Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
Creative reading as hybrid pedagogy
Writing creative writing pedagogy
B. BY APPROACH
Creative reading as hybrid pedagogy
RISHMA DUNLOP
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
— Charles Baudelaire
The Oxford English Dictionary definition of hybrid: 1 Biology the offspring of two plants or animals of different species or varieties, such as a mule; 2 a thing made by combining two different elements; 3 a word formed from elements taken from different languages, for example television (tele- from Greek, vision from Latin); 4 a hybrid car, a car with a petrol engine and an electric motor, each of which can propel it. Origin: early 17th century (as a noun): from Latin hybrida offspring of a tame sow and wild boar, child of a freeman and slave, etc.
The Reader
“All she did was read. This left a commotion in her wake. Reading as faith” (Dunlop 92). My love affair with books began as a young child. I haunted the library and spent hours sitting outside, on its concrete steps, reading. As a voracious reader, I discovered books as windows onto the world, as objets d’art, as talismans, and as the collectible mementos described in Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library.” Above all I came to recognize books as the ground of reading and as the means to learn how to write. In effect, I understood eventually that reading comes before writing, and that reading locates within the reader an original poetics that can make conscious the immense possibilities and salvific forces in the realms of literature, human imagination, and creativity.
In my view, the act of creative reading is the first axiom that identifies creative writing as a field of research. Forms of art and scholarship never remain static; they change constantly, shifting into new patterns of significance. To address some of these changing patterns, I developed Research and Artistic Creation, a graduate seminar at York University in Toronto, designed for students who wish to include artistic components in their scholarly work. It is a hybrid course that draws on multiple literary disciplines.
A hybrid approach forms an essential part of the creative process in any discipline, but in writing, it is a process of gathering and combining disparate bits of knowledge and unifying them into a whole that is a mongrel or mixed-breed genre. To teach the fundamentals of creative writing, I find it best to begin by enabling students to research and annotate their own life experiences. Only after they learn how to read their selves in the world, and only after they learn to combine their experiences with their critical readings, do they begin to write their own authentic, affective, creative works.
Readings
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
— Rebecca Solnit
To stimulate the creative reading process in a workshop setting, I assign a selection of hybrid and autobiographical readings designed to provoke thoughts about a joyful or traumatic incident, its memory, and attendant emotions. The overall aim is to have students produce a significant piece of autobiographical writing. Over the years, the course and readings have evolved and changed. I’ll discuss here the most recent resources that I have found useful for teaching. I begin with two general introductory texts, Carolyn Forché and Philip Lopate’s Writing Creative Nonfiction and John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay. For the purposes of this memoir assignment, some of the readings I recommend are Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (from Glass, Irony and God) and “Kinds of Water,” and Sherman Alexie’s “Captivity,” collected in the D’Agata anthology. The important thing is to expose students to an eclectic, hybrid range of readings, texts of mixed origin or composition.
We consider excerpts from the memoirs Vertigo by Louise DeSalvo, in particular the chapter titled “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar,” which is constructed of non-chronological dated entries. We read memoir excerpts from Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, an interesting example of a memoir told in the third person, drawing from elements of fiction.
Then, to raise the discourse on the differences between fiction and non-fiction, we read the fragmented text of “Unguided Tour,” by Susan Sontag and the story/poem “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid. We read C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining as an example of documentary poetry. These hybrid works reconstruct history and memory in genre-blurring styles. In American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, edited by David St. John and Cole Swenson, the hybrid poem is identified as a synthesis between traditional and experimental styles. In the introduction, Cole Swenson argues that the long-acknowledged “fundamental division” between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favour of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration. The majority of graduate students have had classes that teach them traditional and metrical forms, as well as the conventional borders between genres. Understanding that the borders are permeable and can be crossed, students can step outside their comfort zones, taking risks to find their own styles. Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives provides an example of a hybrid memoir that uses loosely linked essays. Lisa Robertson’s prose experiments in Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture spark heated discussions on artistic form and research. Reading in this radical way, students begin to understand, as Robertson states, that “reading is a willed reception” (26).
After several weeks of reading and writing exercises, I ask students to write critical responses to their readings of experimental works like Lyn Hejinian’s autobiography, My Life, and Jenny Boully’s “The Body” — an unconventional essay composed entirely of footnotes. Other valuable resources include Creative Nonfiction, which frequently publishes calls for themed issues, essays from Harper’s, the New Yorker, Agni, the Paris Review, and Granta, to name just a few of the myriad resources for inventive non-fiction and hybrid prose. Pulled together, these readings help students internalize texts first and develop their own aesthetics.
I use similar techniques in creative non-fiction classes and mixed genres courses for undergraduates. The practice of doing creative reading first, followed by the generation of writing, establishes the classroom as a space of acute listening where students first hear each other’s voices through reading out loud excerpts of what they have written. An atmosphere of trust, respect, and open communication is fostered as a community of writers gets to know each other’s voices and creative styles. Hearing the writing through participants’ readings of excerpts week after week builds, in incremental steps, a sense of confidence, and allows new writings to be shared without fear.
