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

Selling it: creative writing and the public good
Writing creative writing programs

THOM VERNON

The Good of Creative Writing

If we think of pieces of literature as purpose-built spaces, we may gain a better understanding of exactly how literature serves those qualities we call the public good. We enter an author’s literary spaces in order to transform raw perception and sensation into experiences of qualities that also happen to nourish the public good: recognition, trust, empathy, and so on. When we read a book or a story and have an aha! moment, it is very similar to walking into any new space such as a cathedral, an art gallery, or even a new friend’s living room. Our senses register patterns, colours, and smells, and our brains organize this sensory data into what we call “experience.” The construction of these spaces is, I would argue, a principal raison d’être of authoring. It is an activity that links private imagination to the communities in which we live.

Engagement with literature has a private side: we read and write alone. In these constructed literary spaces, our imaginations take flight. Our imaginative capacities, research has shown, are positively correlated with the reading of literature (for example). Invariably, then, we bring our private neurological, psychological, and emotional apparatus and experience back into the public sphere. One consequence of this private-public exchange among writers and readers is that our creative capacities increase our employment prospects. In fact, our creative capacities will soon provide our only economic security. Our world, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) advises, “is a world in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life, in which high levels of education — a very different kind of education than most of us have had — are going to be the only security there is” (“To Read” 77). Not surprisingly, then, reading rates are also positively correlated with social engagement as well as a sense of belonging. Hence, our private literary engagements dialectically shape, and expand, our public ones (86—93). The borders of our private imaginings bleed into public terrain.

Maybe it’s true that “when we see or hear protests against the funding cuts, it is not ordinary Canadians protesting, but rather those who have made a career of living off government grants” (Lapajne). This argument, though, collapses with scrutiny — but probably not in the way its proponents might hope. The debate around public arts funding reveals a good that few other endeavours can claim.

Public arts funding certainly benefits the economy and generates media attention (“Rob, Doug Ford” 2013). At the same time, we value these creative activities precisely because of their contribution to the public and private good — not solely for their dollar return on investment (“How the United States Funds the Arts”). For instance, what exactly is the public monetary return on investment for a photograph in which a crucifix drowns in the artist’s blood and urine? What is good about it may be more elusive than the value of the NEA award to the artist. Along with the work of four other provocative art works, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ became a symbol of government waste and sacrilege. Senator Jesse Helms took an ad hominem approach when he denounced the artist and his work on the floor of the U.S. Senate: “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.… Let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord” (qtd. in Koch). Perhaps Helms was not making the strongest argument, but the broader controversy did force many Americans to ask, What is art? and What is it good for?

If, for instance, money is not to be spent on the arts, education, and social welfare projects because it drains resources, then one wonders what we are spending our money on. In Canada and the United States there has been a shift away from the public funding of social welfare, education, and artistic investment toward an amplification of military expenditures (Vernon, “Selling It”). These expansions have relied on neo-liberal ideologies (market incentive, efficiency, etc.) to justify the privatization of military, education, health, criminal justice, and other formerly government-run activities. These strategic policy moves have facilitated, not the reduction in spending called for by many North American critics of big government, but rather a massive transfer of public wealth into private hands.

When Margaret Thatcher famously asserted that “there is no such thing as society,” the neo-liberal project sought to neuter public support for the public sphere (Hussain; Duménil and Lévy). It’s been argued that this move was strategic (Duménil and Lévy). Well before the most recent financial meltdown, analysts of class Duménil and Lévy argued that “the data are unambiguous. A particular class and a sector of the economy … benefited from the crisis in amazing proportions.… The rising wealth of the wealthiest fraction can be easily documented. Households holding monetary and financial assets benefited from the change in policy.” This move appears to have been as unproductive for our shared economies as it has been for our arts, education, and social democratic values. Further, the neo-liberal project did not fulfill its promise to ensure democratic rights and freedoms while expanding access to economic and personal self-determination. Neo-liberalism became the theoretical spine of the transfer of public wealth to the private sector. This policy move may have cost the public sphere much more than dollars.

