That’s So Academic: The Graduate Workshop vs. Reality
I’ve officially climbed out of the tower. I finished my third degree, and I’m done with academia, at least as a student. And I have to say, I kind of feel like I want to give my brain a bath, get all that academic nonsense outta there. Only the nonsense, not the good sense. But sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.
Example: My boyfriend and I have been writing language arts lessons for a website for pay this summer. The way it works is you write a lesson, turn it in to the online submission manager, and wait. They give the lesson to three reviewers who then give you feedback. You’re supposed to take that feedback and use it to revise your lesson. Pretty simple really. But yesterday Dylan received reviews of his very first lesson. Two of them were very positive, didn’t want him to change much, but one of them was kind of scathing (if something can be kind of scathing) as if this reviewer (who we’ve decided is a little old lady who hates creativity and fun) was out to get him from the start. Everything was wrong, according to this reviewer, the whole lesson a failure.
Unfortunately, this reminded me of graduate poetry workshops. First, let me make a disclaimer. I’m not talking about any one workshop, I’m talking about all of them, the nature of them. I suppose I should also say that I have been in exactly nine graduate poetry workshops at three universities (long story about how that’s possible or why I would subject myself to such torture) and so my views may not be typical or healthy. But here’s how I see it: workshops aren’t so much good for the writers being workshopped as they are for the writers doing the workshopping. The experience helps us read more closely and critically. It exposes us to dozens of other writing styles that we can steal or disdain, but in my humble experience, the workshop doesn’t give the writer much useful advice about how to proceed as a writer, either regarding specific pieces or a writer’s style as a whole. I generally find, out of ten or more workshop critiques, one, maybe two, people who have something useful to tell me about a particular piece. Maybe that makes the workshop worth it. I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t, in my mind, make up for the dozens and dozens of useless, confusing, and sometimes hurtful comments that people make in these situations.
The problem, I think, is that of perspective and forced audience. Every person in a poetry workshop comes to the table with his or her own set of ideals and tastes around what poetry should be, and your work, or mine, might not fit into that mold. We might not be a good audience for the people we’re forced to read. So workshop becomes more about students trying to shape other people’s writing to their own expectations rather than trying to see the work for what it is and what the writer intends for it to become. In other words, it becomes an academic exercise of who can be most articulate or most scathing about someone else’s work, not so much in the spirit of helping their process, but in the spirit of putting another notch it the criticism belt.
Which brings me back to Dylan’s lesson and the one scathing review it received. When he first read all of the reviews, that one stayed on his mind even though it was the outlier, even though the reviewer was mostly wrong. That’s the one we’ve been talking about since, the completely unhelpful, inaccurate review from some anonymous person with their own agenda. And one of the first things Dylan pointed out was that he has a hard time taking that kind of criticism seriously anymore because it feels like workshop all over again. (He, too, spent years in creative writing workshops.) Most of it’s not all that helpful, and it’s hard to wade through it all to figure out what is.
And in the midst of all the criticism and advice, you, the writer, have to keep a sense of self, a strong vision of what you want to create and who it’s meant for. And then you have to go out into reality and try to fly with your own ideas, if, by some lucky chance, they’re still intact.
What a great post, Jamie. I’ve learned a ton this past year, but I came into the graduate program with little knowledge of what creative writing is, and so I often felt just like that–who am I to be critiquing this person who’s been doing this for a few years, who probably at least knows what an essay is? So yeah, I always felt my comments were less than useful. This summer, I’ve chosen to take Jonathan’s advice, writing freely and not showing it to anyone. I do feel like at the end of the year I began to write more for the workshop than for myself, and it stagnated my work a bit. I felt bound by some idea of what I should be writing instead of what I wanted to write, and combining those two things became nearly impossible.
Maybe the genius of the workshop, though, is to teach us to trust ourselves (as well as teaching people how to read and critique, that’s definitely a huge part) as writers. Maybe it’s supposed to work that way–people give you their own ideas of what your piece should be, and you either agree or not, but if not, you justify why, at least to yourself, and I think that makes us stronger, more ready to stand up for what we’ve done.
I agree with what you’re saying, Tanya, about how workshop can teach us how to trust ourselves. That’s a good point. And it’s true, if it doesn’t stagnate your writing, as you said. And maybe it will only do that in phases but will overall improve your self-defined notions of your own writing.
