Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

The joys of adaptation: pedagogy and practice
Writing creative writing pedagogy

PRISCILA UPPAL

Professors of creative writing commonly claim that our raison d’être is not only to train writers, but, and perhaps more importantly, to ­create readers. With the aims of teaching our students to become more sophisticated, more critical, more contextually (historical, aesthetic, cultural) informed readers, many of us supplement creative writing assignments in our courses with specific required and recommended readings, including exemplary novels, poems, short stories, essays, and theoretical works. We also frequently guide workshop discussion toward more sophisticated readings of each other’s creative products, which we hope will then, in turn, facilitate more astute reading in general. When we teach a specific genre or subgenre of literature, we may deliver mini-lectures on the conventions of each form and cite examples from published works by classic writers and contemporaries. All of these pedagogical strategies effectively contribute to the training of active, engaged, and knowledgeable readers, as well as to the training of active, engaged, and knowledgeable writers.

One of the limitations of teaching literature — whether in a strict literary history framework or in a creative writing workshop context — is that we teach our subject from our own historical and cultural moment, our own academic and creative background. None of us can be expected to be experts in all genres and of all literary traditions, especially outside our own linguistic, cultural, and national frameworks. And yet, while many of us teach in an increasingly multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, global environment, many of our students, perhaps eager to learn about different literary movements and their influences on English-language writing in the West, are frequently unfamiliar, and sometimes aggressively alienated, from this body of literature. The myths and classical stories and poetic tropes many professors take for granted are the same ones that mystify, baffle, bore, or enrage some of their students.

Rather than ignoring these student reactions — many of which are never voiced in the classroom but are revealed, explicitly or implicitly, as students force themselves to conform to the literary examples they have been taught — in my experience as a writer and as a teacher, they can become the basis for innovative creative works. One of the most successful — as well as the most critically playful — strategies for expressing and shaping this material is to engage in creative works that are centred on some form of adaptation.

For the purposes of this essay, and to encourage the adaptation process to be thought of as a multi-faceted, multi-generic, even multifarious, activity, I am using “adaptation” as an umbrella term that includes revisionism, parody, pastiche, approximation, translation, and any other uses of source texts to produce unique creative works. Therefore, adaptation can be understood as shaping the same source material from one genre into another — such as the novel Don Quixote into the musical Man of La Mancha — or using the source text as a launch pad for exploring certain themes in a new context — such as James Joyce’s use of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey as the underlying myth behind his sprawling novel Ulysses, or Christa Wolf’s use of the myth of Medea to examine the tensions experienced in post-reunification Germany in her novel of the same name. Adaptability is one of the most sophisticated and most useful forms of creativity because it involves the brain working through issues of genre, content, context, structure, transformation, and transmission all at once.

Most literary writers are attracted to stories from the past (mythologies, religious texts, fairy tales, classical works, foundational narratives). At times we are attracted to particular stories because they validate a certain aspect of one’s identity or understanding about the world, at other times because the stories presented are foreign to our own experience and might express or advocate moralities that attract or baffle or offend.

For me, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (required reading in my Grade 7 class), while written and set in the nineteenth century in a country I had yet to visit, spoke undeniably to an aspect of my own childhood experience. It was only fairly recently, when CBC asked me to write a script touching upon an unforgettable character from literature, that I was able to articulate the connection I felt to that novel — enough of a connection that I read it once every year until I graduated high school. I chose to honour the character of Miss Havisham, the jilted bride for whom all clocks stopped the moment her bridegroom disappeared, leaving her to live out the rest of her long life in a yellowing wedding gown among decayed pastries and cake. How did this story of a bitter, jilted lover have anything to do with me, a child of immigrants from India and Brazil, living in 1980s Ottawa? But it did. When I was two years old, my father, who worked for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), was involved in a freak accident while on assignment in Antigua: a sailboat tipped and he swallowed contaminated water that attacked his immune system in the form of transverse ­myelitis, rendering him a permanent quadriplegic. Life in our home was never the same. Although we did not literally stop the clocks, time would always refer to pre- or post-accident. In addition, my mother, whose emotional suffering at facing the future with a quadriplegic had effects as devastating as my father’s physical suffering, abandoned her husband and two children and fled without a trace. Miss Havisham’s emotional trauma — and the tragic and disturbing home environment she subsequently created for herself — eerily parallelled truths from my own home life. Instead of writing an essay on the book, I asked my Grade 7 English teacher permission to write a creative work in response. I wrote a one-woman play, a monologue of Miss Havisham’s inner life exploring the psychological effects of abandonment. I learned I could give Miss Havisham another voice, my voice, with which to express my own experiences of trauma. This is my first memory of the joys of adaptation.