In addition to its economic failure, the neo-liberal project has eroded many of the social ties that bind. As we work in jobs we hate to repay students loans we borrowed to earn the economic freedom promised by higher education, we are watched, tracked, and censored. There are, since the 1970s, far fewer people doing far better than everyone else. In 2000, the wealthiest 50 percent of Canadian families controlled 94.4 percent of the country’s wealth, with the other 50 percent holding 5.6 percent (Brownlee 7). By 2005, according to Statistics Canada, the wealthiest 10 percent of families controlled 58 percent of wealth (8). It’s no secret that a similar trend is playing out in the United States (Wolff 25). For instance, the Walton family (owners of Walmart) holds as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of the population (Judt 14). One consequence of such drastic wealth inequality is a treacherous shift in allegiances. People’s attention has shifted away from each other to the bottom line. Consequently, we are bound to our surveillance states and the meanings they deploy, perpetuate, and reproduce. “The problem with market economies,” writes Terry Eagleton, “is that they erode the symbolic, affective dimensions of social existence” (“Reappraisals” 78). The assertions and arguments that follow could be applied, arguably, to the entire North American arts and humanities project, which I will reference. However, my focus is creative writing. In a culture where meaning is being collapsed and narrowed to the bottom line, the demand and hunger for the indeterminacy of authoring has, as we shall see, risen.

While President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher led the divestiture of state investments in public goods (arts, education, income support, public infrastructure, etc.) through a long history of demonization, public policy moves, and nationalism, they were not the first. Neo-liberalism’s “reduction of ’society’ to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget,” argues Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land, “that it was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Nazis” (119—20). Over the last thirty-five years, neo-liberal values (low taxes, less waste, government effectiveness and efficiency, etc.) have increasingly displaced the traditional social democratic values fostered by, say, literature. These values include the goods of access to health care and education, the right to organize labour, reproductive rights, and so on. A little further on we shall see exactly how art and literature helped victims of the Nazis, such as Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee, to articulate the collapse of meaning and the rise of fascism.

If our values do not bind us to each other, then we can only look to the state for meaning. Judt contends that the neo-liberal shift has “eviscerated society”; the privatization and bottom-line thinking in regard to public goods such as education leaves “nothing except authority and obedience binding the citizen to the state” (118). With the squeezing-out of public discourse of meanings other than those relevant to the bottom line and the state, we also diminish our capacity to recognize our unique self-conceptions and those of others. This is where fascism enters. But the arts — such as creative writing — could enter here, too.

For what it’s worth, if one were to gauge the value of the arts based on economics, then the arts make a very strong case for themselves. In Canada, the Conference Board informs us that the contribution of the cultural sector to the nation’s GDP is over 7 percent annually, with publishing leading the way in exports; and for every dollar invested in the arts, specifically, $1.84 is value-added to the economy. For its part, the United States is one of the top three producers and exporters of cultural goods (UNESCO). Even in the 2008—10 economic downturn, book sales declined only slightly (Milliot). So, the case for the economic benefits of the arts gainsays their historic demonization.

But even with all of the revenue generation and employment (1.1 million in 2007), there is something inherently valuable in the practice of, and engagement with, the arts — specifically literature (Conference Board). Very recently, it has been demonstrated that when one enters fictional narratives with an emotional stake in the story and its people, she is likely to practise empathy (Bal and Veltkamp; Kid and Castano). Roland Barthes asserts that we are born into a system of symbols, of which language is integral, and it is this “symbolic which constitutes the man” (Grain 93). Literature allows us to engage meaningfully with this symbolic order because it resists the collapse of meaning through amplification and refraction. “We become,” Charles Taylor writes, “full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression” (32). Because our self-conception is inherently formed through dialogue and struggle with the society and symbols in and among which we live, we depend upon engagement with language to communicate and traffic socially.