By the way, I always thought your insights were, well, insightful. So don’t second guess yourself. We’re all still learning in one way or another, and you’re a smart chica. I’m glad to see that you’re writing for yourself this summer.
Thanks Jaime! You’re going to continue blogging here, right?
Yup, unless my life happens to become complete chaos when the school year starts.
You make a lot of good points, and I think you’re absolutely right that workshopping others is probably more valuable than being workshopped yourself.
But I do think the workshop is valuable to the writer, or it was to me — but only in a limited dose. I think the experience of having an honest-to-god audience was good for me, made me attentive to certain things in stories that are easy to dismiss when the audience is theoretical (I mean basic, fundamental communication issues), and I think its really valuable to see where and how people do not understand what you are trying to do.
Too often, writers use that as a chance to simply dismiss the criticism and say: they don’t “get it.” Which is lame. If you use it as a chance to try and make people get it — it can be really valuable.
But I wonder if the experience doesn’t wear itself out kind of quickly. I think you’re right about trying to hold onto your vision in the midst of a lot of people trying to exert an influence, and I don’t really think either extreme is good. It’s not good to think your work is flawless and the people criticizing it are dumbasses, and it’s not good to think everything anyone says is right.
I think lots and lots of workshops could have pushed me hard toward one of those extremes — as the experience began to lose its freshness.
In other words, the workshop for me felt like it opened up for a while — a fresh, original, engaging experience — but it was starting to close down and became familiar, a bit rote, and programmatic after a few of them. I dug them, but it was time to stop.
I think it would be fun to revisit the experience with a different batch of writers someday, though.
I agree with you, Shawn, about the fact that people should try to make people “get it” instead of just dismissing their feedback as evidence that they don’t get it. I feel that people who ignore all feedback are usually immature in their craft. That may mean that they’re young, but it might just mean that they don’t get it themselves, meaning that they don’t know how helpful criticism can really be.
I guess I’m most interested in better understanding the philosophy behind workshop practice. For instance, most workshops don’t allow the writer to speak until the end. I agree with that practice for the most part, but I experienced a workshop that allowed the writer to begin by telling everyone what they were most concerned about in their piece, and that was really helpful to me.
I think that it would be interesting to do a study of graduate workshops to see how many professors actually help to train their students in giving good criticism and how many of them just kind of jump into the workshop process and expect their students to follow.
I so agree that workshop is most helpful for looking at other peoples writing rather than having your own critiqued, but for me it was such a helpful experience. I’m one of those writers that am naturally insecure about my writing and thinks everyone else knows how to improve my stuff. Workshop completely overwhelmed me and when I realized I couldn’t incorporate everyone’s comments without contradicting some of them, I had to go back and only listen to the critiques that really resonated with my originally intent of the piece (which I had to figure out) or the ones that seemed to get me as a writer.
In a way, workshop taught me to not listen to people’s feedback but also to really listen to a some critiques and in the process gaining confidence in my writing.
Oh, and Dylan should totally forget whatever that reviewer said about his lesson. The hurtful unhelpful ones always stay with us. I wish there was a way to hit the memory delete key after we read those reviews.
Thanks, Asa. I think Dylan has pretty much ignored that feedback, putting it in the category of crazy, angry person who doesn’t get the spirit of his ideas.
There also is, rarely, guidance on how to workshop. Which sounds weird given how often all of us have been in one. But I’m not sure how often the writer leading the workshop actually takes more than a few minutes in the first class to explain his or her idea or “theory” of the workshop and, then we all sort of bumble along there.
I’ve had the same experience as Jaime: after the first few, the majority of workshop time and comments wasn’t useful at all. Maybe learning to ignore all that noise is the benefit.
Good point, Michael. During my second graduate poetry workshop at Colorado State, I tried to talk to my professor about how to workshop more effectively, the idea that we should come to a piece of writing with the intention of trying to understand what the work is trying to do instead of trying to get it to do what we want it to do. He wasn’t all that perceptive and thought my suggestions were veiled complaints about my workshop experience the week before, which was fairly negative. I was actually grateful for the negative feedback because I needed it, but I wasn’t able to convince my prof of that and so wasn’t able to have a constructive conversation around workshop process and the philosophy behind it. Oh well!