For another example, I have always been fascinated by the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac, whereby God asks Abraham to prove his unshakable loyalty by offering up his only son as a sacrifice. Numerous painters have found inspiration in depicting the crucial moment when God, satisfied that Abraham has passed the test, sends an angel to halt Abraham’s knife-wielding hand from slaughtering his own child. It’s a story full of horror and suspense, and I was utterly mesmerized by it in my children’s Bible, reading and rereading the story with awe, mostly because I was terrified of the implied moral. Over time, as I reread the story and marvelled at the paintings, I found myself wondering about what happened after the halting — the event’s epilogue. Even though Isaac’s life was spared, I imagined a long, long father-son walk down the mountain. How could Isaac ever feel safe in his home again? Obviously, I approached the myth from a contemporary and literal standpoint, but that became my creative impulse, to contemporize the myth and to explore whether or not the morality could transfer to our own historical and cultural moment. I wrote this poem when news coverage in Toronto regarding child abuse and child murderers was quite prominent. The last stanza turns to these pressing social and political concerns. The poem won a competition and was published in my third book, Pretending to Die.

If Abraham

If Abraham hadn’t responded to God’s command

how much better the relationship with his son

might have been. No nights of discomfort

in the dark, calling out in his sleep

for good Samaritans, no more fights

at breakfast about the day

it almost happened, no more hiding

the largest and sharpest kitchen knives.

If Abraham hadn’t heard another word

and done the deed, how many days before some troupe

of angered parents hunted him down, stood

on his lawn with signs and government officials

broke every unbarred window

in his home, how many years before

the smell came off his hands,

before he could eat meat again.

If Abraham was smart as the men in my neighbourhood

he would have destroyed evidence of his plans,

taken the boy no further than the basement,

and kept the fires burning until

not a soul could have recognized that body. (24)

Writers and readers are haunted by stories. In both my creative writing workshops and my more conventional academic arts courses, I ask my students: What myths, fairy tales, novels, poems, dramas, movies, haunt you? Can you try to think of why (something personal or relevant to today or a pressing fear or obsession …)? This is usually one of the most animated, and emotionally and intellectually invested conversations we have — and it frequently continues throughout the course. As students think more deeply about these questions, they engage in critical re adings of their own and other’s works and identify the types of plots, characters, themes, images, and uses of language that fascinate or obsess or impact them most. They begin to identify an inherited imaginative space that produces emotional and intellectual reactions, and in doing so, they also begin to identify artistic techniques they might wish to explore. It is also an opportunity to discuss important issues of cultural appropriation and under what circumstances adaptation is an act of beneficial creation and response, and when it might be an act of silencing or inappropriate theft or exploitation. (While this essay concentrates on the former, it is important to acknowledge that the latter exists in adaption theory and practice as well.)

Inherited imaginative space assumes shared cultural knowledge. While this is useful for writers to exploit in terms of implied audiences as well as recognizable plots or archetypal characters, it’s important to be able to identify the range of responses, particularly in a multicultural context, that writers and readers may experience as they interact with these inherited myths and stories. I have divided these responses into five basic categories and corresponding reactions:

1. Complete identification with Inherited Cultural Knowledge: Homage

2. Absence of Inherited Cultural Knowledge: Alienation

3. Inherited Cultural Knowledge that contradicts other Inherited Cultured Knowledge: Tension

4. Inherited Cultural Knowledge one admires but is outside of: Longing

5. Inherited Cultural Knowledge that is out-of-date or irrelevant: Ambivalence

Each of these categories can result in creative adaptations, as can be evidenced by the multitude of adaptations of Shakespeare plays alone. In fact, in a lecture I delivered called “Canadian Shakespeare” at the University of Bologna in Italy, offering context for my novel To Whom It May Concern (a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in contemporary Ottawa and featuring a quadriplegic patriarch about to have his family home repossessed by the bank), I argued that if you want to know how various immigrant communities feel about their adopted homelands, examine how their artists adapt texts of inherited cultural knowledge, particularly those taught in schools. Adaptations represent an active dialogue about one’s place in the culture, whether or not new imaginative spaces are required to accommodate diverse experience, and whether or not inherited stories require a contemporary update to maintain continued relevance to new audiences.