Creative writing weaves self-interest (and exploration) into the public good through its construction of literary structures. It does this by positioning and deploying correspondences between the private experiences, perceptions, and sensations of author and reader. These privacies then reverberate as experience for the reader. The middle section of the final volume of Proust’s Finding Time Again, for instance, offers one way to position such correspondences: “One can list indefinitely in a description all the objects that figured in the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style” (198). Proust, of course, is the master of these deployments. Very early in the first volume of Finding Time Again there is one example, a description of the reflections from “a magic lantern” placed in his room by his mother or grandmother to soothe the boy: “Golo would come out of the small triangular forest that velveted the hillside with dark green and advance jolting toward the castle of poor Genevieve de Brabant. This castle was cut off along a curved line that was actually the edge of one of the glass ovals arranged in the frame which you slipped between the grooves of the lantern. It was only a section of the castle and it had a moor in front of it….” (Swann’s Way 9). The author’s memories (real or imagined) prepare scaffolding, bound together by emotion, upon which the reader’s imagination can climb. Reading just this section could allow a reader to experience ancient forests inhabited by a mysterious Lady, the frustration one can encounter as a child trying to make a mechanical thing work properly, remote castles to be conquered (and all things yet to conquer), and the soggy moors full of dangerous traps, pitfalls, and missteps. One can imagine being a frustrated and lonely boy like the narrator, put to bed too early and awaiting his mother’s kiss. The very purpose of placing such scaffolding pillars is not to choose one or the other as correct, but rather to erect a structure into which a reader’s imagination may enter.

As authors create these spaces, readers practise those values that let us cohere normatively. Editor Alana Wilcox puts it this way: “Reading and writing hone the imagination like nothing else, and imagination is the key to empathy, which is key to a successful, compassionate society. It’s here, in this empathy, that literature contributes most to the public good.” Recognition, empathy, and trust are the foundations of civil society. But, more precisely, Taylor holds that what has “come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognised can fail” (35). Provocatively, in this same era where public support of the arts and humanities, and of education, has been drastically reduced, more and more people have turned to creative writing. In 1977 there were seventy-seven post-secondary creative writing programs in North America, while today there are almost nine hundred (Fenza). Perhaps because of the dialectical structures it employs, creative writing (for either producer or consumer) provides the spaces for empathy and recognition — upon which our social cohesion depends.

Architectures of Empathy

Elsewhere I have located the site of literary creation, metaphorically, in the debris pile of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920). Angelus helped Walter Benjamin and Klee understand the distortions of the collective good, in their time, as fascism gripped the national German imagination. The angel can help us here, too, as we flesh out exactly how literature contributes to the public good through the multiplication of meaning.

For Benjamin and Klee, Angelus represented the progress of history. In it, an angel is caught in a storm. As Benjamin describes it, he beats his wings furiously, his curls wild, his eyes riveted on the right, the past. A “pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is this storm” (“Concept of History”). The storm is the storm of history and the debris is potent wreckage waiting for resurrection. The wreckage is composed of “traces”: memories, experiences, perceptions, and sensations. Each “trace,” and so the debris pile, too, is organized by original, organic impulses to desire, love, empathize, recognize, or trust (Kristeva 17—19). It is the foundation of the organic formalism that Klee offers in response to Martin Heidegger’s technological formalism (Watson): “organic,” because each perception or sensation, noticed by our awareness or not, organizes itself into what Freud (Interpretation 351) called “memory-traces,” Benjamin called “trace” (“Baudelaire” 316—17), and we now call neural networks. Perceptions or sensations, and so “traces,” carry with them original impulses and authenticities (auras), which makes them ripe for the author’s picking. Benjamin advised that it is “the authenticity of a thing … that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it” (“Work of Art” 254).

We authors, then, brood over “trace” in a psychological/emotional state of melancholy, and then craft that debris (some conscious, some not) into aura-bearing vessels such as allegories, narrative lines, short stories, or novels. Seemingly long-gone memories and experiences are revived and refracted through literary techniques such as multiple perspectives, tmesis, discontinuities, metaphor, and metonymy. Our melancholic engagement displaces aura into different points of view so that new meanings can surface. This dialectical relationship between past and present in a literary context casts the reader and author as messiahs.

