Creative Writing and Education (New Writing Viewpoints): 11 - Softcover

Graeme Harper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783093528 ISBN 13: 9781783093526

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2015

Synopsis

This book explores creative writing and its various relationships to education through a number of short, evocative chapters written by key players in the field. At times controversial, the book presents issues, ideas and pedagogic practices related to creative writing in and around education, with a focus on higher education. The volume aims to give the reader a sense of contemporary thinking and to provide some alternative points of view, offering examples of how those involved feel about the relationship between creative writing and education. Many of the contributors play notable roles in national and international organizations concerned with creative writing and education. The book also includes a Foreword by Philip Gross, who won the 2009 TS Eliot Prize for poetry.

About this title

About the Author

Graeme Harper is a Professor of Creative Writing at Oakland University, Michigan, USA. He is Series Editor of New Writing Viewpoints, as well as Editor of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. Graeme was the inaugural chair of the Higher Education Committee at the UK's National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE). He is an award-winning fiction writer and a former Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Creative Writing and Education

By Graeme Harper

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2015 Graeme Harper and the authors of individual chapters and commentaries
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-352-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
About the Authors, 
Accounting for the Unaccountable: A foreword in 42 tweets Philip Gross, 
Creative Writing and Education: An Introduction Graeme Harper, 
Chapter 1 Revelation, Transgression, Disclosure and the Tyranny of Truth Randall Albers and Steve May, 
Chapter 2 Dragging the Corpse: Landscape and Memory. Two Writers Consider How the Role of Identity in Their Own Writing Leads into Educational Practice Liz Cashdan and Moy McCrory, 
Commentary 1 The Breath and the Bomb, or, In Praise of the Uneducable Marcela Sulak, 
Chapter 3 Embracing the Learning Paradigm: How Assessment Drives Creative Writing Pedagogy Dianne Donnelly, 
Chapter 4 Greater Satisfaction from the Labor: Creative Writing as a Text Response Strategy in the Teacher Education Classroom Toby Emert and Maureen Hall, 
Commentary 2 Poetry by Heart Paul Munden, 
Chapter 5 Creative Writing as Education in the Chinese Context Fan Dai, 
Commentary 3 Tracing Roots in a Foreign Language Asma Mansoor, 
Chapter 6 Questions and Answers: Responding to Creative Writing Teaching and Learning Craig Batty, Simon Holloway and Gill James (with Graeme Harper), 
Commentary 4 Against Carefulness Katharine Coles, 
Chapter 7 Interpretation, Affordance and Realized Intention: The Transaction(s) Between Reader and Writer Nigel McLoughlin, 
Chapter 8 Movement, Maps, Mnemonics and Music: Teaching Fiction and Poetry Writing Using Sight and Sound Gail Pittaway, 
Commentary 5 Don't Look Now: Exploring Smellscapes and Soundscapes Helps Writers-To-Be Sieneke de Rooij, 
Chapter 9 Redesigning the Lecture in a Cyber World: A Creative Writing Case Study Kevin Brophy and Elizabeth MacFarlane, 
Chapter 10 Originality and Research: Knowledge Production in Creative Writing Doctoral Degrees Jeri Kroll, 
Commentary 6 Taking Creative Writing Seriously in Schools Maggie Butt, 
Chapter 11 The Poetry of Evaluation: Helping Students Explore How They Value Verse Michael Theune and Bob Broad, 
Chapter 12 The Radical Future of Teaching Creative Writing Nigel Krauth, 
Commentary 7 'Born This Way': In Celebration of Lady Gaga Brooke Biaz, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Revelation, Transgression, Disclosure and the Tyranny of Truth

Randall Albers and Steve May

This chapter is written in the form of a dialectic, with some fortunate moments of agreement.

Randall Albers: One of the oldest saws in the teaching of creative writing is 'Write what you know'. This canard ranks right up there with 'Show; don't tell' in popularity and half-truth. (Do Flaubert, Faulkner, Woolf and others limit themselves to showing? No, they do both.) The dictum seems to imply: Writing must draw on the writer's own experience, what the person has lived and seen, in order to have any claim to the attention of an audience. If writing what you know were limited to writing only what you had experienced or seen first-hand, fiction would be a pretty paltry thing indeed.

