By: Joe Ponce
Originally published November 4, 2022
Imagine an undergrad creative writing workshop. Usually, it hasn’t been updated in a while: whitewashed walls, an unused dry erase board with incoherent smears and squiggles. You’ve given a piece of fiction to be critiqued by a group of other would-be writers, led by a professional, someone with years of experience teaching. Each piece of fiction is read tabula rasa before class, at which point the group discusses the work, led by the faculty member. The writer isn’t supposed to speak until discussion is finished, but absorb the work, unable to correct or clarify the record. This model works when the workshop has similar makeup — as the Iowa Writer’s Workshop did, funded by the GI bill and housing only white cisgendered male war veterans (Salesses, 2021).
But it doesn’t work very well when writers come in with different experiences, perspectives, and cultures. In fact, it fails them.
In 2021, Felica Rose Chavez wrote “The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop” to contend with her experiences in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop as a Chicana and first-generation student. Her book argues that the traditional writing workshop is flawed in its foundations, fueled by cisgendered, White male perspectives presented as “normal” human experience (Chavez, 2021). The workshop as it exists fuels systems of competition, forcing students into false consensus-seeking, rather than engaging with the author. The author’s voice, if it is heard at all, comes at the end of the workshop, which can be a troubling experience for marginalized voices already invalidated in the educational space.
Matt Salesses reaches a similar conclusion in his novel, Craft in the Real World (2021): a workshop should be directed by writer’s needs and community-based input, not false consensus. He argues this is done by respecting and engaging with different perspectives, by asking questions and following the writer’s needs and concerns.
But how does this happen? Some ideas for faculty, as well as students:
● Decolonizing your syllabus (writing samples & writing textbooks). For some ideas, check out Felica Rose Chavez’s Resources on her webpage, which includes a community-generated list of diverse writers in both fiction and non-fiction. As a student, decolonizing can mean reading widely from authors outside your own zone of experience. Seek out award-winning books translated from other languages (books which sometimes follow zero of what we think of as “common” fiction conventions).
● Changing the practices within the workshop. Salesses mentions requiring an Author’s Note, where writers compose a short reflection on their writing — the presumed successes and failures they had while writing — that readers read alongside the draft to get an idea of writer intention. This keeps conversations from derailing. Authors’ notes also force writers to consider their own intentions, which a conventional workshop explicitly disallows by not allowing writers to speak for most of the workshop.
● Other methods for changing the format of the workshop: workshops could consider letting the Writer lead the workshop, picking two or three discussion areas for brainstorming or speculation. Or, letting the Writer lead a Devil’s Advocate workshop, where they say everything they don’t like about the piece, while the other writers either defend it or try to offer solutions. Consider asking all students to prepare a topic to speak about — the characterization, plotting, blocking, tone — and then focusing on three at random.
As a student, this might involve difficult conversations: confronting long-standing systems in your institution, or suggesting alternate (non-“canonical”) examples might work in a specific scene. It might involve asking a faculty member when the last time they updated their syllabus was, or in what ways they could expand their canon to include more marginalized writers. It might also involve asking your department or school, what are they doing to actively recruit and retain faculty of color? Certainly these are difficult, but necessary, conversations.
Ultimately, these dilemmas are solved only by bringing more voices to the table, and letting them speak.
References
Chavez, F. R. (2021). The anti-racist writing workshop: how to decolonize the creative classroom. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.
Salesses, M. (2021). Craft in the real world: rethinking fiction writing and workshopping. New York: Catapult.