FROM THE ARCHIVES: Problems with Louis Menand's Essay: "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught?"

This week, I had reason to revisit what seems to be an interminable conversation on whether creative writing can be "taught," and so was inspired to cull my response from the Isak vaults. This post originally ran June 16, 2009.

Many of you sent me links to Louis Menand's six-page essay in The New Yorker, titled provocatively "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?" I put off reading it because, frankly, the can-writing-be-taught question seems to be on perpetual replay: every year or so, writers (!) ask it yet again, filling up column inches while rarely offering any original insight into MFA programs.

Usually these articles hit upon the seeming paradox of writing that, if it is "creative," can't be curriculum-ized, and yet many hundreds of people enter these programs each year and are awarded the degree of "master" (or, in some cases, "doctor"). Weirdly, no other creative art--painting, say, or musical composition--ever seems subject to the can-it-be-taught question like writing is, which for me casts a pall over anyone resurrecting the tired question in yet one more essay, yet one more blog post, yet one more book. It is, after all, writers of one type or another who keep asking this question, and I've suspected that by implying that no, the craft of writing can't be taught, it is an excuse for these writers to suggest that they themselves are among the geniuses who none of us, no matter how many workshops we attend, can match.

But back to Louis Menand's essay, in particular.

I gave it a go. The fact is, I'm aware of quite a lot of problems in how writing is taught in both undergraduate and graduate schools, and, being a writing teacher, I'd like to think about what can be improved in how writers can work with each other in both traditional and non-traditional venues. Perhaps, I thought, Mr. Menand will have insights. Perhaps he can be forgiven for the headline of his article which repeats a tired old question as if it were newly asked.

While Mr. Menand offers a useful overview of the history of writing programs, and the fluid ideas about their functionality, I'm afraid I had many problems with his essay. As follows:

1) It presumes from the very first paragraph that all writing programs are workshops. This is false. My MFA program pioneered the low-residency mentorship model; it's why I chose Warren Wilson College. Mr. Menand writes disparagingly about the workshop model, and I can sympathize with his points. His skepticism about writing as a teachable art is drawn from his skepticism of the workshop model--but to not acknowledge substantive and widespread alternative models (like mentorships and low-res programs) discredits his point.

2) Mr. Menand is hazy on what his objective is with this article. Is he arguing that writing can't really be taught, and so we should cut off all academic writing programs? Is he arguing for writing programs to be modified, developed in alternative and varied ways that better teach writing? More on this in #6.

 3) Mr. Menand is hazy on the stakes. Who, really, is suffering here? What is the urgency? Is he implying that fledgling writers are being hoodwinked? That taxpayers shouldn't be burdened by supporting fiction faculty at their local public university when fiction can't really be taught? That American letters is suffocating by a dozen or so people talking about their poems on the local campus? As Mr. Menand himself points out, while the number of writing programs is growing at a quick clip, "in 2005-06, only four-tenths of one per cent of all master’s degrees awarded were in creative writing."

To put it another way: say Mr. Menand is correct in every critical point he makes about writing programs in this essay; even then, I must ask, who cares?

4) Mr. Menand points to writers who were not "a product of the educational system"--Nabokov, Salinger, and Pynchon--as way to claim that writing programs, while shaping an indisputable number of outstanding writers, can't claim the sum. Magazine editors like Gordon Lish and Robert Gottlieb "surely had as much influence on the fiction that was written and published in the postwar period as anyone who taught at Iowa or Stanford."

Sure, I grant Mr. Menand that. But if his starting question is "can creative writing be taught," mustn't we agree that a classroom isn't necessary for the teaching? That is, aren't these editors serving as teachers, and thus, isn't the act of teaching writing happening via correspondence between the editor and the writer? If so--and I believe it is--Mr. Menand ought to have re-fashioned his starting question to be "can creative writing be taught in academic writing programs."

5) Mr. Menand compares different ideas about teaching writing from, for example, two writing program legends: Wallace Stegner and John Gardner. And where their philosophies on teaching writing differ, Mr. Menand takes the seeming opposition to conclude that "there is no 'craft of fiction' as such" to teach. Doesn't that seem to be jumping to the extreme?

Of course there are varied and seemingly opposed ideas of teaching creative writing, just as there are varied and seemingly opposed kinds of writing, or ways of painting pictures, or methods of organizing a movement. As Mr. Menand says, a Gardner class and a Stegner class were very different--but that doesn't mean that neither man had nothing to teach; just that different kinds of writers would flourish in them.