Steve May: Only if one's experience were paltry – isn't the key issue the implication that only those blessed with magnificent experience can be magnificent writers? So the question is, how do those of us with paltry lives (like Baudelaire, 1861: 250) turn 'miserable sludge' (boue) into gold?

RA: Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, tells of times when he would not be able to get a story going. Standing in front of his fire, squeezing the peel of an orange into the flames to watch it sputter, he would look out over the Paris rooftops and tell himself, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence.' And invariably, he would write that one true sentence and then go on: 'It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. ... Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about' (Hemingway, 1964: 13).

SM: But what is this 'truth' that Hemingway – and, we might venture, writing teachers and students – hope to claim?

RA: Writing what he 'knew' seems coincident with what he felt was 'true' and was necessary to story. Hemingway's notion of felt truth departs from what some philosophers have tried to prove about objective truth, but it recalls Keats's linking of the two in asserting that 'axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses' (Keats, 1818). The key point here is that truth is discovered in the mind – and heart – of the beholder.

SM: So, while the external world, sludge or no, may be the source of our writing, ultimately truth is found in what we make of our experience, not simply in scientific examination and fidelity to external fact.

RA: It doesn't take Hemingway to remind us that truth is an internal, felt response more than an external, objective reality. And it doesn't take Coleridge to remind us that what we know is as much a product of imagination and dreams as of experience – Hobbes, Locke and the empiricists notwithstanding (Coleridge, 1817: 167). In fact, conflating knowing and truth can be a trap. While Hemingway may use his feeling of the truth of something he has known or seen or heard as a means of engendering his sense of possibility and of pushing past the paralysis of writer's block, for others hyperawareness of the need for maintaining fidelity to the way things 'really' happened may actually prompt that paralysis. Writers may not be aware of the cause. They may simply find themselves sitting at their computer, trying to write a scene and not able to get it out. They can't see it clearly enough, can't find the right language, can't hear their voice on the page. And suddenly, they feel the weighty presence of the monkey censor on their shoulder, whispering 'You can't write that! What will the critics think? What will your friends think? What will your mother think? My lord, you'll never hear the end of it!' And that's followed by 'You know, you'll just never be good enough. If you wanted to tell fictions, why didn't you just listen to your mother and become a lawyer? It would've paid better.' SM: Blake (1793) put the same point rather differently:

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

So, we want the bird, we want the truth about the bird, that is the goal. And in order to locate that truth, some grasp of the airy way through which it travels would be useful, if it is air or ether and whether it permits a vacuum. Trouble is, there is no 'available objective reality'. To expand: 'available' means available to us as creatures, 'objective' means untinged or untainted by perception and 'reality' means 'in quotes reality' because we can't have it without the modifying inverts. So, there might be a reality, an objective reality, an unambiguous and fully consistent reality, but it is not available to us, either as poets, novelists, playwrights or physicists. The flat fish with two eyes on the same side of its head will see a moon other than the moon of the toad. Indeed, the toad may be a two- or three-moon creature, depending on its state of amphibiousness at any particular time:

In short, it seems as if language is like a great balloon, anchored to the ground of nonlinguistic fact only by a number of widely scattered and very thin (but all-important) ropes. (Putnam, 1975: 4)

For our purposes here, the main out-thrust of this proposition is that 'truth' is not an invariable objective, but a subjective variable, a product of our closed senses. This is hardly a heartening place to start for the new writer, nor indeed any writer. For one thing, Creative Writing traditionally celebrates the senses, and has a rich history of prompt exercises that depend on sight, smell, taste, sound and touch. If we apply some or all of these to the bird, it seems we are not finding its true essence, but constructing a distorted wraith. Further, our distorted wraiths are all different (if they were all the same, we might begin to have evidence of an available objective reality).

