‘…descriptions are inherently problematical. After all, any workshop involves the varied, sometimes volatile, always changing, perceptions of all its members; a workshop group is an extraordinary complex psychic web, impossible to fully represent in words.’1
•
THE ABOVE IS true of all live teaching situations: seminars, lectures, tutorials. The place, the atmosphere, verbal and non-verbal signs of response and communication are integral to the teaching process. At its centre is the complex relationship between teacher and students, the stuff of changing educational philosophy. In the case of Creative Writing, the class/seminar carries the traces of these changes, as well as those from CW’s history. All roads lead to the workshop in any discussion of this kind, since it is where the written aims are realized in the living practice of the methodology.
Early workshop history
The CW workshop (undergraduate and graduate) exists in two senses: the Workshop, referring to the institutional distinctiveness of CW as an academic discipline, and the workshop, referring to the practices and methodologies of CW pedagogy. The nouns, capitalised and lower case, have spawned a verb. Student writing is ‘workshopped’ in a fashion special to the teaching of creative writing. In Creative Writing: a Good Practice Guide, Dr Siobhan Holland characterised the ‘distinctive attributes of Creative Writing as an academic discipline’, asserting that it ‘is best understood as a practice-based rather than a vocational or service-based discipline’, and she indicated, as other writers have, that ‘The Creative Writing workshop provides the most common form of delivery for Creative Writing programmes at undergraduate and MA level’.2 The workshop thus becomes a sine qua non for creative writing itself, the space within which the subject, the discipline, the activity, the distinctive, and (some would say pedagogically unique and challenging) practice comes into being and takes its meanings.
In academic terms, the workshop is another word for the seminar: small-group teaching which aims to maximise and democratise student participation.
In academic terms, the workshop is another word for the seminar: small-group teaching which aims to maximise and democratise student participation. The sources of this form of learning come from both ends of the educational class and age spectrums. Notions of industrial self-government in the first half of the nineteenth century extended to intellectual work in the Co-operative and adult education movements. The ‘tutorial class’ was developed by the University Extension movement, taking its teaching models partly from the oldest-established universities of Oxford and Cambridge, making a distinction between mass lectures and the small group.
Toynbee Hall, founded in London in 1883, ‘expressed in a different way the new spirit which was stirring in the older universities…men from the colleges in Oxford to engage in social and educational work in the heart of London and to plant the idea of a people’s university based on a fellowship of teaching and learning…(the tutorial class) …will provide far more thorough and systematic teaching than is possible in a course of lectures…ever since the first university tutorial classes were established, stress has been laid upon the importance of discussion as a method of adult education…The successful class is one in which all he members, and not merely one or two of the more vocal, are contributing actively to the common effort.’3
As many have noted, the immediate historical precedent for CW in the academy is that of the University of Iowa, whose Writers’ Workshop became the founding model for (initially) postgraduate CW study. Iowa’s first taught course in ‘Verse Making’ in the spring of 1897 set a precedent which helped to pave the way for ‘creative’ work to be submitted as part of the requirements of postgraduate Masters (sic) degrees in the 1920s.4 Norman Foerster, director of the School of Letters (1930-1944) succeeded in getting the creative dissertation accepted for the PhD degree in the early 1930s, and in 1939, the title ‘Writers’ Workshops’ was officially used for the first time. In 1949, the teaching of CW spread downwards, as it were, to the undergraduate programme, and in the same year the Iowa English Department incorporated CW into its offerings for an English Major.
As historian of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Stephen Wilbers has pointed out, the protocols of the CW workshop have some of their origins with local writers’ clubs:
Their purpose was to improve the participants’ skills as writers by allowing each member to have a turn reading his or her original work, after which the group would respond with suggestions and literary criticism…Accordingly, the method (later to be called the ‘workshop’ approach) was adopted by the University when it offered its first course in creative writing, entitled ‘Verse Making’ in the spring of 1897… The consolidation of Iowa’s achievements in the 1940s and 1950s, under director Paul Engle (1942-1966), led to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop becoming, in effect, the prototype for CW courses in the US during the 1960s, often founded and run by Iowa Workshop graduates.’5
Janet Burroway, an American who studied at Barnard University during the 1950s, compared her experiences in New York and in the UK:
At the Poetry Center of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association I made coffee and onion dip for the young Writers’ Reading Series (Truman Capote…etc)…In the 1960s, which I spent mostly in England, I often found myself defending the notion of creative writing as a university subject and also often critiquing a Sussex student’s fiction or poetry – occasionally at the same time…By the time I returned from Sussex to teach in Florida State University in 1971, creative writing was the hottest subject in the English department – “the boom trade of the English bizz” as one not entirely approving colleague put it…Student demand was high…’ 6
Political and cultural history
Informal, self-organised writers’ groups existed in the UK during the 1950s. In The Teaching of Creative Writing, Philip Hobsbaum reminisced back to the early 1950s, when he was a Cambridge undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge, where F. R. Leavis was teaching. In 1952, he set up a writing group there, typing out copies of poems and stories and sending them round beforehand for members of the group to read. In 1955 he started a similar group in London, and subsequently ‘managed’ (as he put it) groups in Belfast and Glasgow. He described part of his role in the group: ‘I usually let the discussion polarise to some extent before intervening… it was a matter of avoiding closure.’ 7
The phenomenon of writers’ groups, on a continuum from the 1930s became important again during the 1960s and 1970s, where grassroots cultural movements encouraged ordinary people to write memoirs, as well as stories and poetry about their lives, thoughts and feelings. In historian Sheila Rowbotham’s evocative phrase, voices once ‘hidden from history’ came into the open in both informal and formal educational groupings. Sometimes these groups had tutors or leaders, sometimes not. In any case, one of the central issues in the group dynamics was the issue of leadership and authority.
