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.
Thank you so much for reading these pieces, Rosanne. And I’m so sorry you had that experience with the famous writer. Teaching is such a responsibility, and so easily abused.
Thanks, Garth, although, really, I'm well over it. I brought the incident up only to illustrate the point. My only regret is the power I allowed it back then, my ability to discern, to recognize & appreciate useful criticism and to be able to tell it from pure crap & bullying not quite so developed. Teaching, as you say, is indeed a responsibility, one that you take on with such devotion that I'm always thrilled to be in a class of yours. I'm not even all that much for Henry James but because you're teaching him I've signed on for at least one session, the rest to be determined by the dictates of my calendar. So looking forward to it!
"...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."
This is it right here. Once a teaching methodology becomes so ingrained that it pays the salaries and HVAC bills at academic institutions across a country it might as well be untouchable. Look no further than the "case study" method used at MBA programs to teach business for an example of this. Huge unknowns about its pedagogical effectiveness and it's practically the law of the land. It helps that Harvard invented it but I also think you need something that fits nicely on a brochure. "Workshop" and "case study method" fit that bill.
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?
I agree that original sin has its usefulness! And I agree that this is a real pressure everyone I know feels. One way I push back is by returning to (and teaching) Genet, O’Connor, Roth, Leilani.
Thank you for this second post on what you, through long experience as both student and teacher, have found as the serious drawbacks of the traditional workshop model. I went through a low-residency MFA program over 20 years ago. I do not need to go into why it was a terrible idea for me personally to do that at that time in my life and for the reasons I wanted to do it. All I want to emphasize here is that I am a recovering victim of the traditional workshop model, and I guess some part of me, now thankfully very small, always will be. And that my recovery only really kicked into a higher gear in a very activated way a few years ago. That is how long it can take to get over what you call pronouncements about writing, which I had hated and fought against internally, but continued to come into contact with in the years after the MFA, mostly because I kept making the same mistake over and over. It can be too tempting not to. You see, I really don't think workshop is about writing or becoming a better writer. I think it is much more about being seen. And I think writing is often the vehicle which people use to try to be seen. (Why the heck else would they be willing to pay for it, which I believe the vast majority do, and I did? Who doesn't pay for their MFA? I don't know those people.) And being seen is not about writing. That is about them. I did it, and I did it for a long time. And I still want to be seen. But workshop, however brilliant it may be, will never do that for you. Only through time and effort and pain, pain, that if you survive and are fortunate bring you into some relation with your own self, including your reading self and your writing self, will you be able to start to see yourself and then, then bring that vision to others, who may be able to share in it with you, and, even more, see beyond it. I think this must be what you mean when you say, generative writing. It is generating new visions of the self in active participation with the self among others. In a way that it works if you have been reading something, not even something you necessarily love, but trying to read a thing on its own terms, whatever it may be. I will use the example of Elizabeth Bishop, whose poems I did not and even now do not love. Not exactly, anyway. But when I engage with them on their terms - I don't know how else to say that, only that I go into the reading knowing that I don't have to love it, like it, or anything else, I just want to see how it works, what is she doing? when I give my ego over to her ego - that is generative for me. I get something back. I think this might also be what you mean when you say you want a new model. Maybe the model is like this back and forth that happens when we read things to which we bring no other expectation and no pronouncements or propositions, and instead just a profound and real curiosity about what is this? what is it saying? what does it say to me? Which strangely is a process that does and does not happen in solitude.
There can be no objective description of how a piece of writing works on anyone. And it always is working on someone, or it is just lying there little meaningless marks on a page. Curiously I think it is extreme subjectivity that leads to the greatest insight. And enables connection.
I get chills thinking about a retreat model in Iowa. Do it. Do it. Do it! : )
Dear Amanda, thank you so much for this very beautiful comment. I resonate with so much of what you say—especially between the encounter you describe with Bishop and what a meaningful encounter in a generative space might be. Thank you.
this really resonates. I love the differences you've made to the way you do these workshops, but I agree - ultimately it's just a really difficult model.
