{"id":1058,"date":"2013-07-15T18:54:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T18:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/?p=1058"},"modified":"2021-08-04T23:06:30","modified_gmt":"2021-08-04T23:06:30","slug":"review-of-we-wanted-to-be-writers-life-love-and-literature-at-the-iowa-writers-workshop-edited-by-eric-olsen-and-glen-schaeffer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/2013\/07\/15\/review-of-we-wanted-to-be-writers-life-love-and-literature-at-the-iowa-writers-workshop-edited-by-eric-olsen-and-glen-schaeffer\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW OF We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop, edited by Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Green<\/strong> reviews We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop<\/em>, edited by Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer. Skyhorse Publishing, 2009, 320 pages, $16.95 978-1602397354<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A frequent criticism of creative writing programs is that they focus too narrowly on established techniques supposedly constituting \u201ccraft,\u201d but if Gordon Mennenga is to be believed in this excerpt from We Wanted to Be Writers<\/em>, very few concrete literary strategies were \u201ctaught\u201d at all at the most famous such program, at least in the 1970s:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe craft thing? I don\u2019t think the topic ever came up, did it? At least not in the workshops I was in. You did your lump and threw it on the table. I was surprised we never picked out an element of \u201ccraft\u201d and looked at it, how metaphor was used in a story, for example. We never did exercises of any kind. I suppose it\u2019s that way still\u2026We didn\u2019t get into why things are done a certain way, or talk about different styles, what styles are tolerated and what aren\u2019t\u2026why and how.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Mennenga is more blunt in his assessment of the degree to which writing \u201cinstruction\u201d even took place at the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop in the middle 1970s, the period of time during which the cohort of writers interviewed in We Wanted to Be Writers<\/em> attended the Workshop, many of the participants in this assortment of reflections and reminiscences echo his comment. \u201cOur teachers were writers, not teachers,\u201d says Jane Smiley. \u201cThey knew a lot about writing, but hadn\u2019t given a lot of thought to how to communicate what they knew.\u201d Jennie Fields expresses outright disappointment with the teachers at Iowa, who \u201cweren\u2019t nearly as involved or instructive as the faculty I had as an undergraduate,\u201d while Jayne Anne Phillips concludes that, anyway, \u201cpeople enter into an MFA program, not to \u2018learn\u201d to write, but to spend time in a mentor relationship with an accomplished writer\u2026and to be part of a community for a scant two years that supports literature, reading, and the attempt to write.\u201d Co-editor Glenn Schaeffer believes \u201cthe real Workshop was a certain booth by the kitchen at the Mill, where I could watch the band, and my classmates would come by and we\u2019d drink beer and talk about writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

We Wanted to Be Writers<\/em> is essentially an extension of this \u201ctalk about writing,\u201d although it is at least as much talk about being a writer after fulfilling the aspiration of the title as it is talk about writing or learning to write. Indeed, the book\u2019s subtitle gives a more accurate description of the ultimate focus of the book: \u201clife, love, and literature.\u201d It is presented as something like a collective memoir by this cohort of writers (which also includes T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Sandra Cisneros among its best-known members, as well as Marvin Bell and John Irving as teachers during this time), a memoir that is presumably justified because Schaeffer and his fellow editor, Eric Olsen, believe \u201cour cohort to date, as a slice of scribblers, is the most decorated in the history of American letters, as far as having been enrolled at the same graduate institution at one time.\u201d There is a tension in the book between this rather self-congratulatory explanation of the book\u2019s existence and the effort to illuminate the influence of the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop on the accomplishments of this \u201cslice of scribblers\u201d that is never satisfactorily resolved. The editors might say the book is intended to both chronicle a collective experience and examine the effects of creative writing programs on American fiction and poetry, but ultimately these goals may be at cross-purposes: The experiences are too superficially explored to be distinctive or surprising, while the focus on \u201clife\u201d at the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop precludes extensive critique of the instructional methods used there and their utility in developing the talents of this literary greatest generation.<\/p>\n

To call this generation \u201cthe most decorated\u201d is not, of course, to say it is the most talented or most accomplished. A good case could be made that this cohort did indeed manage especially well to combine seriousness of intent (a dedication to \u201cliterature\u201d) with a degree of commercial success or popular appeal (one of the graduates is a television writer whose credits include writing for The Sopranos<\/em>), but is the implicit claim being made by this book that the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop played some formative role in guiding these writers to this sort of success? Surely it can\u2019t be that they were more naturally gifted than other groups of aspiring writers \u201cenrolled at the same graduate institution,\u201d including previous and later groups at the Iowa Workshop itself. Nor on the basis of what is revealed here about the level of instruction at the Workshop could the assertion be made that it imparted some special insights into the nature of literary creation. Is the focus on this particular class and the affirmation of its prestige meant to validate the Workshop\u2019s status as the preeminent \u201cprogram\u201d of its kind? If so, what did it actually do for these students that could be seen as a contribution to literature?<\/p>\n

