Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
Engaged practice: coordinating and creating a community within a creative writing MFA program
Writing creative writing programs
CATHERINE BUSH
The University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA, originally conceived in the 1990s, was launched in 2006. In 2006 there was only one other MFA program in Canada, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, in addition to a number of programs where creative writing was taught as a concentration within an English MA. The latter remains the dominant mode for delivering creative writing at the graduate level in Canada. There was also, amazingly, no graduate creative writing program in Toronto, which has the largest and arguably most diverse writing community in the country, until the simultaneous arrival of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA and the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing stream within its English MA.
Guelph MFA founding director Constance Rooke envisioned a semi-autonomous professional program that would take advantage of writers who were already on faculty in the English department. By locating the program in Toronto, on the suburban north campus of Humber College, where the University of Guelph offers courses and with which it has an administrative affiliation, Rooke aimed to take advantage of a range of Toronto writers and publishing professionals as faculty and visitors while providing students with access to the city’s literary and wider arts communities. An MFA program, rather than a specialization within an English MA, would allow for greater professional concentration and enable the program to admit students without undergraduate degrees in English, since talented emerging writers come from a diversity of backgrounds. Some don’t have university degrees at all but a level of professional accomplishment that facilitates admission into a graduate program.
After Rooke’s death in the third year of the MFA, I took over as program coordinator. Key elements that Rooke promoted remain defining features of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, including the individual study semester, or mentorship, which the students undertake with a professional writer of their choice in the summer of their first year, and the reading-based plenary courses, the program’s two core courses, which I teach as coordinator and have further developed from Rooke’s templates. The plenary courses bring together all twenty-four students in our two-year program and provide an issue-oriented forum for discussing writing craft and the writing life — the aesthetics and ethics of writing. The plenaries also provide a structured way of creating and consolidating an MFA community.
From its inception our MFA has situated the study of writing within an examination of what an engaged writing practice might be. Writing exists, first of all, in strong relationship to reading, and there are reading components to all our courses. But Rooke also wanted students to ask themselves: How should a writer live? The writer must look up from the page and consider the world. I might phrase the question a little differently: How should a writer attend — to the page and to the world, and how do we define and talk about that attention?
Students come to a graduate writing program for a variety of reasons. Some wish simply to intensify their study of the craft or, potentially, to expand their range within a genre or into another genre. Some are looking for training in the teaching of writing and accreditation that will help them find work teaching in order to support themselves as writers. What a graduate writing program offers all students is a community, which is another professed reason for attending such a program. The nature of the community creates a context for the creation of work, supports it, and shapes the conversation that enfolds itself around the work being created. It is useful to think about the nature of the community provided by a writing program and the nature of its engagement with other communities. In various ways, community engagement has also come to be a defining feature of our MFA.
Practicalities have had their influence on the current shape of the program. Original plans to expand the number of students and offer online delivery were curtailed by faculty resources, further depleted with retirement. In fact, the number of students was reduced to its current level of twelve to thirteen admissions a year. The initial plan to have a continually shifting series of sessional instructors (and thus employ a wide range of writers) couldn’t be sustained because of sessional instructors’ rights and seniority. However, Guelph boasts additional writers on faculty, both within the School of English and Theatre Studies and in other departments, who serve on our admission and thesis committees. We’ve had to strategically plan how to provide thesis supervision, given our lack of full-time faculty, and have been able to argue for the creation of a group of associated faculty, all professional writers based in Toronto, to help fill our supervision needs.
Our MFA does not currently have access to regular teaching assistantships. Yet students need and want opportunities to work, both because they require the income and because they desire teaching experience. As a result of our location at Humber College, students can fill a number of positions each year as tutors in the two Humber College Writing Centres on the North and Lakeshore campuses. This arrangement has had the added benefit of being a portal to ongoing hires of MFA graduates to teach rhetoric and composition at Humber College.
Community-based initiatives have become another way to offer students and graduates teaching experience. In Guelph itself, in collaboration with the university’s Open Learning Centre, we have established Creative Writing at Guelph, a continuing education program whose instructors are MFA graduates and occasionally students with sufficient credentials. In Toronto, along with fellow Guelph English professor Michelle Elleray, a parent at Parkdale Public School in Toronto’s downtown west end, I have initiated a six-week teaching practicum in which interested MFA students team-teach a weekly creative writing class to Grade 7/8 students. This program, now in its sixth year, has been supplemented by a second program in which MFA students teach their own two-day units within the Grade 12 Writers’ Craft curriculum at nearby Parkdale Collegiate Institute.