In my graduate course, 20th Century Revisionist Mythmaking, referring to the very popular Canongate Myth series, which has included international writers such as Margaret Atwood, Milton Hatoum, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith, Su Tong, and Jeannette Winterson, I propose the following: If you could adapt a myth to represent contemporary times, what myth would it be? Why do you think it’s a relevant myth for our times? What correspondences can you make between the elements of the original myth and this particular time in history or this geographical region?

Usually students have a hard time choosing just one. And their reasons for choosing particular myths run the gamut of the five categories listed above. Some identify themselves entirely with the myth; some experience deep alienation from the world of the myth and have felt helpless to counter its weight; some are fascinated by how one myth contradicts the moral universe of another; some want to adapt a foreign myth to their own cultural context; and some are attracted to the challenge of how to take a seemingly out-of-date and irrelevant myth and rejuvenate it for contemporary times. Out of this exercise, many students begin their own creative works, and many others use the exercise to ask important questions of their readings, which results in the development of interesting essay topics.

Adaptation assignments are extremely useful tools. As students even begin to think about adaptation, the issue of fidelity is often hotly debated. I turn this into a discussion on critical reading as well as writing:

1. What elements of the original do you consider to be essential?

2. What elements can be changed or ignored? How do you decide?

3. In what context are your choices predictable, logical, or justified?

4. Will some changes be purposefully antagonistic or controversial (and for what purpose)?

5. What genre will this adaptation take? And how does genre influence the process of the adaptation, especially if you are adapting from one genre into another (such as a poem into a film, or a short story into a play)?

Some students are adamant that certain elements of the original story are untouchable. Others are more open to wild flights of fancy retaining only the loosest connections to the original. I like to point out, as Julie Sanders does in her book Adaptation and Appropriation, “adaptation always involves ’relocation’ of some sort: cultural or temporal setting, or generic. The re-location is key. To relocate, one must make that connection of movement between one place and another” (19). Many students who have lived inside diverse cultures, religions, nations, or other communities have intimate knowledge of relocation, and of how to navigate between cultural spaces. This knowledge, if tapped into, can produce exciting strategies for creative writing, dealing with everything from content to structure, to genre, and to creative process. In my experience with highly multicultural classrooms — Toronto’s York University is considered one of the most multicultural universities in North America, if not the most — adaptation assignments offer many students an opportunity to investigate various cultural and ancestral inheritances, many of which they are consciously or subconsciously hiding from their classmates in order to participate in the dominant cultural inheritances generally upheld in the course.

Adaptation is also a great way to discuss the topic of genre, something that many students frequently take for granted. Why is a particular work of literature a poem and not a short story? Why is this artistic product a film and not a play? What conventions of the original form are transferable to other artistic forms? Which are not? How can you exploit these differences for artistic effects? If we think of genre as a particular creative location, each location has its own structural and contextual characteristics that allow for certain types of interactions. Relocating from one genre to another means creating a different imaginative space that runs by different rules. Adaptation exercises are a great way to learn about the conventions of genre — why these conventions exist, why they are useful for the particular form — and how to exploit those conventions in interesting ways.

Adaptation assignments also give students the permission to explore how and why certain literatures survive. As Linda Hutcheon argues in her book A Theory of Adaptation, even though fidelity criticism has dominated the critical field of adaptation studies for decades, “there are many and varied motives behind adaptation and few involve faithfulness” (xiii). In fact, it is the impulse for movement, for change, that generally motivates writers. As Hutcheon continues: “Because adaptation is a form of repetition without replication, change is inevitable, even without any conscious updating or altering of setting. And with change comes corresponding modifications in the political valence and even the meaning of stories” (xvi). The reasons to teach adaptation have little to do with faithfulness, I believe, and more to do with relocation as “metamorphoses”: transforming one living thing into another living thing, whose origins may or may not be easily identifiable. Adaptation sheds light on the continuity of art at the same time it emphasizes that art is continually in process. And if art is continually in process, it means that anyone can participate and inherit artistic products regardless of cultural or ancestral affiliations. This act of relocation is one of defamiliarization and collaboration — destabilizing the source text in order to search for ways in which competing values can be combined for various effects.