Again if Glenn Schaeffer is to be believed, its contribution isn\u2019t specifically literary at all, nor was the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop finally teaching primarily writing. Instead, it was the center of what Schaeffer calls in his introductory chapter a \u201ccreative enterprise,\u201d its principal object to foster a broader \u201ccreativity.\u201d Creativity as encouraged by the Writer\u2019s Workshop is in fact entirely compatible with creativity in business:<\/p>\n

\u201cCreativity captures and holds the attention (or money) of others, whether signified as audience or customers. In fact, people depend on narratives to get them through life; neuroscience tells us that our brains are hardwired to organize our existential states as ongoing narratives, draft upon draft of them. Therefore, a concept in business, as in a story, must be told forcefully and simply, using consequential logic mixed with dramatic leaps. Writers who can convince us of the real through the artifice of story are similar to entrepreneurs: Both start every day with the barest essentials, hoping to change us or our experience of the world, and struggle toward expression on the blank page, or the blank drawing board (infernally resistant media in either case)\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Schaeffer himself went on from the Workshop to become a successful businessman, one could interpret this strained analogy as a necessary rationalization for his project of revisiting his previous \u201cliterary\u201d indulgence. but it also helps to explain the amount of space devoted rather tediously to \u201cprocess,\u201d talk about how those who did make careers in writing organize their creativity. Although one writer does claim that a helpful \u201clesson\u201d learned at the Workshop was provided specifically by John Irving through his efforts to \u201cmodel\u201d his own process in writing a novel, developing a systematic process suitable to a professional writer was otherwise not something the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop appears to have much emphasized. Given the typical structure imposed by the workshop model in the vast majority of creative writing programs\u2014a fixed number of submissions per semester, due at fixed intervals\u2014these programs only accidentally teach writing discipline, as student writers scramble to meet the quota while struggling against the time constraints. In this way as well, We Wanted to Be Writers<\/em> seems less designed to identify the beneficial practices of the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop than to celebrate the superior skill level of this specific cohort who happened to pass through the Workshop together, as its members have developed the requisite discipline, perhaps in spite of the failure of the Workshop to sufficiently alert them to its importance.<\/p>\n

Some of the writers interviewed here complain about other ways in which the Workshop\u2019s failed to prepare them for the concrete realities of being a \u201cprofessional\u201d fiction writer or poet. Co-editor Olsen avers that \u201cmaybe I just wasn\u2019t paying attention, but when I left and got into writing for a living (as if), I was amazed at what a rube I was. I was an Iowa grad, and I didn\u2019t know crap about the real world of publishing\u2026We absorbed the occasional dose about the art, but there wasn\u2019t much nuts and bolts about the business or the craft.\u201d If We Wanted to Be Writers<\/em> works at all to sort through the at times conflicting goals to which creative writing is necessarily devoted\u2014to \u201cart,\u201d to \u201cbusiness,\u201d to \u201ccraft\u201d\u2014it seems to depict the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop as more comfortably focused on art, even if there was little organized effort to specifically delineate the arts of fiction and poetry, little understanding of how to systematically \u201cteach\u201d those arts. The Workshop, no doubt like most creative writing programs at that time, was apparently a stimulating and convivial place for a collection of aspiring writers to reside for a time while also providing them an opportunity to concentrate on their writing and receive a critical response, but it was hardly the place to get a sophisticated education in literary aesthetics.<\/p>\n

A number of those writers who themselves went on to be teachers of creative writing observe that instruction in most programs has improved significantly, and, to judge by the descriptions some give of their own teaching methods, it is likely that this is the case. But for the most part, such an improvement is a pedagogical improvement, an increase in efficiency or a more productive focus on process, not derived from fresh inspiration about how to develop aesthetic sensibility or determine appropriate artistic standards. Perhaps achieving such things is impossible, or, even if an effort could be made to orient creative writing in such a direction, perhaps undesirable, especially in lower-tier programs without pretensions to producing many ambitious \u201cliterary\u201d writers to begin with. But there is little evidence that even \u201cprestige\u201d programs such as Iowa are graduating writers who are transforming American literature with their superior appreciation of the \u201cart\u201d of fiction or poetry. Instead, the very improvements in the teaching of creative writing have themselves arguably helped reduce creative writing to the acquisition of \u201ccraft\u201d in the narrowest sense of the term.<\/p>\n