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click ‘full screen’ option. ‘Esc’ returns you here.
The ‘small groups’, or ‘consciousness-raising’ groups so valued by feminism in the UK and the US during the 1970s, placed great importance on leaderlessness, on equal participation by every member of the group, on the democracy of experience and voice. The notion of ‘consciousness-raising’ was particularly important because it enabled ways for each individual woman (the principle, is, of course, applicable to anyone) to see how her personal, individual experience was part of, interwoven with, social structures such as the family, and the underlying political ideologies which shaped the society. Feminism appropriated a slogan first widely used by the French ‘Situationists’, radical students in the late 1960s, that ‘the personal is political’.8 This enabled a conceptual move towards analysing the social and political structures and ideas which linked the private life, thoughts and imaginations of individuals, with public forms of social organisation; with the role of the state and its relationship with the individual and the family.
The ideals of these small groups were/are laudable; in their early years they enabled women to meet across different kinds of isolation. However, at the same time, the contradictions within such a supposed total democracy were revealed. Each individual in each group brought their own histories and agendas (class, culture, expectation, conscious or not) into the process. The equation between ‘democracy’ and ‘leaderlessness’ was much bruited, and not just in women’s groups. Political theatre companies and organisations such as the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) also worked hard to operate in this way; but, while there was great initial exhilaration and empowerment, there were limitations to the social and individual potentials of such groups, since competing differences were often ignored or covered over.
The leaderless, and supposed ‘structurelessness’ of the Women’s Liberation groups was analysed in an American feminist magazine, The Second Wave, in 1972: ‘Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion…to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive as to aim at “objective” news story, “value-free” social science or a “free” economy….the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones…As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules…The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalised.’9
The cultural mix of political democratization, community-based arts programmes (self/class expression), and radical work within the field of psychotherapy during the 1970s permeated university-organised ways of teaching.
The cultural mix of political democratization, community-based arts programmes (self/class expression), and radical work within the field of psychotherapy during the 1970s permeated university-organised ways of teaching. An organization called DUET (Developing University English teaching) was founded in 1979 by Professor John Broadbent: ‘In the later 1960s at Cambridge I was tiring of one-to-one tutorials, so I began holding seminars. Then I moved to the University of East Anglia where the basic teaching unit was the seminar…people came late to classes or not at all, hadn’t read the books, did not participate or talked emotically….In an effort to get out of this, I regressed to techniques used in primary schools – thematic topics, dramatic improvisation…’10 Broadbent and his colleagues set up conferences and workshops, to explore the nature of group dynamics. The experiment and experience was described by Susan Bassnett, now Pro-Vice-Chancellor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies (phew!) at the University of Warwick, celebrating DUET’s twenty-fifth anniversary:
DUET was born at the height of the Great theory Wars, the crisis point in literary studies, before the advent of post-colonial thinking, when we were trying to come to terms with wave after wave of new ideas – feminism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism, to name but four. Those of us trained in the Leavisite mode, or like myself in the more philological methods of close reading deriving from Empson and the Russian Formalists were literally at the epicentre of the critical revolution. We were teaching courses that belonged to one era, reading late into the night books and essays that were changing our view of the subject and of the world…What made DUET special was its unique combination of the scholarly and the personal: alongside rigorously prepared academic sessions, all participants were assigned to a creative writing group and, most controversially, to a group run on Tavistock principles, close to the old idea of encounter groups that had come into prominence in the 1970s and early 1980s…I remember tears, arguments, confrontations, extraordinary moments of revelation, and a resulting shift of perception that has never left me.’ 11
In his retrospective discussion of the organisation’s varied work, Colin Evans addresses one of the main themes of DUET’s work, as it affected teaching methods then; this has relevance to discussion later in the book about claims that CW dispenses with the traditional ‘authority’ of the teacher. Evans commented that ‘Authority and power are intrinsically neither good nor bad. They combine to enable a person (or a group) to do something and that something is a task that can be good or bad (or, as is usual, seem good to some and bad to others).’ 12
Workshop models and teacher-student relationships
There are a number of models in the CW literature which describe the ‘specialness’ of the CW workshop. First, there is the parallel with the academic practice of peer-reviewing (in journals and publishing). In a report on the ‘Proceedings of the Creative Writing Conference’ held in 1999 at Sheffield Hallam University, Patricia Wooldridge wrote: ‘I believe that the use of peer assessment provides a vital support in the development of undergraduates’ writing.’13 Similarly, in Professional Judgement in the Assessment of Creative Writing, Danny Broderick observed that ‘Peer group assessment is a key element of current teaching methodologies…’14
George Marsh presented a different professional model:
‘At the heart of tutoring literary writing is a relationship that is ideally like that between two writer friends, when one asks the other to advise on a manuscript before submitting it for publication.’ However, on the next page Marsh’s friendships turn into a rather grander, more professionalized division of labour: ‘The tutor’s role should be like that of a publisher’s editor or agent…’ 15
Paul Engle, for twenty-four years Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, reinforced this definition in a letter to Wilbers in 1961, when he ‘likened the teaching that can be done in a workshop to the function of an editor like Maxwell Perkins, who shaped and pared into presentable form the massive manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe. This was echoed by Robert Miles:16
In effect, the seminar reduplicates, in miniature, publishing.’ The model of the workshop process as mirroring publishing/editorial process also served for the FWWCP; there was : ‘…a commitment to using the group as the first readership or audience for work, and as the body that decides about editing, shaping, public reading or publication.’17
Engle drew an analogy which draws on yet another model, between ‘the student enrolling in a workshop and the artist seeking instruction by a master.’18 This is similar to John Moat’s claim about the working relationship established at the Arvon Foundation, between guru and disciple.
