to help depends on things outside our control: our sympathies, our predilections. Any structure that formalizes concrete feedback on specific work between people occupying designated structural positions (e.g. workshop teacher / student)—well, I’m skeptical that’s going to be meaningful. (This doesn’t mean it’s never going to work: sometimes that sympathy does exist, or sometimes even someone who doesn’t have sympathy with your work says something that unlocks a problem. But this is fortuitous.)
I feel pretty sure about two things: meaningful feedback is going to be deeply contextualized and deeply relational. This is why the most important thing about workshop (and MFA programs more generally) is the possibility it presents to find good readers. I always say to students: if you leave your MFA program having found one or two peers who will read your work, whose work you will read, for the rest of your lives—that is an extremely successful MFA experience. (This function of finding readers isn’t a justification for the workshop model, though, I don’t think; it’s served equally well by generative workshops and seminars.) Friendship, or at least collegial respect, seems to me the appropriate context for feedback, along with genuine mentorship and long-term editorial relationships.
I don’t know how to formalize that kind of relationality, or if it could be formalized, in the context of something like a degree program. But then degree programs shouldn’t be our default models for aesthetic education. Genuine education is always about a profound encounter, a profound relation; I think we should be honest about the limited ways that can ever be routinized within institutions. But limited does not mean meaningless. I’m not anti-institutions; I’m not, as I’ve tried to make clear, anti-MFA programs. I’ve written these little essays in an attempt to be honest about what, in my certainly limited but maybe not groundless, good-faith view, doesn’t work. And to try to imagine what might work better.
As always, thank you for reading—
G.
PS: If you’d like to experience what I think is a better model of writerly education, I’d love for you to join us as we read Henry James together. My hope for the year-long sequence of classes on Henry James starting next month is that it will model the kind of intense, sustained engagement with a great writer’s work that I am convinced is key to every writer’s education. There are good reasons to think that MFA programs wouldn’t exist without James. He wrote an early essay called “The Art of Fiction,” which was a provocative title at the time; no English-language writer was more formative of the whole idea that writing could be an art.
But you don’t have to commit for all six classes, if that seems like a lot; any class in the sequence can stand on its own. We start in one month, on Saturday, Sept 19, with James’s first great masterpiece, a landmark in world literature, the bridge (or anyway the start of it) between the Victorian novel and modernism: Portrait of a Lady (the 1881 edition). Four sessions, all recorded for those who can’t attend synchronously. Full and partial scholarships are available; scholarship applications close on Sept 1. (If you’ve applied for a scholarship, you’ll hear from us shortly after that date.) All the info for the Portrait class, including the link to apply for scholarships, is here.
If you do decide to register for all six classes, you’ll get a discount (one class is free) as well as an individual conference with me before the final class. There’s also an option to split the cost over three payments, if that’s of interest. I’ve gotten some emails from people worried about falling behind in the reading, but I don’t think you should worry too much: you’ll have a whole month between each class to catch up if you fall behind. (The videos of my comments and class discussion will still be available for you to watch once you’ve finished the reading.) The info for the full course is here; just scroll down to see the individual class listings.
James is my favorite novelist; teaching a seminar on his novels the past two years at NYU was a highlight of my teaching career. I would love to read him with you.
Learning to read in, as you put it, a writerly way. That! That exactly, to me, is at the heart of a good & useful workshop, useful in the sense that what has been pointed out, by the instructor/workshop leader & the students, can be considered and, if relevant, applied to the writer's own work. I've found this way of operating to be personally the most helpful. This peer-to-peer model, this writing-by-committee, has been, in my experience, unhelpful at best, damaging at worst. Add to that an instructor's cruelty, which I experienced at a supposedly top-tier summer program, and it can kill the least hardy. I know it sidelined me for a long time, but he's long dead, this supposed Great American Novelist, a bully by another name, and I'm well over it, but the damage was real & unforgivable. (The story of mine he chewed up was published in a respectable journal & got me notice from an agent, though I wasn't sufficiently recovered to act on the invitation, alas. I learned much later that he treated all his students like that until one had had enough and accosted him in a hallway. The word "fisticuffs" was mentioned, but after that encounter he was, supposedly, reformed.)
Just this year I was invited to join a workshop that you had to apply for but which, unbeknownst to me, turned out to be another faulty & even more lopsided version of the traditional workshop model. In this one, put on by a well known literary journal, we were encouraged to show work in progress while the leader, so called, stayed very much out of it. As in she was basically absent. This left the writer, who may not even have been sure what the thing was yet, having to figure out what to do with comments from readers just as confused & often not even sure what they were commenting on. It was a frustrating, expensive, and time-wasting experience.
Lastly, I'm not at all surprised, though disappointed, to hear of the pushback to the previous, and in my opinion excellent, posting regarding an alternative to the workshop model. I forwarded the post to someone I know who teaches in one of the country's best MFA programs. Surprising to me--he's someone I regard as open-minded and willing to see many sides, even when there aren't that many to see---he wouldn't even open the link, wouldn't even consider another way, claiming that workshops were how he makes his living and that, right there, was reason enough.
Oh for that blessed silence inside my own head...
Perhaps I am "too online" but the voices that distract me right now come from the dominant literary culture that seems to want writers to prove they are good people with the right opinions first and foremost. Any space that's academia-adjacent, even the horror fiction convention I just attended, is quite anxious about this. I'm glad we're more sensitive about avoiding political harm and striving for accurate depictions of lives outside our own experience. On the other hand, anticipating all those potentially hostile readers is making me blocked big-time. I kind of wish we all still believed in original sin and lowered our expectations. How do you deal with that as a writer and teacher?