Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
One of these things is not like the others: the writer in the english department
Writing the creative writing professor teaching, or not teaching, creative writing
When a former creative writing graduate student of mine decided to apply for a PhD in English at several top American universities, she asked me for a letter of recommendation. I’d nearly finished the letter, praising her dynamic and articulate contributions to class discussion and the combination of solid research, startlingly original imagination, elegant prose style, and inventive conceptual approaches that distinguished her fiction, poetry, and critical writing — qualities I presumed would also be valued among doctoral students in literature programs — when she let me off the hook. An adviser at one of the doctoral programs had told her to instead request a letter from one of her professors from her previous master’s degree, in history. That an English program would value a letter from a history professor over one from a creative writing professor housed in an English department was at once baffling and all too familiar.
Although I entered the University of British Columbia’s MFA program with a vision of eventually teaching creative writing, I didn’t realize that an MFA was considered a terminal degree, whereas an MA wasn’t. What I knew was that I’d been forbidden from doing a double-major in creative writing and English as an undergraduate, having been told by the arts adviser that an English major is granted a BA and a creative writing major a BFA, and never the twain shall meet. I’d made my choice, and over time absorbed this distinction. Although my transcript showed no difference between my abilities in the literature classes I’d taken as electives and my creative writing courses, I was less passionately, fully, and deeply engaged with the former. So I began a graduate program that consisted only of writing classes — plus a sole open elective, a class called College and University Teaching, perhaps the most useful class of my degree.
In it, I developed a poetry course, which I pitched to Continuing Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) soon after graduation. No matter that I was painfully shy, had given only a handful of public readings, and had hardly spoken in class during my entire university experience. I would talk when the class was mine to teach — and teaching would be a welcome counterpoint to my day job as a secretary in the Dean of Arts’ office. It turned out that I could talk, and did, and that being a good listener made me a better teacher. I spent the next five years in Quebec City and Ottawa, applying for — and, fortunately, getting — grants, and teaching writing courses to adults through Continuing Education and to elementary and high-school students through the Ontario Arts Council’s Artists in the Schools program.
In the fall of 1999, a year after my first book had won the Governor General’s Award, I received by email a job posting for a tenure-track position in creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Despite the award and the publication of a second book, I hadn’t expected a chance at a teaching job for another decade or so. My husband and I were living in Ottawa, where I was doing stable and stimulating contract work as assistant editor of the members’ magazine at the National Gallery, and he was planning to begin his doctorate at the Sorbonne. But this was the first creative writing opening — the first that did not require a PhD and experience teaching academic courses — since I’d received my MFA. I couldn’t not apply.
Although my mother cautioned, “But what if you get it?” the application felt like a long shot. Not only did I lack university teaching experience in a degree program, I lacked graduate coursework in English. Concordia’s students were required to complete an equal number of literature and creative writing courses and to defend their theses before both creative writing and academic faculty. How could I prepare students for a defence — and participate myself as an examiner — when I’d never experienced one? How effectively could I teach students whose reading, in historical periods and in theory, would likely surpass mine? I looked up publications by the members of the hiring committee and wondered what kinds of questions an expert on Milton would ask.
In that College and University Teaching class, I’d learned about, and understood all too well, imposter syndrome. The personal nature of literary creation makes writers susceptible to such thinking. Unlike academics, who achieve recognition because of what they know, how they articulate what they know, what they do with what they know, and how much funding they can secure, a writer gets to where she is for blurrier reasons. So much of what writers, particularly poets, do comes down to us: to our perspective, our vocabulary, our imaginations, our idiosyncracies, and often our experience. Although, as Mark McGurl discusses in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, “creativity” has been increasingly touted during the past fifty years, many claim to value it while remaining skeptical of the fictitious and the imaginative (19, 21). Although we writers must have sufficient confidence to believe our work worthy of our own time and the partaking of it worthy of readers’ time, we are plagued by the need to justify ourselves, a need on which the university, with its protocols, evaluations, and paperwork, feeds. Who do we think we are? What’s our methodology? Who supports what we’ve done? And are we good enough at what we do to presume to teach others how to do it, too?
Perhaps fortunately, I retain few memories of the interview. When asked how I would continue to write while teaching, I began by saying, “Well, in other jobs I’ve had …” a response met by one committee member with, “This isn’t just a job.” That evening I said to my husband that I doubted I’d be hired, and that if I weren’t, I would probably never be hired anywhere, as I didn’t know if I’d have the nerve to go through such an experience again.