We have a number of overlapping and/or conflicting models: friendship implies a parity between those concerned; the publisher/writer relationship is a professional relationship, where the writer has entered the market; the book/text is now a commodity which goes into production, and the (ideal) editor is a knowledgable close reader passing on advice to improve the completed text, to make it publishable (the product). In the first there is no structured dependence, in the second there is. The master-apprentice/guru-acolyte model, regularly presented in the literature, implies heavily directed guidance and advice, in which the receiver (student) accedes to the knowledge and wisdom of their leader. Here enlightenment, rather than the market, is the primary aim. The concept of the ‘master class’ is derived from other art forms, and is generally a one-off event.
Each of these models offers a differently inflected concept of the relationship between teacher and student.
Criticism and re-writing
However, all these educational/professional paradigms centre round a CW variant of ‘criticism’, pivotal to workshop protocol, and seen as constituting its distinctive professional practice: Danny Broderick has commented that in the ‘…seminar/workshop…students’ own work in progress is reviewed and revised through critical discussion…This cooperative critiquing of work by peers…places emphasis on the analysis of the text as literary artefact…Students are asked to make value judgements on their own and each others’ texts as part of the process of arriving at the artefact.’19
However, far from being the idealistic, open-ended procedure which the above might imply, the context of the seminar-workshop entails final judgement by the tutor, in assessing and marking student work on behalf of the institution. This creates an inbuilt tension between peer-friendship responses, and that of the tutor, observed by Siobhan Holland when she reported from a CW conference at Bath Spa University in 2001, that some delegates considered that ‘It is not fair to students to find their work praised in workshops and criticised in assessment feedback.’20
The publisher/editor analogy is equally flawed. The larger part of workshop time (and the foregrounded activity) is reserved for discussing student writing, material produced outside class. Even if the student thinks it is ‘complete’, the fact that it is then subject to group ‘criticism’ renders it conceptually incomplete. No publisher’s editor (especially these days!) will spend large amounts of time reading and commenting on any manuscript in detail unless it is already commissioned, and therefore (in principle) en route to publication. Publication is not what happens in the classroom (some argue that reading aloud is a form of ‘publication’; it isn’t). Student work is doubly ‘work-in-progress’, because individual pieces of writing are technically incomplete, or because each class is part of a longer, course-long process.
The CW seminar is thus driven by procedures of re-writing, rather than writing. This is crucial to a real understanding of the process.
The ‘criticism’ presented as the main pedagogic activity in the workshop (whether from teacher or fellow students) must inevitably be based on value judgements of some kind. The issue of value judgements will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Fifteen. For now, the procedure involves applying sets of (concealed, because not taught and shared) literary value judgements on unfinished work-in-progress, via what is variously called ‘feedback’ or ‘critiquing’. The contradictory meanings in this vocabulary take us back to the Romantic/therapy axis of CW.
Thus, ‘feedback’ can mean favourable or adverse opinion (this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’), and ‘criticism’ or ‘critiquing’ can be (often is) used in the colloquial sense of put-down, disapproval. ‘Constructive criticism’ (ie, saying nice things first, pointing out what you ‘like’, what you think is ‘good’), is contrasted with its opposite, ‘negative criticism’, which involves pointing out what is ‘wrong’ or what doesn’t ‘work’. The mooted ideal is to find some form of ‘constructive criticism’, which, in theory, is meant to ‘help’ the student who has presented their writing to decide how to rewrite it.
If CW is training professional writers…writing itself is not strictly the ‘subject’ of CW.
The ideological confusion behind this returns to the Romantic/therapy axis. If CW is training professional writers, then the great-writers approach privileges the text over the writer; if students are taught that CW expresses the self, the writing-as-therapy approach privileges the person over the writing. The first overvalues the art, the second overvalues the person, and together they contradictorily permeate the process of rewriting; writing itself is not strictly the ‘subject’ of CW.
The pedagogical approach is based on a hard-cop/soft-cop methodology. Training great writers entails toughening them up to ‘take criticism’, to survive baptisms of fire (as we shall see later; in writing-as-therapy, the emphasis is on avoiding hurting people’s feelings (after all, if the writing is thought to be expressing the ‘self’, then the ‘self’ will be under scrutiny along with the writing), by ‘supportive criticism’, ie, to find ways of saying something is rubbish without upsetting or patronising them by saying well done for trying.
