Writing Workshop Conformity

From Viet Thanh Nguyen I first learned that creative writing seminars contained a bias towards conformity.  I was in  prison, had been participating in creative writing classes for years, when I read his essay on writing workshops. That can be found here, I had been reading novels and some books on writing and having some questions on what is the novel and how it can be written. Then I read this bit and I thought Yes, that is so right:

As an institution, the workshop reproduces its ideology, which pretends that “Show, don’t tell” is universal when it is, in fact, the expression of a particular population, the white majority, typically at least middle-class and often, but not exclusively, male. The identity behind the workshop’s origins is invisible. Like all privileges, this identity is unmarked until it is thrown into relief against that which is marked, visible and outspoken, which is to say me and others like me.

Even an old white guy like me has a problem with "Show, don't tell." This had been told us in our creative writing classes. My dissatisfaction I trace back to my reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Tolstoy's War and Peace (this analysis might just prove Nguyen's point and mine). Those novels tell as much as they show. But I am pretty sure by the time I read this essay I had already stumbled across my bias against the MFA novel.

Nguyen offers what I read as a call to arms:

We, the barbarians at the gate, the descendants of Caliban, the ones who have no choice but to speak in the language we have — we come bearing the experiences and ideas the workshop suppresses. We come from the Communist countries America bombed during the Cold War, or where it sponsored counter-Communist efforts. We come from the lands America occupied, invaded or colonized. We come as refugees and immigrants, documented and undocumented. We come from the ghettos, barrios, reservations and borders of America where there are no workshops. We come from the bedrooms and the kitchens of the American home, where we were supposed to stay, and stay silent. We come speaking languages other than English. We come from the margins, where English is broken. We come with financial aid and loans and families that do not understand what “creative writing” is. We come from communities we do not wish to renounce in the name of our individualism. We come wanting to do more than just sell our stories to white audiences. And we come with the desire not just to show, but to tell.

But what is that art that is also political, historical, theoretical, ideological and philosophical? How is it to be taught? It must be taught not only as an isolated craft or a set of techniques. It must be taught in relation to, or within, courses on history, politics, theory and philosophy, as well as ethnic studies, gender studies, queer studies and cultural studies.

The history and aesthetics of the workshop must be made visible rather than assumed, and the capacity of writing to save lives and change the world must be seen not as something that is innate only to the writing but as something that is enabled by, and in turn enables, social movements, revolutions and the struggle for power. In short, the answer is not to be found solely in the workshop, which is why it is worrisome that so many writers of color, women writers and working-class writers who are excluded from the model of the workshop continue to subscribe to its powers. As if, Flannery O’Connor (herself the graduate of the most famous workshop of all, at the University of Iowa) said, the workshop wasn’t a case of the blind leading the blind.

Now I have read How the Hell Do We Fix the Creative Writing Workshop?, Jennifer Schaffer's review of Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World in The Nation. Covering much of the same territory, offering some of the same critiques and a similar solution - not to depend on the conformity of the workshop. Matthew Salesses and Nguyen appear together in this roundtable, We Build It Ourselves: A Roundtable on Race, Power, and the Writing Workshop. From the same roundtable, Felicia Rose Chavez said this which I quite approve of - even for old white guys like me:

White hegemony aims to erase, capitalism aims to exploit, and yet we exist, still we thrive. Richard Jean So points to the dominance of white narcissism in the publishing industry, the pervasive racial inequality that’s staunchly anti-Black. And so we build it ourselves, just like we’ve always done. I start by teaching my students to listen to themselves. In my book I give it a name: a pedagogy of deep listening. I might coin the outcome as confidence. To start, students tune inward to confront their psychological and emotional relationships to writing, naming fear, perfectionism, competition, jealousy, and a belief in their own worthlessness as everyday barriers to creativity. We speak these unspeakable things aloud. Too often writers feel alone in their private suffering. Together we affirm that our inner critic is nothing more than fear. Name it and move on. Students tune inward again, this time to summon their mentors as guide. Allow them to love what they love, honor that genealogy that Viet speaks of, invite it into the classroom, legitimize it. In my workshop students craft sculptural “family trees,” tributes to their artistic lineage. I ask, “How might you extend the moves of your mentors?” Finally, students tune inward to write artist statements, tracking their writing process, articulating craft-based questions to guide discussion of their work, and communicating a vision for future drafts. In listening to themselves again and again, students cultivate artistic intuition. They grow into their own ideal reader. They write to please themselves. They workshop so as to witness themselves what needs fixing. When a peer, a professor, an agent, or an editor questions their moves on the page, I want them to be so emboldened as to own their words. No, you cannot use me, tokenize me, reject and destroy me. No, you cannot supersede control and manipulate my voice on the page to sound like you. No, thank you, this partnership is unhealthy. “Tune inward and listen to yourselves, trust yourselves,” I tell my students, so that they might go on to serve as their own authority. It’s a long game, but our publishing allies are out there, they’re growing day by day, just look to Roxane Gay’s imprint. In the meantime: Write for you, your mentors, your ancestors.

I will also suggest a book written by a white man - which I read before I read I read Nguyen's essay - Nelson Algren's Nonconformity.

The decision I came to was to tell the story as the story wants to be written, but then, too, I wrote to satisfy myself without any expectation of publication. I also repeated to everyone I could the message of Viet Thanh Nguyen.

sch