Why I Don’t Believe in Workshop Anymore

• STARTING SOON: Why We Love Henry James. I’m getting more and more excited for this year-long sequence of classes on my favorite novelist; I feel like I’m getting away with something, nobody call the cops. Over six seminars we will explore a big swath of James’s career in fiction, early and late, which really does constitute one of the wonders of literature. But if you don’t feel up for a whole year of James, don’t worry—each class can stand on its own. We’re starting on September 17 with the one James novel everyone really should read: The Portrait of a Lady (1881 edition).“A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads one can’t see—that’s my idea of happiness,” its heroine, Isabel Archer, declares early in the book; as her fate takes her from pennilessness to fortune, from Albany, New York to Florence and Rome, James explores how devastating it can be to get what we want. It’s an extraordinary, depthless novel; it’s amazing that a human being wrote it. It also transformed the novel as a form, making much of what followed—much of what seems to us “modern” in modern fiction—possible.

  We’ll dig into James’s approach to characterization and scene, his exploration of American and European mores, his moral philosophy, his radical approach to psychology. And we’ll spend lots of time on his revolutionary sentences. Join us! All classes are recorded in case you can’t attend the sessions synchronously. Full and partial scholarships are available; scholarships for the Portrait class close on September 1. All the information you need is here. (A note: to see the individual class descriptions, along with notes about which editions of the texts I’ll be using, just scroll down on the main class page.)

• Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Pure Men (tr. Lara Vergnaud) is our next To a Green Thought Book Club pick. We’re meeting this Sunday, August 16, at 3pm ET—which still gives you plenty of time to read this very short novel. Book Club meets six times a year and is open to all Founding Members of this newsletter; to subscribe or upgrade your subscription, just click on the button below.

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Who ever thought it was a good idea? Ten or twelve students sitting around a table, the professor at its head, pronouncing on fifteen or twenty newly drafted pages—likely, at the beginning of the semester at least, the only writing anybody has seen from the student under review; while said student sits, head down and silent, supposedly listening and taking notes but actually, much of the time, too indignant or defeated or humiliated—or excited and flattered and exhilarated—to take anything in. Who came up with this model? Who thought this was the way to educate an artist? For decades around the middle of the century a kind of ethos of cruelty reigned. Frank Conroy, who directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for almost twenty years, reportedly believed a workshop wasn’t a success if nobody cried; even in a softer, more student-focused age, tears sometimes flow. I saw several fellow students cry over my years in school; only once in twenty-five years of teaching workshop has a student run out of one of my own classes in tears. Once is too often.

Toughen up! is what people say in response to such stories, and on one hand I see the point: if having your writing discussed around a seminar table constitutes something you consider trauma, take a breath and acknowledge that you have had a very lucky life. On the other hand, we are inculcated with the belief, by liberal arts educations (RIP) in general and by MFA programs in particular, that creative work is central to the meaning and value of our lives, that what we make is to a very large degree what and who we are. You can consider this a long hangover from Romanticism or you can consider it (as I do) the truth of the matter, or maybe it can be both; in any event, workshop is essentially a model wherein we bring something newly born and invested with our hopes, a little chick still dewy with albumen, and invite a group of our peers to smash it with stones.

For years I’ve tried to massage the model, altering it to maximize its potential to help and minimize its potential to harm, and I think I’ve made it about as good as (given my limitations) I can. Certainly I’ve been vocal with students about my reservations and frustrations, trying to critique the model from within. But practices are more powerful than propositions, and the practice of workshop enshrines a series of ideas about artmaking that I think are fundamentally false. All of which is to say that last semester I taught a workshop in which mostly I think things went right, and which certainly counted (thanks largely to the quality of the students) among the best I’ve had; and nevertheless I ended it feeling something I’ve been trying to stave off for a long time: that I had spent another semester engaged in an enterprise I finally think is fraudulent. This isn’t to say that nothing good can happen in workshop, or that nothing can be learned there; far from it. But it does mean that I won’t be teaching workshop anymore—not of the traditional, critique-based kind. That’s a slightly scary pronouncement, since teaching traditional workshops has been a big part of how I’ve made my living over the past decade. But I’m determined to stick to it, which is part of the point of saying it here. I need a different model.

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WHY WORKSHOP IS TERRIBLE

So what are these false beliefs encoded in the workshop model?