Just read this essay-review by Louis Menand in the June 8-15 issue of The New Yorker. Using a review of Mark McGurl's book, The Program Era, Menand goes into a lengthy and quite interesting reverie about writers workshops and the writers who have attended them and taught in them. The title of Menand's piece is: "Show or Tell (Should creative writing be taught?)"
The "should" instead of a "can" in the subtitle gave me pause. I have elsewhere here offered my opinion that elements of essential writing craft can be taught, and quite obviously is taught, beginning in first or second grade of elementary school, but if by creative writing is meant when that leap is made from being able to write a coherent sentence to the artful act of story-telling with sentences, the creative part of writing, then I stick to my opinion that creativity of that kind is not taught, cannot be taught. Therefore, "should" is irrelevant. Not different from stating that I should flap my arms really hard and fly to Saturn. Should ought to imply can.
Menand opens by stating: "Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem." Change poem to story or novel and the theory remains unaltered.
At Iowa, he explains, the theory is somewhat different, in that the Workshop (staff) makes no claims to teaching writing; the purpose is to encourage writing. It is assumed that if you made the intense cut for acceptance into the program, you are already a good writer.
I applied to, was accepted, and attended the Iowa Writers Workshop between 1980 and 1982. There were 25 students accepted that year (into fiction, with another 25 in the poetry workshop), and, I was told, we came from an applicant pool of some thousands. Is that possible? Regardless, I had no illusions that I was moving to Iowa City to "learn how to be a writer." I thought I had been a writer already by that time for well more than a decade; they would not have even accepted me if I wasn't already a writer. What I wanted to be, and what I hoped Iowa would open opportunities for, was an author; if that failed, the fallback position was the MFA, a terminal degree in a talent field which would allow me to try to find a teaching job somewhere. I did not find garret-living attractive.
I became an author the same year I finished the MFA, so I never did end up using the degree to "teach" writing. And I do credit my attendance at Iowa for opening the door to my career as an author. I got from the program precisely what I hoped to get: an agent and then a publisher.
But, in spite of the Iowa theory that the workshop existed solely to support writers so they could write, there was this insidious little notion that persisted among some members of the staff that students who had never published a word were going to help other students who had never published a word to become published novelists. All our instructors were published writers, some with novels and some with story collections, but they acted in workshop sessions more as traffic cops than teachers; their task being to help move the critique sessions (students on students) along when things bogged down, and to help mop up the blood when students cut each other's throats.
A writer I know recently sent these lines to me in an email (and I hope he won't mind if I use them here): "Almost all the workshop advice that I've ever received has been aimed at excising those elements of my prose that I feel make it distinctive and alive. Most of the workshop writers that I encountered wanted to sculpt other people's work to resemble their own -- or in some cases to cripple a text so that it didn't shine brighter than something they wrote. I find that the stack of books on my desk offer plenty of advice without the snarkiness and sly malevolence."
I participated in Iowa workshop sessions as little as possible, because, like my friend above, after watching the blood sport that workshop critiques are like, I couldn't see any useful purpose in diving in headfirst. I saw my attendance in workshop sessions as essentially a necessary aspect of having accepted the offer to attend, and a prerequisite to getting the degree.
There was in my day one notable exception, Don Hendrie, Jr. He died a young man in 1995. He had published a couple of novels and a few story collections with small literary presses, and I have now read everything he wrote. He was an awfully good writer. He was also the best teacher I had at Iowa. Not so much because of how he moderated the workshop sessions, but because he actually read carefully what we submitted, and in private sessions in his office, taught me what editing is, the power of writing a story word by word, sentence by sentence, rather than in some great free-writing leap, which I was inclined to do in those days. (I rather fault drugs and alcohol for this.) If you read Don Hendrie's books, and you should, you can find them by Googling his name, you will see that he was passing along to anyone he thought good enough, what he was doing in his own work. He wasn't teaching craft, he was offering a way to think about craft that he had already figured out through his own trial and error work.
I think Don Hendrie, Jr. was as rare a find as the Iowa program itself was in those days, but as I do not think Iowa remains; it's prestige and value likely not lasting as long as Don did. The point of programs in creative writing has been so diluted that the original Iowa experience simply may no longer exist -- gone with manual typewriters, mimeograph machines, and pens on paper. Menand says in the article that in 1975, just five years before I entered the Iowa program, there were only 15 degree-granting creative writing workshops in the country. Today, he notes, there are 153 MFA creative writing programs.
I am a small is better kind of person. I much prefer small publishers to large. I detested my author experiences with huge publishing companies (see the post below this one). I am in love with my small publisher. Being one of ten offers a kind of intensity and quality that being one of a thousand cannot. In this regard, I think that whatever value existed in creative writing programs before my day in the early 80s, when I attended one of fifteen, it was probably more valuable than what the same experience is today. There is as much logic and experience in this judgement as simple nostalgia for "the good old days."
On the other hand, put a dozen or so writers in one small university town, and the parties are going to be really, really interesting.
