The Canterbury Trail Mountains

The Canterbury Trail Mountains, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

Since the WiFi at the Fernie Alpine Resort is rather spotty (at least for me and my iPod it is), I wasn’t able to live tweet the panel session of the Fernie Writers’ Conference I attended this afternoon and thought I’d blog about it instead.

Because there’s another event this evening and I have an assignment due tomorrow morning at 11AM, this is going to be a quick and dirty blog post, with hyperlinks added later.

Panel topic was, Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Panel consisted of Alison Calder (AC), Aritha Van Herk (AVH), and Andreas Schroeder (AS), with Peter Oliva (PO) moderating.

PO began the session by quoting Michael Ondaatje, who apparently once said that he’d heard a writer’s research was like panniers. He didn’t know what a pannier was, so looked it up and learned it was either containers in which you could put things or the framework that held up a Victorian woman’s dress. But by the time he’d learned this he was at least a third of the way through writing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and it didn’t really matter much.

PO posed the first question to the panel: are creative writing programs and workshops therefore designed to create the framework for the pannier contents.

Marina Endicott piped up, ‘What about the student with nothing in their panniers – or, alternatively – with bloated panniers?’

AC said to some extent creative writing programs involve a redistribution of the wealth of the pannier contents, involving a certain amount of trading. (This immediately put me in mind of the quilter’s stash and the trading of not only small quantities of fabric but of the peer learning process that goes on when you quilt with others – the solutions proffered by other quilters are often both far more creative and far more practical than anything you’ve been able to come up with yourself. You’ll see a minor panel theme is textile-based.)

AVH said Michael Ondaatje can use anything and make it work, but that the gathering process teaches you both constraint and restraint.

PO then asked whether the panel had any teaching creative writing horror stories and told one himself. He’d had a student in his class whose work was very promising and he encouraged him to pursue a career as a writer. He subsequently discovered his student was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who could play the most musical instruments – 115 in all. He was horrified to learn that to fund his writing career his student had begun selling off his instruments, saying he was tired of playing in smoky bars anyway. This happened just as smoking bans in bars started to go into effect. We didn’t learn whether the student became anywhere near as successful as a writer as he had been a musician.

AS told the story of a female student who – like those people who have as many surgeries as possible (I couldn’t help but think of Elizabeth Taylor) – had workshopped the same manuscript for more than 20 years, attending workshops and classes with some of Canada’s most distinguished writers. It was in great shape after 20 years of editing, but when he had the presumption to make a suggestion about how it could be improved, she said, ‘Well! Mordecai Richler didn’t say that was necessary.’

AVH said she’d a female student who submitted three 500-page manuscripts, which she diligently read and commented on, providing feedback on all three. ‘Huh,’ replied the student, ‘that’s what last year’s writer-in-residence said too.’ But of course she hadn’t made a single change to any of her submissions in the intervening year.

Dave Margoshes began the audience participation portion, saying that you don’t teach talent or imagination in a creative writing course, but you do teach craft and an appreciation of the revision process. While Jack Kerouac talked disdainfully of rejecting everything that smacked of being ‘crafty or revised’ he was really talking about the contrived.

PO said you don’t hear about Kerouac’s notebooks, and implied that the notion that his final published was written as a single long stream-of-consciousness teletype was a myth and that there was a process, which undoubtedly involved rereading, selection and editing, whether self-editing or by an actual editor prior to publication.

AS said he doesn’t believe in one-draft wonders, and that they’re the exception, not the rule.

Marina Endicott talked about private tutors and learning from reading, which isn’t a part of creative writing course work. She also said that actors don’t expect to be successful based solely on their talent or skill without undergoing training, and asked why anyone would think it would – or should – be different for writers.

AS said there’s a notion that taking a creative writing degree program or workshop has, to some extent, the same taint as athletes on steroids, but in fact plays are usually written then workshopped, making them collaborative endeavours involving feedback from directors, producers, and actors. He also talked about the story that circulated about Jerzy Kozinski’s first novel, The Painted Bird: some say Max Perkins’ (Kozinski’s editor) contributed 95 per cent of that novel with his extensive rewrites of what amounted to a first draft.

AC said all writing is essentially a collaborative process involving friends, family, first readers, and editors.

AVH said even though some people can stand on their toes they don’t become ballerinas without training, training, training, and more training. Creative writing programs teach ways of using language, and, more important, teach people to get out of their comfort zones so they can make use of ‘all the muscles we use when writing – not just one’s biceps.’

She then asked if there was a book in all of us.

AC said, there may be a story in all of us, but not necessarily a book. Let’s face it – some people are boring.

PO told the story of Margaret Atwood on a cruise ship. She encountered a doctor who told her he was thinking of becoming a writer. Yes, she said, I’m thinking of becoming a brain surgeon myself. Angie Abdou suggested this story was somewhat apocryphal and that she’d heard the writer was Margaret Laurence. Someone else said they’d once been asked, ‘So are all Canadian authors named Margaret?’

AC said that in order to get out of her own comfort zone and get away from the well-worn paths she usually travels as a poet, she’d started working collaboratively. This forces her to – if she finds herself writing about elephants yet again – ask herself the question, ‘would this work better if it was about a turtle rather than an elephant?’

AVH said you have, as a writer, to look for what will discomfit you most.

AS said that while creative writing programs aren’t therapy sessions, they can indeed force people out of their comfort zones (the implication being that this a good thing in terms of creativity).

AC said that it was always a good idea to work outside your genre and try something new – if you’re a poet, take a prose workshop; if you write non-fiction, try taking a poetry course.

AS said in UBC’s MFA creative writing program you have to take classes/workshops in a minimum of three different genres.