Over a decade later, having served on my department’s hiring committee and noted the uniformity of most candidates’ profiles, distinguished by a list of uninterrupted degrees and post-docs — even many of those applying for our most recent creative writing hire were already teaching at universities — I’m surprised and grateful that I was granted an interview at all. The following September, making the rounds at a welcome reception for new faculty, the university’s vice rector asked, “And which university did you come to us from?” Upon hearing, “Actually, I was working in Publications at the National Gallery,” he shook my hand, staring out the penthouse window into the distance, and moved on.
So here I was. But, to paraphrase Northrop Frye, Where was here? And what was the price of admission?
A writer in academe gives up making writing the focus of her life — sacrifices the freedom to write — in exchange for the freedom from poverty and perhaps obscurity. Although the comparative generosity of Canadian arts funding creates an environment in which it is possible to write full time, at least for a while — the length of that while depending on the success of one’s work and grant writing skills, and on one’s household circumstances, place of residence, and ability to live frugally — those of us disheartened or exhausted by the stresses of grant-to-grant, contract-to-contract living opt for the American model of seeking a teaching position. If poets south of the border, some of whom command $5,000 or more for a reading, hold institutional affiliations, how much more enticing, one would think, would be a stable source of income for Canadian writers, most of whom will appear almost anywhere in the country for airfare, hotel, a meal, and the standard $250 Canada Council honorarium (which has not changed since I began to do paid readings in 1996).
And yet, most writers here are more skeptical of institutional affiliation and less pragmatic than I was. Some harbour deep suspicions of teaching positions, equating them with the death of one’s existence as a writer. While in the United States nearly every one of the thousands who annually complete an MFA or MA, and certainly those embarked on a creative writing PhD, aspires to teach, I’ve had students tell me, frankly, that they’re not interested in teaching writing: they want to write. And so, despite Montreal’s considerable draws, if recollection serves I was one of some sixty applicants for Concordia’s position, not, as would be the case in the United States, one of several hundred.
In his essay “Poetry and Ambition,” Donald Hall laments the fact that, for over half a century, writers in academe have been increasingly segregated in creative writing programs rather than participating in English departments. The kind of English department writer he has in mind, though, is the writer/critic — he mentions Yvor Winters, who, he claims, “entered the academy under sufferance, condescended to” (139). What about the writer who is sought for his or her profile as a literary practitioner, but whose departmental affiliation is the same as that of those whose engagement with the written word is of a markedly different nature?
At a Politics and the Pen dinner on Parliament Hill, a short fiction writer I scarcely knew advised, on learning that I’d been hired at Concordia, that perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to not be a great teacher. A poet and fellow overachiever, my superior at the National Gallery, counselled me to cultivate an air of fragility, to indicate that my need to write was primary and that other tasks would get in the way of my fulfillment of that need. It would go without saying, then, that to ask too much of me would make me an unproductive, non-publishing writer, a poor teacher, and a miserable colleague. Another poet, who had chosen the route of editing, reviewing, and writing criticism — all of this, partly by choice, partly by necessity, outside the university — cited examples of writing faculty who had published little after being hired, or whose work had, he felt, markedly declined in quality. “Just tell me if you see that happening to me,” I said. “Keep an eye on me.”
But I didn’t entirely believe that survival in the university required a strategy. My professors at UBC, whether out of a desire to protect their students’ sensibilities from the tedium of much of academic life or a complete lack of interest in talking about anything unrelated to writing, hadn’t disclosed the sheer weight of extra-literary, extra-pedagogical responsibility that an academic position entailed. One would think that two years of office work in various departments on campus would have opened my eyes, but I remained convinced that only those who became chairs or who chose (it didn’t seriously occur to me that they might have been coerced) to edit journals or head major committees faced significant service demands.
My first suggestion of what lay in wait came midway through the summer of 2000, as I was packing up to move to Montreal. I received an email from a writer who said she’d been sent my way by one of my new colleagues on the understanding that I would be looking after the English department’s reading series for the coming year. With a faint sense of doom, I queried the chair. As it turned out, my predecessor had coordinated the series and it had been decided that I would take over. He apologized for having forgotten to tell me, but couldn’t, of course, apologize for assigning me the role; a writer himself, he had given so much to the institution that what was being asked of me felt paltry.