6) After dissecting the can-writing-be-taught question with a tone of bemusement and cynicism, Mr. Menand surprises by ending his long article with two paragraphs that seem to belie everything that came before. They are, in short, a love note to the writing workshop.

Did I engage in self-observation and other acts of modernist reflexivity (while I was in a writing program)? Not much. ... I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other. I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I'm disarmed by these paragraphs. I appreciate what he's saying: there's weight in being among people who believe writing matters. Frankly, it's unusual enough that few chance upon such communities, no matter how many cafes they frequent. Writing programs make such a space possible, and they can influence even those who don't become "creative writers" when they grow up.

But I'm still confused by what Mr. Menand means to communicate. After he spent many, many words describing what "shouldn't" work in writing programs, he swiftly turns to the conclusion that they, in fact, do work--and what's more, they work in these amorphous ways; for Mr. Menand, the writing program "affected choices."

So.

Where are we at, Mr. Menand? What new insight are you offering us? I don't mean to be oppositional; I'd love the insight. If workshops do work, why did you spend so much space dissecting why they "shouldn't" and so little time with the more interesting question of why they do, given that that is, finally, your conclusion?

I am, simply, confused.

And so, let me offer my own paragraph of opinion.

Some kinds of teaching pedagogy inspire me, and others I loathe. I agree with Mr. Menand that it varies widely from teacher to teacher, and program to program, and this is just why blanket answers to the question of "can creative writing be taught" are impossible; the question needs to be buried.

But in general, writing programs are places where people's love of fiction and poetry are treasured and taken seriously, where reading and writing are given space and attention, and this is a rare and good thing. Let those who attend them enjoy them; let those who find their education as writers rooted elsewhere (books, say, or editors, or friends) flourish there; and let us simply support writers wherever they locate themselves. And quit it with the pseudo-sensational headlines.

This week, I had reason to revisit what seems to be an interminable conversation on whether creative writing can be "taught," and so was inspired to cull my response from the Isak vaults. This post originally ran June 16, 2009.

Many of you sent me links to Louis Menand's six-page essay in The New Yorker, titled provocatively "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?" I put off reading it because, frankly, the can-writing-be-taught question seems to be on perpetual replay: every year or so, writers (!) ask it yet again, filling up column inches while rarely offering any original insight into MFA programs.

Usually these articles hit upon the seeming paradox of writing that, if it is "creative," can't be curriculum-ized, and yet many hundreds of people enter these programs each year and are awarded the degree of "master" (or, in some cases, "doctor"). Weirdly, no other creative art--painting, say, or musical composition--ever seems subject to the can-it-be-taught question like writing is, which for me casts a pall over anyone resurrecting the tired question in yet one more essay, yet one more blog post, yet one more book. It is, after all, writers of one type or another who keep asking this question, and I've suspected that by implying that no, the craft of writing can't be taught, it is an excuse for these writers to suggest that they themselves are among the geniuses who none of us, no matter how many workshops we attend, can match.

But back to Louis Menand's essay, in particular.

I gave it a go. The fact is, I'm aware of quite a lot of problems in how writing is taught in both undergraduate and graduate schools, and, being a writing teacher, I'd like to think about what can be improved in how writers can work with each other in both traditional and non-traditional venues. Perhaps, I thought, Mr. Menand will have insights. Perhaps he can be forgiven for the headline of his article which repeats a tired old question as if it were newly asked.

While Mr. Menand offers a useful overview of the history of writing programs, and the fluid ideas about their functionality, I'm afraid I had many problems with his essay. As follows:

1) It presumes from the very first paragraph that all writing programs are workshops. This is false. My MFA program pioneered the low-residency mentorship model; it's why I chose Warren Wilson College. Mr. Menand writes disparagingly about the workshop model, and I can sympathize with his points. His skepticism about writing as a teachable art is drawn from his skepticism of the workshop model--but to not acknowledge substantive and widespread alternative models (like mentorships and low-res programs) discredits his point.

2) Mr. Menand is hazy on what his objective is with this article. Is he arguing that writing can't really be taught, and so we should cut off all academic writing programs? Is he arguing for writing programs to be modified, developed in alternative and varied ways that better teach writing? More on this in #6.