I have been teaching fiction workshops for a long time and have made constant modifications, some of which have helped me sleep better at night but none of which have resolved the central dilemma you have described in your posts; is this helpful? I don't think it has a chance, honestly. Reading a fledgling story in a week's time, often cursorily, and discussing it without understanding much about fiction yet puts the class and the work discussed in a tough spot. I much prefer to teach craft classes and help students learn to read as writers, in hopes they may learn to read their own work usefully. I have had a fantasy workshop in mind forever where first years students write twenty stories or two short novels over the course of two semesters and then during the summer between semesters they reread what they have written carefully, making note of their obsessions and repetitions, what they love and what they want to learn more about. Then I read some portion of the work as well and have a few conversations with them about it where they have some authority in how they discuss their work—I interview them more than critique them. Then I point to spots in their manuscripts and tell them why this bit grabbed me, and we'd make a plan for what comes next. Would they revise that work? Maybe not. Maybe all that wiring has been a stepping stone. Meanwhile what would we do in class? Self-development and thinking about art of all kinds. Learn what it means to think of oneself as an artist and how other people did it. Read what other artists have written about their work alongside exploring their work. Develop a way of being in the world as an artist, and put the eagerness for validation in perspective. If I ever had the opportunity to do this, then I'd figure out what the second year of the program might be! This whole thing might be a fail, but somehow keeping it in mind helps me think up new ways of helping. In the context of something more conventional, which is how I teach now, I have shifted to an emphasis on self-knowledge and self-trust and developing a practice of reading one's own work accurately. Okay! I have never written this fantasy down before, though I do describe it to my students at the beginning of workshops, at the least to encourage them to write a lot and find out who they are on the page. Ultimately the dream is one person, just one, who can read your work well and talk about it intellectually and emotionally.
All of this workshop talk makes me appreciate one particular huge quotes "art form" that has an unfair advantage to high brow written work of any kind when it comes to feedback: stand up comedy. The beauty of stand up comedy is that all judgment by any authority on your material can be put in its proper place by going to an open mic and seeing in real time whether it got a laugh or not. Such clarity. No massaging of language required. It may be a shit observation or crude idea, but if your particular presentation worked for that particular audience, you know it instantly. And if you bomb, you bomb. It's practically a right of passage. I am not sure where this is going but perhaps if writing workshops had a touch of stand up comedy open mics to them we'd be on to something here.
Hi, I just subscribed so I can coment. For context, I'm a nurse practitioner, also a poet and memoirist. My academic background is in the sciences. No MFA. So. I've read both essays with great interest. My education as a writer has come mainly through workshops, having thoughtful readers, and my writers' group. Both essays circled around a concept you call "aesthetic education." I've never come across that term. Could you explain what you mean by that? Because that seems to be your benchmark for teaching "what is helpful to the writer," I think I can't fully appreciate these essays without asking you to flesh out what you mean by that phrase.
Thanks for this question, and for reading these pieces. I don’t mean anything too fancy by the term: something like “education in being an artist.” Which I do think is different from many other kinds of education, a special kind of formation. Probably the place I spell it out at greatest length is in this essay on Raven Leilani, which anticipates some of the points I make in these pieces: https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/greenwell-luster
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.
Thank you so much for reading these pieces, Rosanne. And I’m so sorry you had that experience with the famous writer. Teaching is such a responsibility, and so easily abused.
Thanks, Garth, although, really, I'm well over it. I brought the incident up only to illustrate the point. My only regret is the power I allowed it back then, my ability to discern, to recognize & appreciate useful criticism and to be able to tell it from pure crap & bullying not quite so developed. Teaching, as you say, is indeed a responsibility, one that you take on with such devotion that I'm always thrilled to be in a class of yours. I'm not even all that much for Henry James but because you're teaching him I've signed on for at least one session, the rest to be determined by the dictates of my calendar. So looking forward to it!
Ah, i can’t wait to read James with you!
"...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."
This is it right here. Once a teaching methodology becomes so ingrained that it pays the salaries and HVAC bills at academic institutions across a country it might as well be untouchable. Look no further than the "case study" method used at MBA programs to teach business for an example of this. Huge unknowns about its pedagogical effectiveness and it's practically the law of the land. It helps that Harvard invented it but I also think you need something that fits nicely on a brochure. "Workshop" and "case study method" fit that bill.
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?
I agree that original sin has its usefulness! And I agree that this is a real pressure everyone I know feels. One way I push back is by returning to (and teaching) Genet, O’Connor, Roth, Leilani.
Thank you for this second post on what you, through long experience as both student and teacher, have found as the serious drawbacks of the traditional workshop model. I went through a low-residency MFA program over 20 years ago. I do not need to go into why it was a terrible idea for me personally to do that at that time in my life and for the reasons I wanted to do it. All I want to emphasize here is that I am a recovering victim of the traditional workshop model, and I guess some part of me, now thankfully very small, always will be. And that my recovery only really kicked into a higher gear in a very activated way a few years ago. That is how long it can take to get over what you call pronouncements about writing, which I had hated and fought against internally, but continued to come into contact with in the years after the MFA, mostly because I kept making the same mistake over and over. It can be too tempting not to. You see, I really don't think workshop is about writing or becoming a better writer. I think it is much more about being seen. And I think writing is often the vehicle which people use to try to be seen. (Why the heck else would they be willing to pay for it, which I believe the vast majority do, and I did? Who doesn't pay for their MFA? I don't know those people.) And being seen is not about writing. That is about them. I did it, and I did it for a long time. And I still want to be seen. But workshop, however brilliant it may be, will never do that for you. Only through time and effort and pain, pain, that if you survive and are fortunate bring you into some relation with your own self, including your reading self and your writing self, will you be able to start to see yourself and then, then bring that vision to others, who may be able to share in it with you, and, even more, see beyond it. I think this must be what you mean when you say, generative writing. It is generating new visions of the self in active participation with the self among others. In a way that it works if you have been reading something, not even something you necessarily love, but trying to read a thing on its own terms, whatever it may be. I will use the example of Elizabeth Bishop, whose poems I did not and even now do not love. Not exactly, anyway. But when I engage with them on their terms - I don't know how else to say that, only that I go into the reading knowing that I don't have to love it, like it, or anything else, I just want to see how it works, what is she doing? when I give my ego over to her ego - that is generative for me. I get something back. I think this might also be what you mean when you say you want a new model. Maybe the model is like this back and forth that happens when we read things to which we bring no other expectation and no pronouncements or propositions, and instead just a profound and real curiosity about what is this? what is it saying? what does it say to me? Which strangely is a process that does and does not happen in solitude.