Siobhan Holland’s report referred to ‘The need for robust support structures to students who may well draw on traumatic experiences in the processes of reading and writing.’21 This is consonant with Celia Hunt and Fiona Sampson’s suggestion that: ‘CW classes may become, on occasion, arenas where deep feelings and emotions are unearthed and expressed, and teachers and group leaders may sometimes find themselves in the position of counsellor or therapist, without the appropriate skills to act as such.’22
If that is so, then the CW (ie, the university) classroom becomes a therapy group, with teachers needing ‘…to be aware of the importance of creating in the classroom a “holding environment”, to use Winnicott’s term, within which participants can feel safe enough to engage more closely with their inner worlds. This can be done by organising peer support within the writing group itself, or through the availability of individual consultations with the tutor, or by having available counselling or psychotherapeutic backup which can be used when necessary.’ 23 This presents the CW teachers with an impossible – if not dangerous task. Carrying out the desired task of ‘constructive criticism’ involves creating right kind of group dynamic: Liz Almond, in ‘The Workshop Way’, says the workshop ‘… should provide a safe environment whereby you can get to know and respect other people through their work and begin to develop an ability to offer constructive criticism.’24 ‘It takes time,’ she explains, ‘to develop a critical vocabulary if you’re not used to responding to other people’s work.’25 Yes; it’s called doing an English degree.
Training for criticism and Houses of Correction
Paul Dawson argues that the ‘pedagogical practice of the workshop is fundamentally one of critical reading’, and is thus based on ‘a theory of reading’. 26 Taking this from Emerson’s concept of ‘creative reading’, he suggests that this CW theory of reading, which ‘developed out of Literary Studies rather than composition’, is converted to the concept of the workshop as based on ‘reading from the inside; the practice of writing as a means of developing literary appreciation and critical skills’(his italics). This is an extraordinary idea…, where CW claims to be equipped to take over the functions of English. The implication that CW is itself the site of a training in critical reading does serious injustice to the complexity of notions of ‘reading’ as well as to notions of ‘writing’ and ‘criticism’.
Tom Grimes, in The Workshop:Seven Decades of the Iowa Workshop, spells out the workshop experience:
Nearly every participant has sensed and reacted with some apprehension to a spirit of competition in the Workshop setting. But many writers view the ordeal of measuring their talent against the talent of others as a necessary crisis in their artistic development. Paul Engle believes that the intensity of this experience contributes to the writer’s growth.’27
Robert Graham, who visited the Iowa Workshop 2001 wrote about Frank Conroy’s class:
‘A fellow student describes what he calls his “ordeal”, and someone else likens the workshop process to an autopsy. Conroy’s comments on the workshop included comments such as: “We…spend 95% of our time finding out what is wrong.” A student notes that “Conroy believes he isn’t doing his job unless the occasional student bursts into tears or faints.” One teacher describes his own classroom role as “…traffic cop. I make sure things aren’t getting out of control. After a particularly gruelling session, a woman tutor comes in, ‘like a den mother’, with a basket of sweets for everyone. 28
This gender-divide of hard cop/soft cop has resonances with the later chapter on women/gender.
Tom Grimes takes up the story:
Then come the Workshop discussions. The line edits that pick apart the imagined integrity of your story before the end of the first sentence. The declaration by others of utter mystification when it came to being able to say what your story was about. The lancing comparisons of your pale imitation to the work of obviously influential masters…’, climaxing triumphantly with: ‘What the Workshop has done, strangely enough, is taught us what not to do…’29
An appropriate slogan, suggests Grimes, for the Workshop, might be ‘Abandon all Hope, all ye who enter here’.30
Workshops are not a climate in which genuine teaching and learning can take place. Instead, they are sado-masochistic Houses of Correction on a Victorian scale.
Well, words fail me. Almost. What respectable, important subject or occupation could possibly justify its sado-masochistic methods in this way? Despite the fact that very many CW teachers are passionately committed to their students, conscientious about the ways in which they teach/try to teach, it is absolutely vital to recognise the vice-like grip of an impossible combination: the patronising of individual vulnerability alongside a method which cannot fail but be discouraging and educationally disempowering. It is not a climate in which genuine teaching and learning can take place. Such workshops are sado-masochistic Houses of Correction on a Victorian scale.
I am not the only dissenter here, though voices of protest are occasional, and rarely sustained. Rob Mimpriss, one of the very few CW students who has dared to raise his head above the received wisdom of the workshop parapet: ‘I have been moving towards the conclusion that the workshop has little to offer the writer, and may at times do harm…Not everyone will feel willing to speak, and what they say will be influenced by the group dynamic as they learn how hard it is to be the only dissenting voice, to be cruel when others have been kind, or to damn one student’s work after praising another’s.’31 Some teachers have articulated their reservations. Ali Smith admitted: ‘Teaching creative writing workshops gives me irritable bowel syndrome.’32 As Alan Mahar commented, ‘Offering criticism of another’s writing can be a precarious affair; listening to criticism can be downright disastrous.’33
From her 1992 research project into community writing groups, Rebecca O’Rourke stated stringently that ‘People are working with cobbled together models of constructive criticism drawn from school – criticism as negative, unpleasant and fault finding – and from the market – criticism as a selective judgement. I found few models drawn from the writing process — criticism as a means to extend, clarify and challenge the writer …’
She also reported concerns about ‘feedback’ and ‘criticism’: ‘A contradiction began to emerge. People went to writing groups in order to get feedback on their work and yet were almost always unhappy with the feedback they received. The issue was partly a question of whose responsibility criticism was seen to be: did it belong to the writer, the group or its leader/tutor. Some felt encouragement was incompatible with criticising work.’34
These comments were not voiced within the workshops, but safely away from it, to someone not involved with the group:
The language which people used to describe feedback was distinctive and it was at odds with the actual process I observed. The language was violent and aggressive. Phrases such as “rip it to pieces”, “pull it part”, “pull no punches”, “give it the once over” and “brutally honest”…It conjured up a process in which the writing and the writer’s feelings were literally taken apart.’