It is doubtful that the workshop method of instruction, which most creative writing programs have adopted from the Iowa model, could ever work to privilege \u201cart\u201d as the primary ambition to be pursued by the workshop\u2019s participants. The natural tendency of the workshop is surely to migrate toward issues of commercial acceptability or publishing prospects, issues that focus attention on the common lot of expectations facing the aspiring writer, lest discussion devolve into incoherence through the chaos of inevitably various and conflicting assumptions about aesthetic value. Individual instructors might want to dispense \u201cthe occasional dose about the art,\u201d but students aiming to become professional writers are inevitably going to regard their instructors most of all as sources of information about the publishing world and as valuable conduits to that world. In creative writing programs that have themselves come to serve predominantly as conduits to the publishing world\u2014and to supplementary sinecures as creative writing instructors in other creative writing programs, sinecures that have become crucial adjuncts to the publishing world\u2014\u201dbusiness\u201d and \u201ccraft\u201d have inexorably come to be unavoidable concerns, arguably to the point that \u201cart\u201d is something left to take care of itself.<\/p>\n

In the mid 1970s, the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop apparently was still a place where simply being around other writers and aspiring writers, in an environment in which the writer\u2019s vocation was taken seriously, was enough to make the experience worthwhile. Although the cohort represented in We Wanted to Be Writers<\/em> of course had their ambitions to become recognized poets and novelists, few of them seem to have regarded the Workshop as a \u201cprofessional\u201d program providing direct preparation for a career in writing. Certainly they do not seem to have considered it certification for a job teaching creative writing. While many of them did wind up teaching in creative writing programs, the impression one gets from the comments in this book\u2019s final chapter, which chronicles the group\u2019s post-Workshop experiences, is that most of them fell into teaching as a job they now found themselves qualified to do. Most presumably attended the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop because they indeed wanted to be writers and it promised to help them attain that goal. One could conclude from the testimony of this book that at this time \u201ccreative writing\u201d had not quite reached the self-perpetuating status it now occupies, through which the advanced creative writing degree provides students the appropriate credential to themselves become teachers of creative writing. That this is the current situation does not mean students enrolled in creative writing no longer want to be writers first of all, but it does mean that what began as institutional support that provided writers some security from an unreliable marketplace, whereby thay could also pass along first-hand advice to interested students, has become itself the primary means by which writers declare their intention to become writers in the first place.<\/p>\n

Eric Olsen expresses the usual justification for creative writing from the writer\u2019s\/instructor\u2019s perspective:<\/p>\n

\u201cAbsent other forms of reliable support for writers, absent a marketplace that values writing and rewards writers commensurate with their labor (or at least sufficient to cover basic necessities), a teaching gig is about as good as it gets, until those royalties kick in, anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

But by now, for the vast majority of writers with teaching positions in creative writing programs, those royalty checks will never \u201ckick in,\u201d at least not to the degree such writers might relinquish those positions to write \u201cfull time.\u201d On the one hand, we could regard this state of affairs as even stronger justification for the now very extensive system of creative writing programs, which allows writers who otherwise would struggle to survive in an unfriendly commercial environment to keep writing. On the other, we might wonder if this system is artificially both maintaining a storehouse of writers who will never receive much attention and enticing students into pursuing a \u201ccareer\u201d that will never really emerge.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it doesn\u2019t finally matter. There are surely worse ways to spend a life than in talking about writing with literary-minded students, and much less rewarding legacies of one\u2019s education that insight into \u201ccreativity.\u201d Although one could still ask whether, whatever service the system of creative writing performs for individuals and for the American university system at large, it performs an equal service for American literature.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Daniel Green<\/strong> has published numerous essays and reviews in The Quarterly Conversation<\/em>, Full Stop<\/em>, Open Letters Monthly<\/em>, American Book Review<\/em>, Antioch Review<\/em>, and Bookforum<\/em>. Since 2005 he has maintained the literary blog The Reading Experience<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Green reviews We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop, edited by Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer. Skyhorse Publishing, 2009, 320 pages, $16.95 978-1602397354 \u00a0 A frequent criticism of creative writing programs is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21927],"tags":[22180],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2069,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions\/2069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}