Parkdale Public School is what’s known as an inner-city model school, a program established to ensure that all children, especially those from low-income families or facing language barriers, have access to the skills and opportunities that will enable them to succeed. Both Parkdale schools have racially diverse student bodies; many students come from families of recent immigrants, even refugees, Tibetan and Roma in particular.
MFA students are responsible for developing their own teaching plans, aided by group discussions about pedagogy. They are given feedback on their teaching both by the MFA coordinator and the Parkdale teachers, who energetically support their work. Since many MFA students and faculty live in the downtown Toronto west end, this teaching takes place within the community that we inhabit as writers. While teaching, MFA students also have a chance to model themselves for the high-school students as emerging professional writers, to present this way of life as a possibility. The Parkdale programs end with the creation of booklets of student work and a combined assembly in which a selection of Grade 8, Grade 12, and MFA students read from their writing.
In the plenary class, I argue that students shouldn’t take for granted the existence of a culture that will sustain literary art but should think as activists about what they can do to help create and maintain such a culture. They need to model themselves as readers and as writers, and as writers who read. The Parkdale Projects give us an opportunity to do this in a hands-on way while offering MFA students the practical experience of teaching creative writing in different educational settings.
Our two-year program attracts writers at various stages of development, from those just out of undergraduate programs to mid-career writers, and students are required to take at least one workshop (of three) in a second genre outside their area of specialization.
There are pedagogical challenges to our approach: highly developed poets may share a workshop with students who have little or no experience as poets, even though they have expertise in another genre. Instructors need to contend with this diversity of experience within the classroom. Still, our students write and think about writing with sophistication; conceptually, they are not beginning writers even if testing out another genre. The desire to gain experience in a second genre is one reason that mature writers return to school.
In the fall semester of each year, students come together for the plenary courses, Writers on Writing and Writers in the World, which are offered in alternating years. The plenary courses — called “plenaries” because they bring together all students in the program — are colloquia that combine the intellectual and the practical. Class discussion is interwoven with student presentations on a series of readings. Texts include works in the genres on which we focus as a program, along with hybrid texts that push the boundaries between genres and essays from the specific and wide-ranging literature of practising writers on their art, which is not necessarily encountered in literature classes. The breadth of the readings is global and ranges across time. Works by Yuri Herrera, Jan Zwicky, Etgar Keret, Binyavanga Wainaina, Mahmoud Darwish, Jeannette Armstrong, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Sheila Heti are among those encountered. The plenary courses provide a focus for a reading-based practice within the framework of a writing program while offering a forum for discussing writing through a series of issue-based inquiries.
Before I came to the Guelph MFA, I had, like many writers, mostly taught workshops, albeit with a strong reading component. The plenary courses present a different pedagogical opportunity, to develop twinned reading courses for graduate writing students that are simultaneously forums for lively, even contentious discussion. Astute students note thematic connections among the readings and between the two plenaries. The courses are structured to reinforce and bounce off each other, since one group of students will take one course first, the next cohort the other. The plenaries run one day a week and include a morning and afternoon session; the afternoons may involve smaller break-out discussions or visits from professionals (editors from traditionally published and digital magazines; publishers from conglomerates and independents; newspaper book section editors; agents; and writers). Visiting writers are invited with an eye to the different ways in which writing enters the world and is integrated in a wider life: Sina Queyras gave a talk on developing a voice and creating the online Lemon Hound literary magazine site and persona; Shyam Selvadurai spoke about the Write to Reconcile project that he has developed in Sri Lanka to teach creative writing skills to those who suffered trauma during that country’s civil war.
Writers on Writing focuses on where the writer meets the page or screen, and examines how writers understand and describe their own creative processes and techniques. Our first week’s discussion springboards from the framework of “What do you know? To write from what you know, or not, and, if so, how to determine what you know?” Developing writers are often told to write what they know. It seems useful to begin by asking students what and how they approach “knowing” as writers. What does it mean for a writer to know something? What does each of us mean by this? What is the place of experience in our writing, how do we each define it, and, conversely, what might be the role of “not-knowing” in our writing? Readings present varied points of entry into this quandary: an excerpt from Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction,” also from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letter One” from Letters to a Young Poet, Flannery O’Connor’s “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” John D’Agata’s introduction to The Lost Origins of the Essay, David Shields from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and a brief Harold Pinter essay.