Not only was I unprepared for the service commitments of a university teaching position, I’d underestimated the difference between teaching a continuing education class to mature students and teaching a year-long graded course to undergraduates fresh out of high school or CEGEP. I soon realized that the method by which I had been taught — a sort of workshop immersion, in which we learned how to talk about writing by talking about writing — was woefully inadequate in a class of twenty-three students (close to twice the size of my own first workshop), many of whom had not written poetry before and most of whom had little experience of or interest in reading it.
When I learned that curricular logistics made it impossible to require students to take an Introduction to Poetry literature course concurrently with an introductory poetry course in creative writing, I built the literature course into the creative writing one. While I used to require students to submit their work to journals, now I require them to write craft-oriented book reviews. My students write essays, give presentations, do regular exercises (including some designed specifically to shake them up), and read essays on craft. While thought bubbles over their heads may say, “I’d rather be workshopping,” I know the workshop discussions, when they happen, benefit from all the rest. Although there are seven of us with tenured or tenure-track positions in creative writing — a healthy number for a Canadian creative writing program — my colleagues and I remain just under 30 percent of the twenty-four total departmental faculty. My title, “Professor, Department of English” seems a misnomer, not to mention that in institutional correspondence I’m respectfully granted the honorific “Dr.”
How not to feel like an imposter when asked to assess the comparative qualifications of various candidates for a medievalist position? How to voice my dismay that so few scholars seem to do close reading any longer — that theory has overtaken an interest in a work of literature as a made thing, assembled of words and punctuation marks — without sounding retrograde or simply naive? How to grapple with the absence of evaluative judgment among academics, for whom it seems anathema to comment on a work’s aesthetic quality, so rife with political implications are terms like “good”? I don’t have true insight into what it’s like to teach a lecture course of eighty students with no teaching assistant, nor do my academic colleagues know what it’s like to teach twenty students, from whom submissions of work are ongoing and often revealing, and for whom assessment always feels — and on some level is — personal. Only a stalwart few of my academic colleagues offer to serve as readers for creative writing theses. At many times, the two “streams” in my department are indeed, to use Hugh MacLennan’s term, “two solitudes.”
Before being hired, I’d heard of SSHRC. That was as far as my knowledge went; it was someone else’s acronym. Had I not been part of an academic department in a university intent on augmenting its research profile, I would never have felt compelled to attend an information session on research grants shortly before teaching my first class. Joining me were two recently hired colleagues, one a novelist, the other a Renaissance specialist. The novelist and I took few notes, quickly realizing that the nature of our practice disqualified us from grants with a scholarly orientation; the Renaissance specialist, meanwhile, stayed up for nights on end and produced a successful application. For the next few years, I took solace in the fact that I was exempt from the fierce institutional demands to bring in funds; then SSHRC introduced its research/creation grants. Immunity lost, I began the process of writing the most epic application I’d ever completed, filling out CV forms online to list every poem I’d ever published, every reading I’d given, every prize or grant I’d received (in dollar value, of course), all using an elaborate, plodding multiple-choice system. For six weeks, this is how I spent my weekends. Soon after learning that my project had been funded, I began to understand a colleague’s joke that the best thing about getting a grant was not having to apply for at least another three years.
To spend the money meant hiring research assistants. For the first time, I delegated aspects of my creative life, sending grad students off to gather material for poems I might write. Though I was grateful to be able to fund them, and no doubt they were happier doing this than waiting tables, I couldn’t help thinking that I was missing out, since often it was the material on the facing page from what I thought I was looking for that really sparked a poem.
In order to ensure that the funded research assistants also had more meaningful work, I’d proposed as part of my application an anthology project that paralleled in subject the poetry manuscript I would write. While I wrote poems about zoos, the RAs and I would research, compile, select, and introduce poems by others on the same subject. This project, the metaphor of which began to apply disconcertingly to its impact on my life, occupied much of my non-teaching time for several years. While the grant paid for my travels to historic European zoos, it offered no teaching release. Not surprisingly, I wrote less than I would have written without funding. The resulting anthology, Penned, was published in 2009; my own book did not see print until fall 2011, by which time it was often misunderstood as an offshoot of the anthology rather than the other way around. On the official record, the grant was a success, but it confirmed that my own practice is, at least so far, one that requires time more than money.
