University of Southern Mississippi

An Argument for Creative Writing Pedagogy: Teaching Ourselves to Think TwiceAuthor(s): Wendy BishopSource: Mississippi Review, Vol. 19, No. 1/2, Workshops (1990), pp. 293-295Published by: University of Southern MississippiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20134466 .

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The teaching of writing

clearly and feel more deeply about the world in which they live, where language can achieve a luminous specific clarity,

where the individual is more important than the bottom line. As such it serves to empower students with counter-cultural ideals at a time when the whole world needs to stop valuing product over process. It's not only writers who must under stand the process of reiision.

And what if some of the people who pass through MFA

programs write mediocre (or worse) poems and stories? Others write sublimely, and the side effects alone make the programs worthy. People learn to read better, with more of an

awareness of what it takes to write well consistently, and people learn to write better too-if not better stories, at least better sentences. These aren't trivial accomplishments.

Our critics have long promulgated an apocalyptic vision of millions of monastic cells, each inhabited by a mediocre narcis sist, madly typing away on an electronic keyboard while Rome burns. Can this-even if it were true, and even in its most dire incarnation-really harm American culture? At least these poor misguided souls aren't selling junk bonds, or banning abortions, or building machines to level the rain forest.

Wendy Bishop

AnArgwunntfir Creative WfjPedgo4gy: Teading OuteIves to Think Twice

For too long, creative writers have used public forums to denigrate teaching. In intemriews, writers ritualistically deny that teaching can or should matter and seldom discuss the destruc tive effects of poor teaching. Writer-academics disapprove of the abilities of their students, the uniformity of current writing (it is definitely not Literature with a capital L), the misalliance of writing professionals with writing programs, the foolishness

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Symposium

of the many student-novices who are misguided, ambitious

or arrogant enough to want to join the star system or the

academic system.

I want to suggest another way of thinking that doesn't develop from any of these premises. Admittedly, sometimes I feel I am the only one tuned in to this wavelength although

more and more I realize I am not. A few other creative writing

pedagogists exist; we seek each other out at conferences and chat about unfamous and unfavored things. I've been con vinced by experience and by such conversations that we need to think long and hard-to think twice-about these issues. It seems more productive to consider our professional lives this

way-a credo of sorts: Teaching any writing class, and creative writing in par

ticular, is tough, exhilarating, and possible work. Learning to teach better is also tough, exhilarating, and

possible. Through teaching, a creative writer can become a better

writer, a better reader, a more adept user of language, a

more knowledgeable analyst of human character, a better teacher, and a less apologetic or belligerent member in the

English department-for cross-disciplinary collaboration can feed the intellect and fuel the classroom.

Creative writers have for too long bought the whole repression, avoidance, denial package. Too often we can't admit that-sometimes-wonderful, illuminating, strange chemistries occur in the classroom and that when we're not there we sometimes miss our "scene of teaching," and that

when we're not there we're often not writing anyway. Who decided writers don't have to earn a living and that

this one-teaching-isn't as honorable a way as any? After

all, we do get to write.

Teaching creative writing is one of those complicated things many of us do as we go about our lives. Let us do it

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The teaching of writing

better and let us teach our graduate students better how to teach.

Think how we all might benefit.

Matthew Brennan

Can Writig Be Taght?

rm not sure students can be taught to write literature, but they

can be taught to read it. And if they read literature, sometimes

they develop enough craft and imagination to produce it.

When I was in grad school, a witty professor who had pub

lished a book of poems-but no longer taught either creative writing or composition-told a fellow T.A. that "teaching writing is like casting false pearls before real swine." His at titude derived, I believe, from how he emerged as a writer: he read literature, grew to love it, and finally emulated it; never in his life had he sat through a writing class, except for the ones he taught early in his career.

I have days when his witticism seems proverbial, for many of my students lack not only the experience to produce litera ture, but also the knowledge of basic grammar to produce

English sentences. And those that do know English often have never read a poem. Sure, they've read rock lyrics by Ozzy Osbourne, but nothing by Sharon Olds or Adrienne Rich, James Wright or Richard Wilbur. Usually, the workshops teach these students they really don't like poetry-at least the kind considered literature. Which is OK. The world needs bankers, schoolmasters, and disc jockeys.

But I believe workshops can produce writers, or students who will become writers. The "pearls" I try to cast before my classes are the gem-like poems that I aspire to and learn

from as a poet. Some of my pearls are false for certain stu

dents, but the point is to get them to find the poems that reflect the glitter already tucked in the far corners of their

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