In the second week we consider the question “Whom do you write for?” I’m careful to point out that we’re not talking about the market but how we internalize the idea of a reader. Is it a version of the self, or a specific other, or others? What changes in the act of writing if we conceptualize it as an act of communication to another — or don’t?
Writers on Writing also affords opportunities to interrogate terms that students might otherwise take for granted. One week, I ask them to articulate what they mean by realism, or what they mean when they say a piece of writing feels “real.” Other weeks, we press up against definitions of what a story is, or a poem, or the nature of metaphoric language, or differing approaches to truth in creative non-fiction. We discuss the necessity of grappling with time in narrative forms, and ways to do so, and do a unit on constraint, expanding from formal Oulipean rigours to contemplate the place of constraint in all genres.
Writers in the World invites students to consider and debate how writers navigate, and choose to represent, the world around them. They are asked to consider both the assigned readings and their own writing practice in light of weekly themes. We begin with a discussion of how we give value to the act of writing and to literary works — spurred by readings from Lewis Hyde, Susan Sontag, Eileen Myles, Salman Rushdie, Ocean Vuong, and Li-Young Lee. We move on to consider various conceptions of place and land and our relationship to each, attempting to expand our spatial and temporal awareness and how we might collectively and individually describe our “here and now.” Throughout the course we are continually engaged in a consideration of how we pay attention as writers. I want students to think about the fact that every choice we make about where to direct our attention has both ethical and aesthetic consequence. We take on some of the thorny debates about representing others who are not like us and the implications of racialized imaginings. During the course of the semester, we examine works by Dionne Brand, Judith Thompson, C.D. Wright, Roberto Bolano, and Caryl Churchill as responses to specific political and historical situations: the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pinochet years in Chile, the Israel-Palestine conflict at the end of 2008. We discuss differing forms that transgression may take on the page, literary strategies for depicting extreme experience or, conversely, leaving space for the unspeakable, the literary value of making absences of all sorts feel present. We consider practical issues such as the changing copyright climate (and debate whether and when we’d give work away for free), the effects of digitization on literary production and writers’ professional lives, and the challenges of defining a national literature. I lead some of the discussions, as do students as part of their presentations, since the ability to generate class discussion is another useful pedagogical skill. Graduates describe missing the conversations of the plenaries, an intensity of dialogue that can be difficult to find elsewhere.
One of the challenges of teaching a class like the plenary is student diversity. Students come from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds. Those just out of undergraduate programs may initially find it intimidating to speak in front of their older and more experienced peers. Some find the more rigorously intellectual offerings challenging and are most at home speaking from the pragmatics of their own practice. Some enter the program more politicized than others. Smaller break-out groups prove useful in giving the less assured room in which to speak; the mixture of first- and second-year students also helps. A graduate program shouldn’t assume the “why” of what we’re doing but should continually interrogate it, both at the level of individual artistic creation and as a practice. The creation of literary work asks students to encounter the world in its complexity and recreate an experience of complexity in literary form. Exposure to a diversity of voices in the classroom — those who speak Ojicree or Swahili or grew up with a rural Italian dialect in the home or have lived in the Philippines or served in Kandahar or whose fathers have vanished or who identify as queer or who write poetic drama or realist short stories or hybrid memoir — is a way to experience complexity and grow as a writer. At the end of the course, students submit a writing assignment in which they contend with one of the readings through the lens of an issue or issues raised during the semester, while taking their own writing practices into account. Encouraged but not compelled to respond creatively, some have submitted fictional interviews, lyric meditations, and hybrid narratives, others more formal papers.
The plenaries provide a framework for a course that in a scaled-down and less rigorous form could be offered to undergraduates, one that formally disrupts the dependence on the workshop model as a way to teach writing. The emphasis on debate keeps things lively.
Graduates of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA speak frequently of the unique opportunities provided by the mentorship undertaken during the summer of their first year. The mentorship provides an initial period of individual study prior to the thesis process, acknowledges the centrality of intensive yet guided solitary work in a writing practice, and gives students the opportunity to work independently with a professional writer.
