Teaching Writers

The New Yorker’s summer fiction issue is out, and it includes a longish—it seems as if every article in the New Yorker has to be a page or two too long—commentary by Louis Menaud entitled “Show or Tell: should creative writing be taught?”  I know.  This is an old, tired conversation, but it’s also impossible to avoid if you’re a writer, which means either you most likely have, will have, or will strongly consider having an MFA or you’re dead-set against the whole idea.  Menaud hits up all of the usual talking points: can writing be taught?  What damage do these programs inflict through “the impress of an institutional experience?”  Have they enriched or impoverished our literature?  Beyond all of that, I was struck by the way he conflates fiction, poetry, and creative-writing instruction.

Menaud opens by declaring: “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.”  Then he ties the piece off with an anecdote about his own experiences writing and workshopping poetry in college.  Despite these bookends, Menaud has little, if anything at all, to say about creative-writing programs and the teaching of poetry.  In fact, the essay centers on Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era, and its argument about “creative-writing programs and American fiction.”  Menaud, and apparently McGurl, provides a number of insights on the subject, but I couldn’t shake the essay’s implication that creative-writing programs that teach fiction and those that teach poetry are one and the same.

I’ve actually gone through (don’t ask) two creative writing programs, one specializing in poetry and another in fiction, and found the two experiences different in numerous ways.  All creative writing programs emphasize the workshop, and this format proves ideal for poetry, where 12-15 students may spend 20-30 minutes discussing a single poem.  This enables a kind of focus, line by line or even word by word, that can’t exist in a fiction workshop, where students bring in 10-15 page short stories or even novel chapters.  In addition, poetry, with its rich tradition of formal modes, allows for a wide breadth of exercises that focus solely on craft; for example, a poetry workshop may require students to write a petrarchan sonnet or a villanelle.  By comparison, the exercises in fiction workshops inevitably teach craft in broader terms, dealing with “setting” or “character development.”  Finally, much of what I valued in my MFA didn’t involve workshopping my poems. It involved mentorship, community, and reading lots and lots of poetry—both by my peers and others.

All writers learn through imitation; fiction writers imitate other fiction writers and poets imitate other poets. So, in order to imitate successfully, young writers need to find models that can inspire and instruct.  This is much harder for a young poet in our society, where poetry exists only at the margins of the margins; a creative writer leads an isolated life, but the poet’s isolation is more severe (as demonstrated by the emphasis in Menaud’s essay).  In this regard, the creative-writing program proves an invaluable aid to poets, offering a vital social space where they can immerse themselves in reading and writing poetry and, for lack of better words, “being a poet.”

by Martin Woodside