There can be no objective description of how a piece of writing works on anyone. And it always is working on someone, or it is just lying there little meaningless marks on a page. Curiously I think it is extreme subjectivity that leads to the greatest insight. And enables connection.
I get chills thinking about a retreat model in Iowa. Do it. Do it. Do it! : )
Dear Amanda, thank you so much for this very beautiful comment. I resonate with so much of what you say—especially between the encounter you describe with Bishop and what a meaningful encounter in a generative space might be. Thank you.
this really resonates. I love the differences you've made to the way you do these workshops, but I agree - ultimately it's just a really difficult model.
I have been teaching fiction workshops for a long time and have made constant modifications, some of which have helped me sleep better at night but none of which have resolved the central dilemma you have described in your posts; is this helpful? I don't think it has a chance, honestly. Reading a fledgling story in a week's time, often cursorily, and discussing it without understanding much about fiction yet puts the class and the work discussed in a tough spot. I much prefer to teach craft classes and help students learn to read as writers, in hopes they may learn to read their own work usefully. I have had a fantasy workshop in mind forever where first years students write twenty stories or two short novels over the course of two semesters and then during the summer between semesters they reread what they have written carefully, making note of their obsessions and repetitions, what they love and what they want to learn more about. Then I read some portion of the work as well and have a few conversations with them about it where they have some authority in how they discuss their work—I interview them more than critique them. Then I point to spots in their manuscripts and tell them why this bit grabbed me, and we'd make a plan for what comes next. Would they revise that work? Maybe not. Maybe all that wiring has been a stepping stone. Meanwhile what would we do in class? Self-development and thinking about art of all kinds. Learn what it means to think of oneself as an artist and how other people did it. Read what other artists have written about their work alongside exploring their work. Develop a way of being in the world as an artist, and put the eagerness for validation in perspective. If I ever had the opportunity to do this, then I'd figure out what the second year of the program might be! This whole thing might be a fail, but somehow keeping it in mind helps me think up new ways of helping. In the context of something more conventional, which is how I teach now, I have shifted to an emphasis on self-knowledge and self-trust and developing a practice of reading one's own work accurately. Okay! I have never written this fantasy down before, though I do describe it to my students at the beginning of workshops, at the least to encourage them to write a lot and find out who they are on the page. Ultimately the dream is one person, just one, who can read your work well and talk about it intellectually and emotionally.
All of this workshop talk makes me appreciate one particular huge quotes "art form" that has an unfair advantage to high brow written work of any kind when it comes to feedback: stand up comedy. The beauty of stand up comedy is that all judgment by any authority on your material can be put in its proper place by going to an open mic and seeing in real time whether it got a laugh or not. Such clarity. No massaging of language required. It may be a shit observation or crude idea, but if your particular presentation worked for that particular audience, you know it instantly. And if you bomb, you bomb. It's practically a right of passage. I am not sure where this is going but perhaps if writing workshops had a touch of stand up comedy open mics to them we'd be on to something here.
Hi, I just subscribed so I can coment. For context, I'm a nurse practitioner, also a poet and memoirist. My academic background is in the sciences. No MFA. So. I've read both essays with great interest. My education as a writer has come mainly through workshops, having thoughtful readers, and my writers' group. Both essays circled around a concept you call "aesthetic education." I've never come across that term. Could you explain what you mean by that? Because that seems to be your benchmark for teaching "what is helpful to the writer," I think I can't fully appreciate these essays without asking you to flesh out what you mean by that phrase.
Thanks for this question, and for reading these pieces. I don’t mean anything too fancy by the term: something like “education in being an artist.” Which I do think is different from many other kinds of education, a special kind of formation. Probably the place I spell it out at greatest length is in this essay on Raven Leilani, which anticipates some of the points I make in these pieces: https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/greenwell-luster