Students wanted more guidelines from the tutors: ‘Tension surrounding feedback and criticism was a constant theme in the life of the creative writing groups and courses. It was cited as the most important aspect of the activity, and the one people wanted most to change.’ Therefore ‘Students expected tutors to deal in absolutes – what was right and what was wrong, good or bad – and to offer definite opinions.’ The corollary to this was that ‘…many students do not trust the judgement of their peers….’35 O’Rourke’s conclusion is that ‘Central to the problem are issues of power and authority within courses/groups…’ Of course, this is only a ‘problem’ if one seeks to deny the authority of the CW teacher in the interests of a simplistic egalitarianism. This stands in contrast with the guru/acolyte model, where the guru clearly has ‘knowledge’ and the acolyte is clearly there to ‘receive’ it.
Conclusions
This is a summary of the pedagogical implications of the irreconcilable conflicts at the heart of current Creative Writing pedagogy. The conflictual models are shoe-horned into a pedagogic practice which renders the workshop as a House of Correction, built round rewriting, rather than writing. Untheorised (or, at best, under-theorised) principles of ‘criticism’ are translated into, by turns, brutal and patronizing exchanges. This devolves the conceptual oppositions into the centre of the student-teacher relationship. In addition, this denies CW’s relationship to its own histories, which are those embedded in the history of English: literary criticism and literary theory. The apparent sanctuary which within which creativity is supposed to flourish, turns out to be a repository for a set of Emperor’s clothes, which do not fit: piecemeal pragmatic assumptions about rewriting drive the hard-cop/soft cop process.
Peter Abbs, ‘The Place of Creative Writing in the Development of Teachers’, in Teaching Creative Writing: Theory and Practice, eds. Moira Monteith and Robert Miles (Open University Press, 1982), p. 79
English Subject Centre, Report Series No. 6, February 2003.
Adult Education, Robert Peers (Routledge, 1959, 1972), p. 46 and p. 230.
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop by Stephen Wilbers (University of Iowa Press, 1980); The Workshop:Seven Decades of the Iowa Workshop, ed. Tom Grimes (Hyperion, New York, 1999).
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stephen Wilbers (Iowa University Press, 1980), p. 19.
Monteith & Miles, op. cit, pp. 60-61.
Ibid, p. 30.
The phrase was coined by Carol Hanisch, an American feminist, in 1971. —Ed.
By Joreen, Volume 2, Number 1, 1972, pp. 20-21.
‘“Forms of life”: how the DUET project began’, by John Broadbent, in Developing University English Teaching, ed. Colin Evans (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), p. 18.
English Subject Centre Newsletter, 9 November 2005. p. 25.
Evans, op. cit., p. 74.
Sheffield Hallam, p. 119.
‘Writing in Education’ (NAWE, Autumn, 1998).
‘A Commentary on Aims and Assessments in the Teaching of Literary Writing’, Monteith and Miles, op. cit., pp. 45-46.
In Monteith and Miles, op. cit.
The Republic of Letters, ed. Dave Morley and Ken Worpole (minority Press, Group Series No 6, 1982). p.5
The Workshop.
The Emperor’s Changing Room.
By MICHELENE WANDOR.
‘…descriptions are inherently problematical. After all, any workshop involves the varied, sometimes volatile, always changing, perceptions of all its members; a workshop group is an extraordinary complex psychic web, impossible to fully represent in words.’1
•
THE ABOVE IS true of all live teaching situations: seminars, lectures, tutorials. The place, the atmosphere, verbal and non-verbal signs of response and communication are integral to the teaching process. At its centre is the complex relationship between teacher and students, the stuff of changing educational philosophy. In the case of Creative Writing, the class/seminar carries the traces of these changes, as well as those from CW’s history. All roads lead to the workshop in any discussion of this kind, since it is where the written aims are realized in the living practice of the methodology.
Early workshop history
The CW workshop (undergraduate and graduate) exists in two senses: the Workshop, referring to the institutional distinctiveness of CW as an academic discipline, and the workshop, referring to the practices and methodologies of CW pedagogy. The nouns, capitalised and lower case, have spawned a verb. Student writing is ‘workshopped’ in a fashion special to the teaching of creative writing. In Creative Writing: a Good Practice Guide, Dr Siobhan Holland characterised the ‘distinctive attributes of Creative Writing as an academic discipline’, asserting that it ‘is best understood as a practice-based rather than a vocational or service-based discipline’, and she indicated, as other writers have, that ‘The Creative Writing workshop provides the most common form of delivery for Creative Writing programmes at undergraduate and MA level’.2 The workshop thus becomes a sine qua non for creative writing itself, the space within which the subject, the discipline, the activity, the distinctive, and (some would say pedagogically unique and challenging) practice comes into being and takes its meanings.
In academic terms, the workshop is another word for the seminar: small-group teaching which aims to maximise and democratise student participation.
In academic terms, the workshop is another word for the seminar: small-group teaching which aims to maximise and democratise student participation. The sources of this form of learning come from both ends of the educational class and age spectrums. Notions of industrial self-government in the first half of the nineteenth century extended to intellectual work in the Co-operative and adult education movements. The ‘tutorial class’ was developed by the University Extension movement, taking its teaching models partly from the oldest-established universities of Oxford and Cambridge, making a distinction between mass lectures and the small group.