I also encourage students to think of their own lives and the lives around them as potential echoes of known myths, fairy tales, and other stories. One assignment that I’ve used successfully in the past, particularly in fiction and creative non-fiction writing workshops, is this one (originally published in Writer’s Gym: Exercises and Training Tips for Writers): Interview a family member, eliciting as many stories as possible for as long as possible. Welcome stories that do not involve you directly, as well as those that do. Then take one of these stories and try to figure out what myth, fairy tale, or fable it most closely resembles. Think about plot, themes, archetypal characters, morals, and symbols; find correspondences between the family story and your chosen myth, fairy tale, or fable. Then write your family story within the conventions of your chosen myth, fairy tale, or fable. Keep in mind that most myths are written in the third-person omniscient point of view. This will help you look at the story in a more objective fashion, and will also help you concentrate on plot and action, rather than reflection. Because you are basing your family story on an earlier, likely better-known story, you can have a lot of fun playing with the similarities and differences between the two. (What if Eve had offered Adam a slice of pizza instead of an apple? What if Cinderella played basketball and her prince went out searching for her with one lonely size 10 sneaker?) (54—55).

This assignment has run the gamut from immigrant narratives to war stories to stories of specific family births to failed inventions to delicious secrets. As the family tale takes on a large cultural narrative, students start to see how their own lives naturally mirror many of these long-standing structures and how the microcosm of the family can frequently represent the macrocosm of a much larger community across time and space.

Other fruitful assignments include:

1. Do something ordinary with a mythical figure or historical person.

2. If I could trade bodies (pick a character from a book and imagine yourself in his/her or its body).

3. If they could trade bodies (pick a character and change his/her gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, or other characteristic and see what happens to the story).

4. Take one of Aesop’s fables or similar “moral” tales and revise the story to result in a new moral.

5. Give a mythical or religious character a contemporary occupation.

I’m also fond of this assignment, from Kevin Griffith’s “Hamlet Meets Frankenstein: Exploring the Possible Worlds of Classic Literature”: “[Ask] students to take two seemingly unrelated works of literature and then write a poem speculating on what would happen if those characters met” (111).

Short translation assignments can also be very enlightening and rewarding for writers and readers alike. Although the vast majority of students at first find the translation assignment daunting, intimidating, and sometimes even a boring waste of time (they’d much rather write their own material, they say), those same students are almost all converts in the end, as they begin to appreciate not just translators in general, but also the very difficult choices they are making, much of the time without realizing it, when they are writing in English. They also frequently work with family members and friends and learn about how adapting from one language to another usually opens up more worlds creatively and imaginatively — and even personally — than they knew existed. Many of my students say they have never worked on anything creative with their parents or grandparents before, and they learned a lot about their cultural and ancestral heritage in the process, as well as learning about writers from other languages they will continue to read and explore.

Adaptation exercises remind us that, as Sorouja Moll does in “On Adaptation & girlswork”: “Adaptation is disobedient … Adaptation can both destroy again and heal again … Adaptation is blasphemous … Adaptation asks the painful questions” (93). These assignments also remind us what it means to be a reader. As Dennis Cutchins writes in “Why Adaptations Matter to Your Literature Students”: “Studying literature via adaptations offers our students a better, more effective way to study literature. In fact, I would argue that studying literature through adaptations can teach students what we mean when we say ’literature’ … [as] students must hold at least two texts in their minds at once” (87—88). He goes on to conclude: “This ability to comprehend the contextual nature of meaning is, I believe, at least part of what we mean when we suggest that a particular student is more ’literate’ than another” (93). I would add that it is also part of what we mean when we say a particular writer is more literate than another, and that the ability to hold many texts simultaneously in the mind can stimulate limitless creativity. Ultimately, I would like to propose that adaptation assignments provoke action, fight against passivity, reinvigorate the essential stories of a culture, and re-stimulate creative life if it has become too complacent. Adapting or revising someone else’s works can lead to a new, active, and fluid understanding of self, history, culture, and art, which to my mind is the reason the liberal humanities exist in the first place.

Works Cited

Clark, Eliza, ed. Writer’s Gym: Exercises and Training Tips for Writers. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2007. Print.

Cutchins, Dennis. “Why Adaptations Matter to Your Literature Students.” The Pedagogy of Adaptation. Eds. Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M. Welch. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010. Print.

Griffith, Kevin. “Hamlet Meets Frankenstein: Exploring the Possible Worlds of Classic Literature.” Classics in the Classroom: Using Great Literature to Teach Writing. Eds. Christopher Edgar and Ron Padgett. New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1999. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Moll, Sorouja. “On Adaptation & girlswork.” Shakespeare Made in Canada: Contemporary Canadian Adaptations in Theatre, Pop Media, and Visual Arts. Eds. Daniel Fischlin and Judith Nasby. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 2007. Print.

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Uppal, Priscila. Pretending to Die. Toronto: Exile, 2001. Print.