 3) Mr. Menand is hazy on the stakes. Who, really, is suffering here? What is the urgency? Is he implying that fledgling writers are being hoodwinked? That taxpayers shouldn't be burdened by supporting fiction faculty at their local public university when fiction can't really be taught? That American letters is suffocating by a dozen or so people talking about their poems on the local campus? As Mr. Menand himself points out, while the number of writing programs is growing at a quick clip, "in 2005-06, only four-tenths of one per cent of all master’s degrees awarded were in creative writing."

To put it another way: say Mr. Menand is correct in every critical point he makes about writing programs in this essay; even then, I must ask, who cares?

4) Mr. Menand points to writers who were not "a product of the educational system"--Nabokov, Salinger, and Pynchon--as way to claim that writing programs, while shaping an indisputable number of outstanding writers, can't claim the sum. Magazine editors like Gordon Lish and Robert Gottlieb "surely had as much influence on the fiction that was written and published in the postwar period as anyone who taught at Iowa or Stanford."

Sure, I grant Mr. Menand that. But if his starting question is "can creative writing be taught," mustn't we agree that a classroom isn't necessary for the teaching? That is, aren't these editors serving as teachers, and thus, isn't the act of teaching writing happening via correspondence between the editor and the writer? If so--and I believe it is--Mr. Menand ought to have re-fashioned his starting question to be "can creative writing be taught in academic writing programs."

5) Mr. Menand compares different ideas about teaching writing from, for example, two writing program legends: Wallace Stegner and John Gardner. And where their philosophies on teaching writing differ, Mr. Menand takes the seeming opposition to conclude that "there is no 'craft of fiction' as such" to teach. Doesn't that seem to be jumping to the extreme?

Of course there are varied and seemingly opposed ideas of teaching creative writing, just as there are varied and seemingly opposed kinds of writing, or ways of painting pictures, or methods of organizing a movement. As Mr. Menand says, a Gardner class and a Stegner class were very different--but that doesn't mean that neither man had nothing to teach; just that different kinds of writers would flourish in them.

6) After dissecting the can-writing-be-taught question with a tone of bemusement and cynicism, Mr. Menand surprises by ending his long article with two paragraphs that seem to belie everything that came before. They are, in short, a love note to the writing workshop.

Did I engage in self-observation and other acts of modernist reflexivity (while I was in a writing program)? Not much. ... I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other. I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I'm disarmed by these paragraphs. I appreciate what he's saying: there's weight in being among people who believe writing matters. Frankly, it's unusual enough that few chance upon such communities, no matter how many cafes they frequent. Writing programs make such a space possible, and they can influence even those who don't become "creative writers" when they grow up.

But I'm still confused by what Mr. Menand means to communicate. After he spent many, many words describing what "shouldn't" work in writing programs, he swiftly turns to the conclusion that they, in fact, do work--and what's more, they work in these amorphous ways; for Mr. Menand, the writing program "affected choices."

So.

Where are we at, Mr. Menand? What new insight are you offering us? I don't mean to be oppositional; I'd love the insight. If workshops do work, why did you spend so much space dissecting why they "shouldn't" and so little time with the more interesting question of why they do, given that that is, finally, your conclusion?

I am, simply, confused.

And so, let me offer my own paragraph of opinion.

Some kinds of teaching pedagogy inspire me, and others I loathe. I agree with Mr. Menand that it varies widely from teacher to teacher, and program to program, and this is just why blanket answers to the question of "can creative writing be taught" are impossible; the question needs to be buried.

But in general, writing programs are places where people's love of fiction and poetry are treasured and taken seriously, where reading and writing are given space and attention, and this is a rare and good thing. Let those who attend them enjoy them; let those who find their education as writers rooted elsewhere (books, say, or editors, or friends) flourish there; and let us simply support writers wherever they locate themselves. And quit it with the pseudo-sensational headlines.

Comments

[PJC]

Way to take him to task, Anna. Nice job.

[WMG]

Boy this is after the fact. I've read Menand's article a few times. I think a crucial thing to note is he doesn't ask "can" CW be taught, but "should" it be taught. And I think in his closing paragraphs (and not a little bit in the rest of article) he does affirm the value of such teaching -- but perhaps re-frames it look askance at the way in which the MFA has been re-tooled as a just another machine of cultural production. Rather, he suggests, the teaching of CW can be a useful if seen as a part of a more humanities-centred engagement with the world.

[WMG]

re previous comment: edit: insert "to" between "it" and "look". Delete "a" between "be" and "useful". Note to self: proofread.