Toynbee Hall, founded in London in 1883, ‘expressed in a different way the new spirit which was stirring in the older universities…men from the colleges in Oxford to engage in social and educational work in the heart of London and to plant the idea of a people’s university based on a fellowship of teaching and learning…(the tutorial class) …will provide far more thorough and systematic teaching than is possible in a course of lectures…ever since the first university tutorial classes were established, stress has been laid upon the importance of discussion as a method of adult education…The successful class is one in which all he members, and not merely one or two of the more vocal, are contributing actively to the common effort.’3
As historian of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Stephen Wilbers has pointed out, the protocols of the CW workshop have some of their origins with local writers’ clubs:
Janet Burroway, an American who studied at Barnard University during the 1950s, compared her experiences in New York and in the UK:
Political and cultural history
Informal, self-organised writers’ groups existed in the UK during the 1950s. In The Teaching of Creative Writing, Philip Hobsbaum reminisced back to the early 1950s, when he was a Cambridge undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge, where F. R. Leavis was teaching. In 1952, he set up a writing group there, typing out copies of poems and stories and sending them round beforehand for members of the group to read. In 1955 he started a similar group in London, and subsequently ‘managed’ (as he put it) groups in Belfast and Glasgow. He described part of his role in the group: ‘I usually let the discussion polarise to some extent before intervening… it was a matter of avoiding closure.’ 7
The phenomenon of writers’ groups, on a continuum from the 1930s became important again during the 1960s and 1970s, where grassroots cultural movements encouraged ordinary people to write memoirs, as well as stories and poetry about their lives, thoughts and feelings. In historian Sheila Rowbotham’s evocative phrase, voices once ‘hidden from history’ came into the open in both informal and formal educational groupings. Sometimes these groups had tutors or leaders, sometimes not. In any case, one of the central issues in the group dynamics was the issue of leadership and authority.
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The ‘small groups’, or ‘consciousness-raising’ groups so valued by feminism in the UK and the US during the 1970s, placed great importance on leaderlessness, on equal participation by every member of the group, on the democracy of experience and voice. The notion of ‘consciousness-raising’ was particularly important because it enabled ways for each individual woman (the principle, is, of course, applicable to anyone) to see how her personal, individual experience was part of, interwoven with, social structures such as the family, and the underlying political ideologies which shaped the society. Feminism appropriated a slogan first widely used by the French ‘Situationists’, radical students in the late 1960s, that ‘the personal is political’.8 This enabled a conceptual move towards analysing the social and political structures and ideas which linked the private life, thoughts and imaginations of individuals, with public forms of social organisation; with the role of the state and its relationship with the individual and the family.
The ideals of these small groups were/are laudable; in their early years they enabled women to meet across different kinds of isolation. However, at the same time, the contradictions within such a supposed total democracy were revealed. Each individual in each group brought their own histories and agendas (class, culture, expectation, conscious or not) into the process. The equation between ‘democracy’ and ‘leaderlessness’ was much bruited, and not just in women’s groups. Political theatre companies and organisations such as the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) also worked hard to operate in this way; but, while there was great initial exhilaration and empowerment, there were limitations to the social and individual potentials of such groups, since competing differences were often ignored or covered over.
The cultural mix of political democratization, community-based arts programmes (self/class expression), and radical work within the field of psychotherapy during the 1970s permeated university-organised ways of teaching.
The cultural mix of political democratization, community-based arts programmes (self/class expression), and radical work within the field of psychotherapy during the 1970s permeated university-organised ways of teaching. An organization called DUET (Developing University English teaching) was founded in 1979 by Professor John Broadbent: ‘In the later 1960s at Cambridge I was tiring of one-to-one tutorials, so I began holding seminars. Then I moved to the University of East Anglia where the basic teaching unit was the seminar…people came late to classes or not at all, hadn’t read the books, did not participate or talked emotically….In an effort to get out of this, I regressed to techniques used in primary schools – thematic topics, dramatic improvisation…’10 Broadbent and his colleagues set up conferences and workshops, to explore the nature of group dynamics. The experiment and experience was described by Susan Bassnett, now Pro-Vice-Chancellor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies (phew!) at the University of Warwick, celebrating DUET’s twenty-fifth anniversary:
In his retrospective discussion of the organisation’s varied work, Colin Evans addresses one of the main themes of DUET’s work, as it affected teaching methods then; this has relevance to discussion later in the book about claims that CW dispenses with the traditional ‘authority’ of the teacher. Evans commented that ‘Authority and power are intrinsically neither good nor bad. They combine to enable a person (or a group) to do something and that something is a task that can be good or bad (or, as is usual, seem good to some and bad to others).’ 12
Workshop models and teacher-student relationships
There are a number of models in the CW literature which describe the ‘specialness’ of the CW workshop. First, there is the parallel with the academic practice of peer-reviewing (in journals and publishing). In a report on the ‘Proceedings of the Creative Writing Conference’ held in 1999 at Sheffield Hallam University, Patricia Wooldridge wrote: ‘I believe that the use of peer assessment provides a vital support in the development of undergraduates’ writing.’13 Similarly, in Professional Judgement in the Assessment of Creative Writing, Danny Broderick observed that ‘Peer group assessment is a key element of current teaching methodologies…’14
George Marsh presented a different professional model:
Engle drew an analogy which draws on yet another model, between ‘the student enrolling in a workshop and the artist seeking instruction by a master.’18 This is similar to John Moat’s claim about the working relationship established at the Arvon Foundation, between guru and disciple.