PO talked about the vast increase in the number of MA programs in creative writing that currently exist.

AVH said this was especially true in the US, where the number of creative writing programs - many of them online - has increased from about 300 to 1200 in the last 30 years or so. Of course, she said, a fair bit of this amounts to nothing more than ‘tuition harvesting’ on the part of post-secondary institutions. (I found this a refreshing cynical admission.)

Angie Abdou asked a question of her own, followed by another posed to her on Twitter. Angie’s question was, ‘If you’re thinking of taking a creative writing program, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give a potential student?’ And then passed on the question from Twitter, which was, ‘why are students being pushed into MFA programs in creative writing – which primarily teach you how to teach, when there are no jobs available teaching creative writing, rather than MA programs which would teach you how to write?’

AVH said you need to look closely at every program and think about what your goals are. It isn’t easy to get the information you need, but you need to look long and hard at the faculty, and not just who’s listed on the masthead, since they may well not be doing any of the teaching. She cited the example of an author named Malcolm who’s listed as being one of the instructors in a UK creative writing degree program – and he’s basically window dressing. Marina Endicott knew who she was talking about but we’ll have to fill in the blanks re the writer’s last name (and that of the university) when we remember who it is (if you know, please let me know via a comment – it might save one of us waking up at 3AM shouting the guy’s name).

AS said the lack of positions available for teachers of creative writing was directly related to lifting age of retirement requirements for profs, and that Baby Boomers can now continue to work till they’re 90 at universities. The point of the UBC program is to prepare students for a career as a writer, not to prepare people to teach creative writing. And UBC’s program is unique among creative writing programs in Canada in that there are no course work requirements, it’s all workshops. He also said that UBC used to hire on CVs only, but that degrees held have assumed greater importance and that a recent dean wanted everyone teaching in the creative writing to have PhDs. There’s been a temporary reprieve on this issue, but degree requirements to teach creative writing continue to edge up and an MFA is the rock-bottom requirement.

He also said fact finding was a difficult process and that the one thing every student contemplating taking a creative writing degree program should avoid was a program where the teachers were intent on creating disciples.

AC said she’d finally remembered a student horror story. She said every year, when she asks if there are any questions, someone will ask ‘how do I get an agent?’ As a poet, she says, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea. And that as a beginning writer, this is putting the cart before the horse (ok I’m editorializing a bit there, she didn’t actually say that, but it’s what she meant). ‘You don’t need an agent,’ she said, ‘you need to learn how to write!’

AVH said creative writing programs always focus on working on craft, never on the business aspects of a writing career. (From my perspective as someone who tries to help authors market their work, and that of many agents, publishers, and booksellers, I’m betting this is something we’d like to see addressed in creative writing programs taken by adults, but never mind….)

PO quoted Roberto Bolano, who said, ‘short story writers should be brave’ and Mark Twain, who said, ‘a tale should accomplish something and arrive somewhere.’

AVH said her one rule in her creative writing classes is, ‘no guns, no killing – let your characters live’ – you don’t just to get them kill them off by shooting them or having them killed by a bus when stepping off a curve.

A workshop participant asked what was the one thing students should bring to a creative writing program.

AVH said her favourite students are those who know how to celebrate the local, and said Andrew Wedderburn had been in her class. One of the other students told Andrew he couldn’t write a book set in and about Airdrie, AB, ‘because no one’s ever heard of Airdrie.’ His novel The Milk Chicken Mom is now being published. And it’s set in Airdrie. (Obviously no one said this to Dianne Warren before she wrote Cool Water, or Angie Abdou before writing The Canterbury Trail.)

AS said that when he’s reading manuscript submissions for admission to the UBC program, he doesn’t give a damn how good the writing is – what he looks for is a lively imagination, because this is something he can’t teach or transmit, and without it good writing doesn’t really matter.

AC said she looks for what’s produced as a result of assigned exercises, that the students she gets excited about are those whose imagery is striking and original and that direct her to look at things in new ways.

I then asked my devil’s advocate question regarding training and academic qualifications for those who teach creative writing. Surely, I said, there’s some merit in having someone teaching actually know how to teach (although an MA, an MFA and/or a PhD are certainly no guarantee of a good teacher). Writing workshops 30 years ago were often treated by authors hired on the basis of their CVs (i.e. the work they’d produced as writers) as paid vacations, and that I’d taken two, taught by well known Canadian authors, who had absolutely no plan at all. At the second one two of us had read and I had happened to bring with me a copy of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and to compensate for the instructor’s lack of a plan, we’d done several of the group and individual exercises he’d provided.

PO said he likes to teach using the Socratic dialogue model, teaching his students how to critique and how to learn distance – that teaching creative writing involves direction given by a good teacher.

AS said that teaching creative writing can be done very badly and that there’s often a closed loop system in play, where classes are highly scripted and there are no surprises and no challenges. This doesn’t work for everyone, and when it doesn’t, sometimes a one:one tutorial system works. He also said they can’t always make an exception for the students who aren’t benefiting from the workshop approach, which was a shame because young writers are very vulnerable.

PO then quoted some (highly questionable) statistics on writers’ lifespans. Poets and fiction writers tend to live much shorter lives than non-fiction writers. We’d all like to see the source of those stats, I think.

At this point we were a good half hour over our allotted time, so I didn’t get to ask my final question: If you were choosing a creative writing program, which would you rather take, the one John Gardner taught at SUNY Binghamton (taught by an obviously very dedicated instructor at an institution that doesn’t have an amazing reputation for creating successful writers), or one taught by Raymond Carver (who seemed to have been, one way or the other, barely there) at the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has an astonishing track record of producing successful writers?