The past is reified as humans narrate their lives into stories. When I tell you of my experience, organized from perception and sensation, it becomes your own. For example, my Aunt Sarah confessed to me, at ninety, that she still felt very guilty for setting the schoolhouse on fire in the little Arkansas hamlet where she was being courted by her future husband, Joe. Even at that age, she swore me to secrecy. Sarah’s guilt rears its head, sometimes more or less consciously, every time I make an absent-minded misstep. The circumstances of my missteps are different than Sarah’s, but her original impulses and auras traverse the decades and inform my contemporary experience — and my literature. So, when in The Drifts, Julie abandons Pity, a nine-year-old girl, in a storm-swept parking lot, I experience Sarah and her arson.

In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin puts it this way: “Story does not aim to convey an event per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the audience in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand” (316). Our novels and allegories become these earth-bound vessels bearing their creator’s aura.

These perceptions qua experience can be measured as electrically charged exchanges of sodium and potassium in brain cells. The charge is produced as brain cells (and other neuro-elements) emit energy, measured by frequency and amplitude (Hz/hertz and µV/microvolts, respectively). Such aha! moments are the brain’s electrophysiological response to environmental stimuli, and it is a response that can be measured and recorded as event-related potentials (ERPs) (Moran). This energy is emitted, like the pulse of aura, when we have experiences. The sodium-potassium transfer reifies the past as it reconstructs it as the structures of allegory, metaphor, and experience.

Like neuroscience, chaos theory has something to offer this discussion. Allegories, as auratic vessels, cobble “trace” into story, much as subatomic particles create strange attractors: the unique, seemingly chaotic formations made by the collusion of subatomic particles moving over time (Bradley). Because the movement of subatomic particles seems random and fleeting, they do not, it seems, leave traces. But, tracked over time, elaborate structures are found to have been erected and organized as the particles are pulled toward and driven from one another. These are forces akin to the love that Kristeva cites. These attractive forces, acting as love, empathy, recognition, trust, and so forth, are the material ties that bind when it comes to “trace” (Benjamin, “Concept of History” 389—90).

Writers inscribe, disrupt, and deploy “traces” like magic spells. It is authenticity that sustains “trace” over time. And if clustered into neural networks, or “trace,” original authority becomes food for the progress of history. But not so fast. There is a “whore” who casts the spell called “once upon a time,” according to Benjamin (“Concept of History” 396). Hitler and his followers, for instance, invoked the mythical Volk in order to embody Germany’s past in himself and the Third Reich. “The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality,” Heidegger told his students (Evans 421). This embodiment was deployed by Nazi culture as an instrument of historical and philological paralysis. In his “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin works out how, if we can cut loose from the spell of “once upon a time,” the past endows us with a “weak” messianic power (390). We must, through dialectical engagements (such as authoring, reading, baking) “wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.” The love, empathy, and trust that become our own experience during and after our engagement with these “traces” erect the ceiling and walls of what we come to recognize as our experience (Kristeva 21). These impulses also act as the organizing and motivational principle for our social behaviour, according to Jane Jacobs and others (qtd. in Judt 67).

The difference between writing and authoring is the “good” of writing. In The Grain of the Voice, Barthes distinguishes between writing (writing without polyvalence) and authoring (writing that provokes a multiplicity of meanings); between matte (sans echo) and textured writing (94). If a piece of work lacks dimension (i.e., lacks echo) it risks its ability to resonate as literature. Authoring, though, is a deliberate placing of “trace” on the margins of linear time so that “a logical framework for the countless flashes, condensations, plots, and meditations” moves the reader beyond into a grand cathedral of her own making (Kristeva 189). These “traces” then interrupt chronological story-time so that a reader’s imagination can enter (Chatman 406). Here, socially cohesive qualities can be experienced and practised. The reader steps inside the literary space and into the pulsing, textured vibration emanating from each, her senses perceive the pulse of authenticity and then she, herself, becomes an encoder (Kristeva 232). An East Los Angeles university fiction student emailed me that “creative writing helps us learn what it means to be human from a variety of perspectives in time and place” (Ariel). She is alluding, I presume, to the multiplication of meaning that comes from engaging with creative writing. Our allegories enslave objects in meaning as they disturb aura — and so meaning — into new codes and meanings (Eagleton, Walter Benjamin 20). The virtue of this authoring, then, is that these codes are situated in the text, without instruction; the word, liberated, disrupts signs into a new architecture of meaning(s) and experience — and so, empathy, trust, and so on. This sort of writing is the blood of our literary aha! moments and our liberation.