We have a number of overlapping and/or conflicting models: friendship implies a parity between those concerned; the publisher/writer relationship is a professional relationship, where the writer has entered the market; the book/text is now a commodity which goes into production, and the (ideal) editor is a knowledgable close reader passing on advice to improve the completed text, to make it publishable (the product). In the first there is no structured dependence, in the second there is. The master-apprentice/guru-acolyte model, regularly presented in the literature, implies heavily directed guidance and advice, in which the receiver (student) accedes to the knowledge and wisdom of their leader. Here enlightenment, rather than the market, is the primary aim. The concept of the ‘master class’ is derived from other art forms, and is generally a one-off event.
Each of these models offers a differently inflected concept of the relationship between teacher and student.
Criticism and re-writing
However, all these educational/professional paradigms centre round a CW variant of ‘criticism’, pivotal to workshop protocol, and seen as constituting its distinctive professional practice: Danny Broderick has commented that in the ‘…seminar/workshop…students’ own work in progress is reviewed and revised through critical discussion…This cooperative critiquing of work by peers…places emphasis on the analysis of the text as literary artefact…Students are asked to make value judgements on their own and each others’ texts as part of the process of arriving at the artefact.’19
However, far from being the idealistic, open-ended procedure which the above might imply, the context of the seminar-workshop entails final judgement by the tutor, in assessing and marking student work on behalf of the institution. This creates an inbuilt tension between peer-friendship responses, and that of the tutor, observed by Siobhan Holland when she reported from a CW conference at Bath Spa University in 2001, that some delegates considered that ‘It is not fair to students to find their work praised in workshops and criticised in assessment feedback.’20
The publisher/editor analogy is equally flawed. The larger part of workshop time (and the foregrounded activity) is reserved for discussing student writing, material produced outside class. Even if the student thinks it is ‘complete’, the fact that it is then subject to group ‘criticism’ renders it conceptually incomplete. No publisher’s editor (especially these days!) will spend large amounts of time reading and commenting on any manuscript in detail unless it is already commissioned, and therefore (in principle) en route to publication. Publication is not what happens in the classroom (some argue that reading aloud is a form of ‘publication’; it isn’t). Student work is doubly ‘work-in-progress’, because individual pieces of writing are technically incomplete, or because each class is part of a longer, course-long process.
The CW seminar is thus driven by procedures of re-writing, rather than writing. This is crucial to a real understanding of the process.
The ‘criticism’ presented as the main pedagogic activity in the workshop (whether from teacher or fellow students) must inevitably be based on value judgements of some kind. The issue of value judgements will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Fifteen. For now, the procedure involves applying sets of (concealed, because not taught and shared) literary value judgements on unfinished work-in-progress, via what is variously called ‘feedback’ or ‘critiquing’. The contradictory meanings in this vocabulary take us back to the Romantic/therapy axis of CW.
Thus, ‘feedback’ can mean favourable or adverse opinion (this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’), and ‘criticism’ or ‘critiquing’ can be (often is) used in the colloquial sense of put-down, disapproval. ‘Constructive criticism’ (ie, saying nice things first, pointing out what you ‘like’, what you think is ‘good’), is contrasted with its opposite, ‘negative criticism’, which involves pointing out what is ‘wrong’ or what doesn’t ‘work’. The mooted ideal is to find some form of ‘constructive criticism’, which, in theory, is meant to ‘help’ the student who has presented their writing to decide how to rewrite it.
If CW is training professional writers…writing itself is not strictly the ‘subject’ of CW.
The ideological confusion behind this returns to the Romantic/therapy axis. If CW is training professional writers, then the great-writers approach privileges the text over the writer; if students are taught that CW expresses the self, the writing-as-therapy approach privileges the person over the writing. The first overvalues the art, the second overvalues the person, and together they contradictorily permeate the process of rewriting; writing itself is not strictly the ‘subject’ of CW.
The pedagogical approach is based on a hard-cop/soft-cop methodology. Training great writers entails toughening them up to ‘take criticism’, to survive baptisms of fire (as we shall see later; in writing-as-therapy, the emphasis is on avoiding hurting people’s feelings (after all, if the writing is thought to be expressing the ‘self’, then the ‘self’ will be under scrutiny along with the writing), by ‘supportive criticism’, ie, to find ways of saying something is rubbish without upsetting or patronising them by saying well done for trying.
Siobhan Holland’s report referred to ‘The need for robust support structures to students who may well draw on traumatic experiences in the processes of reading and writing.’21 This is consonant with Celia Hunt and Fiona Sampson’s suggestion that: ‘CW classes may become, on occasion, arenas where deep feelings and emotions are unearthed and expressed, and teachers and group leaders may sometimes find themselves in the position of counsellor or therapist, without the appropriate skills to act as such.’22
If that is so, then the CW (ie, the university) classroom becomes a therapy group, with teachers needing ‘…to be aware of the importance of creating in the classroom a “holding environment”, to use Winnicott’s term, within which participants can feel safe enough to engage more closely with their inner worlds. This can be done by organising peer support within the writing group itself, or through the availability of individual consultations with the tutor, or by having available counselling or psychotherapeutic backup which can be used when necessary.’ 23 This presents the CW teachers with an impossible – if not dangerous task. Carrying out the desired task of ‘constructive criticism’ involves creating right kind of group dynamic: Liz Almond, in ‘The Workshop Way’, says the workshop ‘… should provide a safe environment whereby you can get to know and respect other people through their work and begin to develop an ability to offer constructive criticism.’24 ‘It takes time,’ she explains, ‘to develop a critical vocabulary if you’re not used to responding to other people’s work.’25 Yes; it’s called doing an English degree.