And time is scarce. During my first year of teaching I wrote regularly, while each year since then I’ve written less and less from September to April until, now that I have two children, I have resigned myself to not writing more than a few lines of poetry during the teaching year. As August ticks to a close and department meetings and orientations begin, I feel my life as a writer, rejuvenated during the summer, shutting down. I make notes on ideas for directions I hope to follow when I begin to write in earnest again the following May. Before classes begin, I think, “I cannot do this again” — and then something happens.
A class discussion takes flight as a student encounters William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” for the first time and asks what makes it a poem. A student who’s submitted only heartfelt, overly obvious anecdotes in the guise of poems writes an elliptical, imagistic wonder. Another student follows up on a reading recommendation with transformative results. A digressive conversation during office hours reveals the ongoing mystery and complexity of these human beings whose consciousnesses and aesthetics I have the privilege of sharing week after week. A novel I read in thesis form wins the Giller Prize. A student I taught years ago contacts me not to ask for a letter of recommendation but to express her gratitude for the course, from which she’s still learning.
Although there’s no doubt that I would have been a more prolific writer had I not submitted my application to Concordia, the loss I have felt as a result of the job has been of time, not of creativity. Rather than being diminished, my imagination has been augmented.
In a typical creative writing classroom, I see a richer range of writing than I do in any one Canadian literary journal; the distinctiveness of individual imaginations and aesthetics, before they become shaped by a desire to please the professor, the workshop group, or the magazine or book editor, continues to astonish me. The best and most innovative of my students have taught me new approaches to syntax, while the weaker have forced me to articulate criteria for excellence that have raised my standards for my own work. Students’ boldness in rising to the challenges I set inspires and requires me to do the same. I read essays on poetic craft with a seriousness that I’d have been unlikely to bring to the task were there not a pedagogical imperative. At the end of every course, I tell my students that I will miss them, and I do.
When I’m critiquing a really fine poem, time vanishes as it does when I write; I’m not plunged into the depths of myself as when writing, but I’m plunged, nevertheless, into poetry. I discover other aesthetics and sensibilities, an experience no less memorable or illuminating — and certainly more refreshing — than swimming around in my own. Louise Glück has written eloquently on the ways in which ego vanishes when working with another’s poem, “to get [it] right” (17). And although I’m not interested in influence in power-centric terms, I realize that in many ways I can have more of an impact on writing as a teacher than as a poet. In my twenties, I could, given the opportunity, write all day, every day. I’m not sure I could do that now, nor that I’d want to. Increasingly, I’m aware that writing is but a part of life and that this is something to embrace rather than lament.
We come to teaching through our love of the material but, once here, we find ourselves talking to others all the time — students, colleagues, staff. My grant-and-freelance years were marked by long periods of solitude — sometimes leaving the house only to look at paintings or buy groceries — punctuated by bursts of enforced sociability when I went to a reading or spent a week giving school workshops. In that solitude, I wrote some of my best poems. But could I have called myself happy?
Although I had not anticipated this, the security of a tenured teaching position has largely protected me from a futile and distracting focus on grants, prizes, the breakthrough “poet’s novel,” and other potentially lucrative aspects of a writing career, freeing me to deepen rather than broaden, to work at my own pace, and to listen to my own instincts in developing an aesthetic that, for better or worse, does not privilege audience. The novel that I’d begun writing before being hired was, in part, motivated by an agent’s interest in the novel that I might write. That I have not completed it, I must also admit, is partly due to the demands of teaching, but also to my recognition that my approach remains driven by image, language, mood, and idea rather than by character and plot, and that I haven’t yet figured out how to make my strengths serve the form of the novel. So I have been free to take my time with prose, and to let my poems become increasingly idiosyncratic.
That I rarely see the friend who warned me not to stray off course attests to the different paths our lives have taken. If he were to report to me on my trajectory during the past decade, I’m fairly sure of what he would say, and I would agree. That I have succumbed to the demands of teaching and service; that during the past decade I have edited three books — one of which arose from my grant and one of which I was approached to edit in part because I taught writing — and published only one. That to shepherd books along is, though valuable, not equivalent to writing one’s own. But what can he know of the rewards? I would respond that, as with parenthood, life is different on the other side.
Works Cited
Glück, Louise. “Education of the Poet.” Proofs and Theories. New York: Ecco, 1994. Print.
Hall, Donald. “Poetry and Ambition.” Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry. Ed. Martin Lammon. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Print.
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.