Students are offered a list of potential mentors yet are free to suggest a writer/mentor with whom they’d like to work. Nor do mentors have to reside in Toronto. Students can communicate electronically with a mentor (if that suits them and the mentor), who responds to their writing in weekly meetings. As coordinator, I contact all potential mentors, set up the mentorships, and oversee schedules and reading lists. The amount of writing (and reading) that a student does will vary by project and writer. The arrangement affords great flexibility in terms of addressing students’ varied needs and aesthetic sensibilities, and mentors have included American writers Francisco Goldman and experimental poet Charles Bernstein, Newfoundland-based novelist Lisa Moore, and then-Shanghai-based novelist Madeleine Thien, poet and hybrid prose writer Lisa Robertson, who lives in rural France, and closer-to-home writer Camilla Gibb and the poet Kevin Connolly.
During their last two semesters in the program, students concentrate on a thesis, a book-length creative project or full play script, which they have usually begun during the mentorship. Ideally, they leave the mentorship with a rough first draft or the major portion of a draft complete. Students are not required to work on their thesis project during the mentorship, but are encouraged to do so, particularly those writing novels or other long-form narrative. Students thus have two extended opportunities for intense, independent work on a writing project.
Thesis supervisors are drawn from either full Guelph faculty associated with the program or writers appointed to our Associated Faculty. Supervisors, unlike mentors, are required to work with students in person. Students defend their thesis — a work that has undergone significant revision and in some cases may nearly be ready to submit to publishers — at an oral exam in which they give a talk placing their creative project within a critical context that includes formal and conceptual challenges and supplementary readings.
It’s sometimes charged that writing programs enforce aesthetic sameness on their students. This can happen, as can the over-workshopping of student writing in ways that merely emphasize competence. I see it as my responsibility as coordinator to be alert to such risks, to speak to them in the classroom and model their opposites, and explore formal and aesthetic possibility through a range of specific examples, by returning to that most crucial question. What makes a work of art feel alive? It’s important to create a space in the classroom, and the program, in which a variety of voices and points of view feel safe to express themselves. The sense of safety is an essential element of community. It’s not unusual for students’ writing to be a response to personal trauma, and writers are often metabolically and psychologically sensitive.
Our extracurricular offerings are another way to approach the diverse forms that a writing life can take. I have organized a panel on writers and money (Sheila Heti spoke of loans among artist friends, poet Margaret Christakos to the financial insecurities of mid-life, playwright Colleen Murphy of using grant money to help buy a car). Madeleine Thien gave a talk on her personal engagement with the work of theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.
One of the advantages of our Toronto location is that students can make contacts with fellow writers, arts professionals, and organizations. We offer Master Classes under the auspices of the International Festival of Authors at Toronto’s Harbourfront, annual interviews in which students themselves have an opportunity to ask questions and meet the writers. Students have done internships at Toronto theatres; an MFA reading is part of the annual lineup at the Eden Mills Literary Festival outside of Guelph. We host a monthly program reading series in a Toronto bar that brings together students, alumni, and prominent local writers associated with the program.
What responsibility do we who teach and administrate graduate writing programs have to address how our students will make a living? Do academic programs generally have this responsibility? Arts programs? Students come to graduate writing programs looking for an intensive professional apprenticeship and, if they’re text-based creators, portals to publishing. Giving students a realistic sense of the market doesn’t have to mean depressing them with a torrent of difficulties. Students say as much: they don’t want to be depressed. The fact is, lucky things happen to writers at all stages of their careers. Hope is a useful emotion. We had a recent graduate sell a short-story manuscript to a major publishing house in a week. Sometimes that happens; more often it doesn’t. One year, six students in our program sold manuscripts within six months of graduation. In class, we debate the merits of digital publishing and self-publishing versus more traditional routes. The trans writer Vivek Shraya recently spoke to students about her own journey from self-publishing to a traditional independent press, all while she held down a full-time job. I speak to the ways in which my own writing process is slow and the decisions I’ve made to accommodate this, and about the challenges of maintaining an immersive writing practice while engaged in other work. I try to give a sense of how unstraightforward a writing life can be. Yes, students need to be given a sense of how they will make a living and tools that will help them do so. Yet a writing program also recreates a world, or a microcosm of the world, and within it, students should be encouraged to engage, in the broadest and deepest of ways, with questions of how to live as writers. This means grappling not only with how to create writing that lives but also how to navigate and embrace and respond to the world in which they and their writing live.