RA: Without getting any more deeply (and unreferenced) into the epistemological debate carried on by Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle and others, we might ask 'How do teachers and students of creative writing understand "truth" and how do they respond to its call within themselves?' With Emerson's self-reliance: 'To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, – that is genius' (Emerson, 1841: 147)? Or perhaps with Wilde's less sure view: 'The truth is rarely pure and never simple' (Wilde, 1895: 35)? More practically speaking, how do teachers help students break free of truth's tyranny in order to silence the monkey censor, realize their own unfolding vision and write fiction, non-fiction, poems or plays not bound by notions of 'correctness' (political, moral or other). And how, correspondingly, do we help students learn to be open to suggestion, avoid unalterable, solipsistic belief in their own world-view and respond to the wider social matrix in which they live and write?

SM: Try this simple experiment:

Show an object to one group of people. Get them to describe it without naming it. Let them read their descriptions one by one to another group, who have not seen the object, and who then try to draw the images evoked in their minds by the descriptions. (May, 2007: 46)

RA: It doesn't sound simple.

SM: Trust me. The drawings will usually vary widely, as will interpretations of the 'meaning' or 'reality' of the evoked objects. Why? Not just because some people are 'better' at describing things, or because some are 'better' at understanding or drawing, but because the differing preconceptions, knowledge and experience of the writer and reader make it impossible that the two versions of the 'thing' are the same. Nor, of course, can the perceptions of two different readers be identical. Or even six.

RA: Reminds me of the tale passed down from ancient India of the six blind men touching different parts of an elephant and finding that it is like six different things – a pillar, a rope, a tree branch and so on. None of them is 'right' in the sense of knowing the full picture; each has his own picture, his own experience of the object, his own version of elephant reality. And while, it must be said, each has the potential for telling a perfectly fine and true story about that reality, putting all six stories together as readers will not ultimately get us any closer to the objective 'truth' of the beast than any one of them. Just as for Blake's bird.

SM: Let's hop down a different path in the rose garden. Let's deconstruct a somewhat jaundiced version of what we are asking of our students in the classroom:

Dear class, I'd like you to write something that fulfills the expectations first of your peer group within this classroom, and then, possibly in the future, that fulfills the expectations of a larger group of public persons and makes you a modest but respectable income. Now, don't get me wrong, this is not a simple business, nor can it be entirely conscious. Setting out to write a 'bestseller' (or a cult book, or even a TV repair instruction manual, if they still had them) is not generally considered a good plan. Why? There will be a large number of expectations and assumptions of which neither you nor your audience are aware, and so hitting these will be a process of trial, error or luck (we call this workshopping). Because there is no available objective reality, it is up to you to create a 'reality' that floats the boat, tickles the boxes and hits the spot for the majority of your audience.

Please don't take this for the heartless process it might appear; indeed, arousing the emotions of your audience is probably going to be one of the boxes to tick, enlisting their sympathy, making them believe, making them want something good to happen to someone, or bad to someone else – you may often find yourself in tears, or in fears, or in a transported state – all the better. It may also be of benefit if you appear not to be conforming to the assumptions and values of the culture you are courting. Witness how the chattering classes of the UK respond with shuddering pleasure to a bit of rough in the form of (say) the novels of Irvine Welsh. Vicarious transgression (so long as everyone can get home safe for tea) is probably a plus. Gender, social and racial stereotypes are good ground for the manipulation of expectation and response: the skilled artist can go beyond mere reversal (woman as strong instigator – very passé) to the double or triple inversion – woman appears strong, is weak, finds strength later on. Finally, don't tell me you are writing what you are writing because it's 'true'. The so-called truth almost invariably spoils a good story and, as we all know by now, there is no available objective reality, so throw that stuffed bird out the window. And we will not be expecting you to write with precision – how can you be precise when the thing you're describing is imprecise?

Let's leave that classroom and see what we've got.

If there is no available objective reality, then our best efforts will leave us with a metaphorical room full of drawings, containing a variety of shapes and textures, triangles that could be beaks, pronged things, feathery protuberances, beady, bulging circles. Have we got anywhere as writers – any further than if we simply called it a bird and shut the bird book?

RA: Students faced with the blank page and forced to decide between naively asserting the truth of their own experience and wholeheartedly accepting the truth of a table-thumping audience of peers and teacher find themselves in a precarious position, even an utter quandary. Do they simply put forth their own vision of the bird and insist upon its validity, any objections notwithstanding, or do they give themselves over to the will of the group – and, more often than not, the teacher – in order to please that audience and hope for the aforementioned modest but respectable reward?