Training for criticism and Houses of Correction
Paul Dawson argues that the ‘pedagogical practice of the workshop is fundamentally one of critical reading’, and is thus based on ‘a theory of reading’. 26 Taking this from Emerson’s concept of ‘creative reading’, he suggests that this CW theory of reading, which ‘developed out of Literary Studies rather than composition’, is converted to the concept of the workshop as based on ‘reading from the inside; the practice of writing as a means of developing literary appreciation and critical skills’(his italics). This is an extraordinary idea…, where CW claims to be equipped to take over the functions of English. The implication that CW is itself the site of a training in critical reading does serious injustice to the complexity of notions of ‘reading’ as well as to notions of ‘writing’ and ‘criticism’.
Tom Grim
es, in The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Workshop, spells out the workshop experience:
Nearly every participant has sensed and reacted with some apprehension to a spirit of competition in the Workshop setting. But many writers view the ordeal of measuring their talent against the talent of others as a necessary crisis in their artistic development. Paul Engle believes that the intensity of this experience contributes to the writer’s growth.’27
Robert Graham, who visited the Iowa Workshop 2001 wrote about Frank Conroy’s class:
This gender-divide of hard cop/soft cop has resonances with the later chapter on women/gender.
Tom Grimes takes up the story:
An appropriate slogan, suggests Grimes, for the Workshop, might be ‘Abandon all Hope, all ye who enter here’.30
Workshops are not a climate in which genuine teaching and learning can take place. Instead, they are sado-masochistic Houses of Correction on a Victorian scale.
Well, words fail me. Almost. What respectable, important subject or occupation could possibly justify its sado-masochistic methods in this way? Despite the fact that very many CW teachers are passionately committed to their students, conscientious about the ways in which they teach/try to teach, it is absolutely vital to recognise the vice-like grip of an impossible combination: the patronising of individual vulnerability alongside a method which cannot fail but be discouraging and educationally disempowering. It is not a climate in which genuine teaching and learning can take place. Such workshops are sado-masochistic Houses of Correction on a Victorian scale.
I am not the only dissenter here, though voices of protest are occasional, and rarely sustained. Rob Mimpriss, one of the very few CW students who has dared to raise his head above the received wisdom of the workshop parapet: ‘I have been moving towards the conclusion that the workshop has little to offer the writer, and may at times do harm…Not everyone will feel willing to speak, and what they say will be influenced by the group dynamic as they learn how hard it is to be the only dissenting voice, to be cruel when others have been kind, or to damn one student’s work after praising another’s.’31 Some teachers have articulated their reservations. Ali Smith admitted: ‘Teaching creative writing workshops gives me irritable bowel syndrome.’32 As Alan Mahar commented, ‘Offering criticism of another’s writing can be a precarious affair; listening to criticism can be downright disastrous.’33
From her 1992 research project into community writing groups, Rebecca O’Rourke stated stringently that ‘People are working with cobbled together models of constructive criticism drawn from school – criticism as negative, unpleasant and fault finding – and from the market – criticism as a selective judgement. I found few models drawn from the writing process — criticism as a means to extend, clarify and challenge the writer …’
She also reported concerns about ‘feedback’ and ‘criticism’: ‘A contradiction began to emerge. People went to writing groups in order to get feedback on their work and yet were almost always unhappy with the feedback they received. The issue was partly a question of whose responsibility criticism was seen to be: did it belong to the writer, the group or its leader/tutor. Some felt encouragement was incompatible with criticising work.’34
These comments were not voiced within the workshops, but safely away from it, to someone not involved with the group:
Students wanted more guidelines from the tutors: ‘Tension surrounding feedback and criticism was a constant theme in the life of the creative writing groups and courses. It was cited as the most important aspect of the activity, and the one people wanted most to change.’ Therefore ‘Students expected tutors to deal in absolutes – what was right and what was wrong, good or bad – and to offer definite opinions.’ The corollary to this was that ‘…many students do not trust the judgement of their peers….’35 O’Rourke’s conclusion is that ‘Central to the problem are issues of power and authority within courses/groups…’ Of course, this is only a ‘problem’ if one seeks to deny the authority of the CW teacher in the interests of a simplistic egalitarianism. This stands in contrast with the guru/acolyte model, where the guru clearly has ‘knowledge’ and the acolyte is clearly there to ‘receive’ it.
Conclusions
This is a summary of the pedagogical implications of the irreconcilable conflicts at the heart of current Creative Writing pedagogy. The conflictual models are shoe-horned into a pedagogic practice which renders the workshop as a House of Correction, built round rewriting, rather than writing. Untheorised (or, at best, under-theorised) principles of ‘criticism’ are translated into, by turns, brutal and patronizing exchanges. This devolves the conceptual oppositions into the centre of the student-teacher relationship. In addition, this denies CW’s relationship to its own histories, which are those embedded in the history of English: literary criticism and literary theory. The apparent sanctuary which within which creativity is supposed to flourish, turns out to be a repository for a set of Emperor’s clothes, which do not fit: piecemeal pragmatic assumptions about rewriting drive the hard-cop/soft cop process.
♦
MICHELENE WANDOR is a poet, dramatist, esssayist and teacher. This essay is adapted from her 2008 book, The Author Is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived. She is the author of Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin (2021). She is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review and currently tutors on the Distance Learning MA (DLMA) in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her first novel, Orfeo’s Last Act, will be published later this year.
NOTES.
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Publication: Monday, 20 February 2023, at 17:52.
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