Dear Readers:
Each month (or whatever), you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. This is the 43rd one.
The word “workshop” makes me think of this ceramics class that my brothers and I and almost everyone we knew took when we were kids. There was no progression; it was just Ceramics, and you could take it as many times as you wanted. On the first day of each run of the class, the teacher, Hardy, explained the different types of clay–the regular gray kind, a stiff terra cotta, and porcelain. He told us what kinds of glaze were best for different scenarios. He told us about the wheel and said he could show us how to use it.
Then he let us do whatever we wanted. Sometimes he’d warn us that big, heavy things might break apart in the kiln, but he wasn’t telling us not to make big, heavy things. He was just saying what might happen if you did. You could make a pizza out of porcelain, a stuffed one as big and thick as an actual Giordano’s. You could make a whole village of buildings and people. You could make a heavy hippopotamus. A replica of your house. A sign that said anything.
I loved starting a project, walking over to the enormous lump of the main kind of clay. It was the dusty gray of a certain type of chocolate ice cream they only have in ice cream parlors. I would grab as much I could, leaving finger smears all over the communal lump, and carry it back to the work table with absolutely no idea of what I was going to make.
That, to me, is a workshop.
You always have the option to make whatever you want. I usually take that option. During my education, this resulted in negative outcomes ranging from mild “what are you doing, Lucy?”s to gentlemen’s C minuses to “it was a huge mistake to admit you into this elite program.” Ceramics was the only time when making whatever you wanted was what the class was about. The only time in my entire education!
I took an afterschool ceramics class at Lab School, in fourth or fifth grade, where we were instructed on how to build a beautiful round box with a flower inside it. There was only one type of clay and we all got the same amount. We had to roll it out into a long snake, then coil the snake into a neat circle. This was the base of the box. Then we got another piece of clay, which we rolled out into an even longer snake. This we wrapped around the circumference of the base, creating a neat round container. The lid was another neat snake-circle. Then we wet our fingers and smoothed out the snakes, so no one who saw our boxes would ever know about them. Finally, we made the flowers that would sit inside the box by tracing petal-shaped stencils with Xacto knives. My box ended up beautiful. It looked like everybody else’s, and I was proud.
I don’t know why I remember this whole process so well. I don’t remember anything I learned or made during Hardy’s workshops. Just the feeling, empowerment mixed with responsibility. It was a complicated feeling, because when, inevitably, what you richly imagined ended up looking a way that led your parents to laugh when you brought it home, you realized that your imagination had bumped up against your capabilities.
To get better, to make your ceramics less funny, there were two things you could do. You could try to increase your skill by sitting at that boring wheel with Hardy, or you could do the easier thing: imagine less. We had all learned in school to imagine less. But in Ceramics, there was no one to get better for, no sense that getting better was of value, so you didn’t have to make that choice, and no one did. Yes, our parents laughed at our ceramics, but Hardy was the ceramics expert, not them, and he didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything at all–just neutral, logistical things like, “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you made last week are out of the kiln.”
I wanted to study creative writing in college because the course catalog called writing classes workshops. The word workshop! But creative writing workshops turned out to be the kind of class where the teacher has huge authority and there’s an immutable pattern that each class period follows. Mark McGurl describes it in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing as “a small group of students sitting around a table discussing each other’s stories, with the professor sitting in as a moderator and living example of an actual author.” The Program Era is a really important book because it is the first time literary studies has looked at institutionalized creative writing. McGurl is basically using his brilliant theory-mind to interpret D.G. Myers’ The Elephants Teach, the definitive history of American creative writing as a discipline (definitive because it is the only one, not because it is good. I don’t like it at all and I may tell you about that another time). Here’s another thing McGurl says about workshops:
No one has ever proved that creative writers make the best creative writing teachers, but that sort of proof is evidently beside the point. What the literary artist is presenting to students in the classroom is a charismatic model of creative being.
Into the gap where things would be taught in, say, an English literature class, comes the workshop leader’s authority as “a charismatic model of creative being.” I was disappointed to discover this, but the disappointment was muted by the amount of positive feedback I got from my classmates and the workshop leader--positive to the point where I ended up dating the workshop leader for several years. It never occurred to me to think what Hardy thought about my ceramics. I had a sense of him as an expert, but not as an arbiter.
In The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Felicia Rose Chavez offers a strong critique of workshops as they are and specific, targeted ways to change them. She points out, for example, that the workshop “honors predominantly white workshop leaders renowned for their high-caliber publications and degree accreditation” and proposes a model that “honors workshop leaders who’ve earned distinction as innovative and effective allies to writers of color, ranking superior teaching over publication credits or master’s awards.” I think all creative writing workshops should adopt her proposals immediately. But I really wish they’d just stop honoring any leader.
It’s interesting to consider Chavez’s and McGurl’s critiques of the workshop side by side, because they are essentially making the same point in completely different tones. Chavez, the creative writer, is lyric, personal, superserious: “When I speak of the traditional writing workshop mode, I speak of an institution of dominance and control.” McGurl, on the other hand, sometimes sounds like he’s stifling a laugh. At the end of the book, he writes about the “rhetoric of excellence in the university”--excellence is the goal, the justification, the operating principle.
And isn’t postwar American fiction, after all, unprecedented in its excellence? If I could, I would ask this concluding question with two voices in counterpoint, and only one of them sarcastic.
McGurl is praising the diversity, variety, and richness of Program Era fiction with one of those two voices. And the other voice, the sarcastic one, he just gestures at throughout the book because it’s so obvious: what kind of art, what kind of artists, adhere to state-sponsored institutions like this? What is going on?
McGurl is writing to his literary studies peers, not to the creative writing professors on the other side of the hallway. They’re not going to read this. But if they did, what would they think? I hope they would read “excellence” as an insult. But a lot of them, I know, would take the opportunity to be honored.
Sincerely,
Lucy
My finer works are the Grecian vases and kylikes I made when I was nine but I suppose I don’t get to choose the illustration 😤
So wonderful I don’t know what to say.