Writing is a complex activity, bringing many areas of the brain into play at once. It demands free play of the individual's mental faculties. As Lad Tobin has ably shown, the writing classroom is fraught with power relationships – student to student, student to teacher, student to group – any of which have the potential to inhibit this free play by directing the student writer's attention to what cannot or should not be expressed rather than to what can be – must be – if imagination is to do its work (Tobin, 1993).

Teachers need not be Paper Chase tyrants in order to convey subtly, even unconsciously, that certain kinds of student will be set above others or that certain kinds of behavior will be rewarded. We have all seen classrooms, and may have been students in them ourselves, where grandstanding is the name of the game, where those in the front row vying for the teacher's attention manage to get it, where students from a certain class, carrying a certain brand of educational preparedness, of a certain gender or race or ethnicity, displaying a certain facility of expression, are allowed to run the show – all regardless of talent, motivation, creativity and so on.

SM: Attending a script-writing course where the tutor had developed a singular style of character self-narration (e.g. BILL: And Bill rises in a fury to strike Ben), it was somewhat disturbing to find that all but one student attending the course were writing their scripts in the same way by the end of the week. Lord knows what had happened to our morals.

RA: The problem for developing writers is compounded when the will of the external negative audience has been internalized, when the desire to please that audience has been so inculcated through years of straight-line, follow-the-rules schooling, when the voices of parents, relatives, friends or the frowning wider audience result in a self-censorship so pervasive and so profound that any notion of personal power has been negated by the power of the group. Not to say that all audiences are bad in this regard. The desire to please an audience that is not judgmental except in the sense of wanting the best that the person can do can be enabling and helpful in producing excellent writing. And helping students experiment with different kinds of audience in order to find the most enabling and helpful should be part of the teacher's effort in the classroom. Meanwhile, students who lack this experience and who carry around the internalized version of a negative, judgmental audience may feel exposed, that they are revealing too much as they set pen to page or fingers to keyboard. A student writing a novel in which one of the main characters is a cutter will often get the question from one or more classmates: 'Is that you?' The question presents a dilemma for her. Should she avoid answering? Should she show her own scars and say yes? Should she lie and say 'No, I just happen to have known some cutters in my life' or 'No, I just did research and made a character out of it'?

SM: Or the mature student who is writing the 'true' story of her horrifying childhood (which her family strenuously denies). Her father, mother, uncles, aunts and friends were satanic abusers. She has a frightening power of imagining herself into that child, and to see and hear and smell and touch with that child, and convey those sensations to the reader. We are with the horror of the child being passed round a circle of leering men, beside a crackling coal fire, the whiff of their spittle, the cackles, the murmurs, the sensation on our surprised and vulnerable bodies. How might her workshop tutor and fellow students respond to her work in progress?

RA: It's the writing, not the writer?

SM: So, for example, suggesting that in the scene involving the father, the two uncles, and two other unidentified men, might it be more effective to reduce the number of abusers to three? This would focus the scene, reduce repetition and, by the principle of less is more, actually increase the anguish and pain.

RA: And she replies – 'But there were five'.

SM: And never sells the book, I think.

RA: But wrote it to her own satisfaction?

SM: Her father, who denied it all, died while she was writing it.

RA: Students in creative writing classes must find ways of confronting the tyranny of truth and mediating between internal and external claims to knowing. Between Bishop Berkeley's assertion that nothing exists without a perceiving mind (Berkeley, 1710: 62) and Dr Johnson's gruff, foot-stomping response 'I refute it thus!' (Boswell, 1791) there would seem to be precious little space to move.

In the end, of course, all except legal prohibitions are internal. Since the immediate audience of the writing classroom acts as a stand-in for the wider audience, it posits a social context that appears to be external but which students internalize. Our goal as teachers must be to help developing writers retain ultimate ownership and agency for their own work while also creating an environment enabling them to take in suggestions of others in the workshop openly, to reflect upon them without giving those voices undue power, and to sort out what might be 'true' for their own story and what is not.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Creative Writing and Education by Graeme Harper. Copyright © 2015 Graeme Harper and the authors of individual chapters and commentaries. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783093528
• ISBN 13: 9781783093526
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Graeme Harper