In a digitally mediated world, students are able to engage their narrative skills in various technologies and new media. This environmental shift leads the pedagogy of creative writing into a field in which hybridity (the combining of elements, like fiction and non-fiction, text and images) becomes an essential part of the creative process. In effect, hybridity becomes a new, cohesive force, a way of focusing various media or theoretical influences on a single subject. Hybridity is also a method of expanding the boundaries of fragmentation, compartmentalization, and specialization, as well as a way of releasing new energy.
After the students have discussed their creative and critical readings, I ask them to produce a piece of memoir-like writing made up of five dated entries, each entry no longer than a paragraph, recording significant events from five stages of their lives (infancy and early childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and the present day). Then they use their five dated entries to develop their factual or fictional autobiographical narratives. Students are asked to become bio-cartographers, to map life events with sensory detail, and become unflinching observers of the difficult stories they might wish to write. They are invited to think about writing the unthinkable, the unimaginable, to think about the implications of being the central character in a story, and to write about what scares them most, since the great dramas reside in dark places that are difficult to expose.
Once students select an event to expand on, I ask them to write a narrative of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 words. The next step is research: interview someone who was at the event or conduct research in print or graphic archives and write a 1,000-word narrative about the experience. Then I ask them to use both steps to develop a final essay. By the end of the course, students should have 3,500 to 4,000 words — a draft that can be refined and revised, and that demonstrates borrowings across genres or traditions and forms.
Reading a memoir is a creative act that defies the self-centred exhibitionism of the genre. Writing in a memoir form is a process of researching one’s life and perhaps rethinking, reimagining, or revising one’s past. Seeing things anew, through systematic research into the subject, may lead to unexpected discoveries or new facts and opinions. Readers experience these kinds of autobiographical writings through the lenses of their own lives. Creative readers, however, conduct a form of literary scavenging, searching for what serves them best and reusing what is useful for new purposes.
Praxis and Healing
Invariably, year after year, the majority of seminar participants choose to write about personal events that scared, or wounded, or silenced them in some way. Research and Artistic Creation is set up to encourage students to write about a deeply felt experience, a joy or wound they do not usually express in words. If trust has been established in the classroom, students will pursue such topics in an environment that is safe, yet challenging. They work from a sense of excitement, rather than fearing failure or humiliation. Over the first weeks, students share excerpts from their work without judgment, with a sense of connection to others. Critique begins when solid first drafts are generated. Student evaluations consistently indicate that the range of hybrid readings and in-class processes were highly valued and enabled them to approach their work in new ways.
While students will complete a finished piece for the course, many go on to expand the essay or progress to a thesis or dissertation project. Writing about trauma and other radical experiences can lead to a cathartic, potentially healing experience that could be represented or rendered in the student’s essay or story. In Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, Louise DeSalvo considers personal writing as a restorative tool. She illuminates how the writing process transformed writers such as Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, Audre Lorde, and Isabel Allende.
The importance of considering creative writing as healing praxis is reflected currently in the burgeoning of programs in Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities found in medical schools across Canada and the United States, a clear indication of the growing emphasis on creative writing as a pedagogical-healing tool for physicians and patients. The Bellevue Literary Review, for example, is a long-standing publication of the Department of Medicine at New York University. In Canada, the University of Toronto publishes a literary medical humanities journal called Ars Medica, and has established an artist-in-residence program to work with physicians in training, faculty, and scholars on their narrative skills.
In each of my classes, I have encountered students who came to terms with long-lost or more recent traumatic memories by sublimating them in their creative writing. To illustrate, I’ll describe two case studies of students who found the courage to give voice to a difficult experience that they wanted to write about but did not know how to articulate. The first student went on to complete an MFA at another Canadian university and win a prestigious national award for best emerging writer, and has recently published her work in book form. Her participation in my courses enabled her to break through her resistance to writing and develop a moving, complex fictional story about mental illness and depression. Her work included forays into forensic science and biblical research. The story she originally envisioned as a lyric essay became a work of experimental fiction and later an extremely affective, insightful piece of non-fiction, which expanded on the origins of her fictional narrative and revealed her understanding of the psychological and philosophical reasons behind mental breakdown.
The subject of the second case study is a writer who found his voice by exploring and writing in hybrid forms. He has won several creative writing awards and has also recently published a book of poetry. The lyric essay laid the foundation to his experiments in combining non-traditional elements with aspects of formal poetry. These experiments enabled him to write a series of poems about his mother’s bipolar disorder.
These two examples indicate how students engage in critical reading exercises that help them reach inwards and find their own ways of writing about their traumas and significant events. The course becomes generative of new knowledge and a location of generous scholarship. This process has been effective, in part, because teaching creative writing to digitally literate students means first and foremost encouraging them to slow down and read, research, and analyze every word or bit in its context. In fact, creative readings become a way of training, and the writing becomes a way of fighting for the healing process by confronting the wound in an articulate way.
Reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams initially provoked in me the principal idea behind creative reading as pedagogy. It made me aware of how the complexity of our lives is often only articulated in dreams and works of literature, as well as how dreams and literature are related to the subtlest ways we express our deepest and often repressed concerns. Consequently, provocative literary narratives that deal with oppression or repression are my most valued teaching tools. I use them to inspire connections between my students’ lived experiences and the art of writing creatively.
Reading, to me, is above all a creative activity, an imaginative way of making our human experience intellectually or emotionally visible. In this context, I have shaped my pedagogical project as a university professor in the field of creative writing, which begins in the field of creative reading and becomes a hybrid that incorporates the fields of cultural literacy, literary studies, and arts education in general. I view these fields as intertwined aspects of the need to read, write, and engage intellectually with the world in which we live.
Encouraging students to appreciate narrative alterity, as a formal cause of literature and as a passion for students’ contemplation, provides a counter-environment to the numbing materialistic forces of an entertainment-based society that frequently hides or obfuscates the creative, interpretive readings that artistic creation requires. In that sense, creative writing as a field of research is a pedagogical extension of the act of creative reading, as distinct from semiotics, or general semantics, or aesthetics.
The Hybrid Artist-Scholar
Like all writers, student-writers are influenced by multiple sites or locations. Their identities have not only been shaped by reading but also by experiences with multilingualism, post-colonialism, diasporic cultures, as well as politics and globalization. As a hybrid artist-scholar, my creative writing and my pedagogy aim to reflect how new works, and new knowledge, originally appear as the consequence of some unconventional formulization that produces a new impression, as a response to questions of identity. Hybridity permits students to engage with the kind of complexity that has already shaped them as persons in the digital age. Whether in scholarly writing or in poetry, or in any another medium, I consider the combining of two or more disciplines an intellectually liberating process. I encourage students to consider forms of “radical juxtaposition,” as Umberto Eco called it, because I deeply value what Francis Bacon, in his essay “The Advancement of Learning,” called “broken knowledge.” Hybridity, juxtaposition, and “broken knowledge” are approaches I implement to help students externalize the stories that are buried within them. Hybridity is also an approach taken up by Marshall McLuhan, as a way of spontaneously accessing new thoughts and engaging with culture and media as an integrated ecology. As he states in Understanding Media, “The hybrid … is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born” (63).
Teaching creative writing is, for me, above all a question of creating an open space for creative and critical thought to take shape. Roland Barthes referred to “the pleasure of the text” as a space in which both reader and writer are integral to a process in which independent-minded readers are able to challenge arbitrary authority and hierarchical attitudes. The digital age is amplifying this challenge and bringing higher education to a critical crossroads, locally and in a global context. Consequently, the teaching of creative writing as a field of research needs to explore new questions that arise from new media and from viewing creative reading as a form of pedagogy in all media.
Regardless of media used, creative reading can lead to creative writing, and creative writing can lead to historiographic poiesis, that is, art-making in response to history. In today’s new media environment, particularly with the digital possibilities of hybridity and the Internet, new questions about a student’s learning experience are being raised constantly, questions about the long-term effect of electronic devices on language, on reading, and on writing. These questions must intensify our research into the impact of new media on the pedagogies we employ to provide an enduring worth.
In her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf claims that we are not naturally wired to read. Reading must be learned through the brain’s plasticity; when we read we are changed physiologically and intellectually. Creative writing courses produce opportunities for learners to figuratively reintegrate their so-called non-linear, artistic, right brain hemisphere with their linear, conventionally literate, left brain hemisphere. In that sense, my pedagogical goal is to bring together the two hemispheres, the empirically academic and the intuitively creative, just as the corpus callosum does in the neurobiology of the brain.
Reading Hybridity
We spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word, the readings we take in the societies, the world of which we are part.
— Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1991
Hybridity in education is emerging through the ever-growing presence of digital online learning. We are entering an era in which the relationship of our students to digital technology is making new teaching modalities possible and necessary. Hybrid forms have transformative power, the power to alter and dismantle forms, and the power to create new forms. We need to foster writers who understand modernism within the tradition, and who are committed to the development of language and new forms of writing. But as Wallace Stegner said in On Teaching and Writing Fiction, “We learn any art not from nature, but from the tradition, from those who have practiced it before. Writers teach other writers how to see and hear” (41). Books are made from other books, and we turn to writers, past and present, to understand the significance of our lives. In that sense, I propose that we consider the critical art of creative reading as a form of pedagogy that aims to legitimize creative writing as a field of research.
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. “Au Lecteur.” Les Fleurs du Mal. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Print.
Dunlop, Rishma. “Claim.” Reading Like a Girl. Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2011. Print.
Gordimer, Nadine. “Writing and Being.” Nobelprize.org. Nobel Lecture, 1991. Web.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Print.
Robertson, Lisa. Nilling. Toronto: BookThug, 2012. Print.
Solnit, Rebecca. The Faraway Nearby. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print.
Stegner, Wallace. On Teaching and Writing Fiction. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.