And so, perhaps, here lies the reason that so many creative writers are enrolling in post-secondary programs. Authoring has the ability to interrupt the chronological temporality of a story so that a reader can expand the picture imaginatively (Chatman 406). Barthes’s organic accidents of meaning take guidance, practice, and skill. The whole literary project is passed from generation to generation, writer to writer. In the neo-liberal era, these hand-offs are happening more and more in post-secondary creative writing programs.

Why Study Creative Writing?

Although tuition is expensive, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) confirms what was certainly true in my case: writing classes demonstrate the desire to direct energies toward what is aesthetically, socially, and politically positive (Fenza). Her experiences with literature provoked Karen McD, a practising lawyer working with battered women — and a creative writing graduate student — to give a client Stephen King’s Rose Madder. “It had changed her life…. The novel had helped her more than the legal process.” (McD). Karen then began to study creative writing.

Tuition for post-secondary writing programs runs from approximately $1,500 at a community college to upwards of $40,000 for some private graduate school programs. Adult creative writing classes are big money-makers, while creative writing classes for traditional students are regularly the most popular classes, supporting a variety of less-attended programs, such as ­comparative literature (Fenza). Since there are, it seems, fewer and fewer public avenues to form or reform the world, the AWP writes, enrollment become justifiable. We will pay big bucks to learn to contribute positively to other people’s experiences.

Studying creative writing allows students to become more astute thinkers, producers, and consumers. As writers, we are constantly interrogating our thoughts and beliefs, and those of our characters. We must become minor experts in quantum physics, neuroscience, credit-default swaps — you name it. We learn the difference between gamagrass and crab apple, elm and poplar, and alexandrine and slug lines; between Barthes’s texts of pleasure and texts of bliss (Pleasure 21). Objective correlatives emerge from our once matte texts. “The making and exchange of literary talents and gifts is, of course, a highly civilized and humane act; and appropriately, academe has accepted the practice and making of the literary arts along with study and scholarship in the literary arts” (Fenza). Karen explained that “the post-secondary setting creates a different kind of incentive and more ’real’ deadlines for writing projects. Also, feedback from a university professor tends to be more objective (and therefore useful) than feedback from a writing group member.” The study of creative writing puts students in direct contact with literary masters. For example, in what other context would Hubert “Cubby” Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream, etc.) have pointed out to me that I was alternating between fourteen- and sixteen-syllable lines in my writing? It took a master to notice this raw, organic formalism emerging.

Poet and critic R.M. Vaughan advised me, “Perhaps in the larger sense, even if most of the students will never end up getting published or have careers as writers, they will be more literate, more media savvy, and more prone to think independently, and thus be better consumers. On the other hand, I think knowledge sharing ought to be assessed for its innate value, not on an economic level. A more creative populace makes for a more creative world, and that obviously includes economic prosperity.” We North Americans are “well aware that something is seriously amiss” (Judt 29). It is inspiring to see that so many of us have taken up our pens quietly and doggedly to earn our keep but also to contribute to the collective good. The architectures of empathy that we create allow readers to have their own experiences of themselves and the rest of us. We hunger for the textured intermittences of a Proust or an Alice Munro. There, in the drawing rooms of fin de siècle Paris or the fox farms of southwestern Ontario, we are recalled and revived in the symbolic world that literature erects. The author’s skill at crafting these structures and qualities can be practised in class so that we can then deploy them publicly in our writing. As we have seen, these contributions benefit civil society, the economy, and our own well-being enormously. In an era where neo-liberal policies have decimated savings, eliminated jobs, and grossly exaggerated the income gap, creative writing offers the means to contribute our suffering, losses, and triumphs to the public good.

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