How to fix creative writing "education"

A proposal for a radical reform

This year is the 90th anniversary of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—ninety years of what Mark McGurl has referred to as “The Program Era.” The rise of MFA programs, initially controversial and fomenting fervent backlash, came to be taken for granted by the end of the twentieth century, and it is only now, in the twenty-first, that the programs are finally facing serious pushback again.

As one of Canada’s Leading Voices™ in the war against creative writing programs, I am going to shock and disappoint my frothing readership by asserting that, rather than embracing the cathartic demand that these programs be demolished entirely, I think a viable and even preferable alternative may be the (very) radical reformation of the system.

My proposals are as follows.

1. Decouple “creative writing programs” from universities.

This one is the most fundamental and the most non-negotiable. I don’t think academics are without their use in society (though they require their own structural reforms), but literature academics and writers need to be kept as far apart as church and state ought to be. “But Eris, you’re a writer and you’re literally married to an English lit academic”—yes, well, the heart wants what the heart wants. Ideally, however, never the twain should meet, as it is bad for both disciplines; it is poor academic integrity for an academic discipline to so deeply tie itself to the object of its study, and too much academic influence malnourishes fiction.

It doesn’t help that contemporary-ish trends in English literary scholarship are a race to the bottom in terms of inane, picayune bullshit—from the resurgence of the Benjaminian “flâneur” (yo, ever think about how people walk around????), to “domesticity” (yo, ever think about how people be doing shit at home????), to “hospitality” (yo, ever think about letting somebody into your house????), to the now much-parodied “bodies” in “spaces” (yo, ever think about uhhhhhhh), these yawn-inducing clichés of analysis should especially be kept as far away from the process of actual literary creation as possible. The fact that many universities with a creative writing department treat it as a sidecar to their literature departments only compounds the problem.

This is to say nothing of the problem of housing an art institution under the auspices of an often corrupt corporate institution tied to the bourgeois state, or that most of these programs were created by the CIA and its equivalent allies across the bourgeois West.

2. De-professionalize.

The MFA system has turned creative writing degrees into a professional degree for a professional “career”—this is especially true in countries like Canada (where your intrepid reporter resides), as the broad institutional support in this country for homegrown art has been turned into a self-legitimating system of petty arts bureaucrats, and more and more of the arts scene seems to be infested with apple-polishing ladder-climbers more interested in advancing said “careers” via compulsive elbow-rubbing nepotism rather than by, you know… “getting better at writing.” Writing should not be seen as a “career” and you should not be looking to “get somewhere” with it, it’s a pursuit for its own sake. Certain magazines here in Canada (Yolk being the most obvious example where I am in Montreal in particular) were effectively forged in the fires of this career-forward attitude by students from these programs who had digested this ideology, and you can tell because they have SquareSpace websites that look very “professional” but also look like they’re a start-up trying to sell you some new kind of menstrual cup or something. When you hear these people talk about “creative writing” like some kind of white-collar career path, does it excite you? Is that why you got into writing? Is that what you want your creative life to look like? Being some neutered professional “Creative”? Some Yuccie? Fuck. That.

Real creative writing “schools” should emerge out of collectives and movements, with the aim of advancing art and not “careers.” Again, proximity to formal institutions like universities can only pollute this goal more and more over time with their bourgeois and increasingly neoliberal sensibilities. Creative writing “schools” should be largely informal, community-driven projects.

3. Kill the focus groups.

Workshops in creative writing programs are extremely destructive. The principal problem here is that a creative writing workshop is just a random selection of people who happened to be admitted to a university program—these are not peers chosen out of respect for their work or shared principles, these are a random cross-section of society who will judge your work like a focus group. Even “strong-willed” writers will be affected by this after three to four years, whether they’re aware of it or not, and it will work to sand the edges off of your work because the workshop rewards appealing to the workshop “as a whole.” But more rewarding writing is work which is divisive, and springs forth from a place of obsessive need from the artist in question—what one of Discordia’s members refers to essentially as the “Poetics of Retardation.”

In 2005, Rick Moody penned the essay “Writers and Mentors” in The Atlantic, in which he complained about this very “focus group”-oriented approach, and compared it unfavourably to the Socratic-style mentorship model (like Moody, the most important thing I got from my own sojourn in a cw program was a good mentor).¹ This is how a “creative writing program” ought to be structured: with mentorship as its prime goal. “Mentors” so-defined should be able to both encourage and challenge their students to come to not only refine their work but refine what they believe and what they wish to express through said work—to find their “Retardation” to return to my colleague’s terminology.

This mentorship should be the primary “selling point” of such “schools,” and students should choose organizations based on the “faculty” they would like to mentor them. Besides, why enter a “program” just so you can spend most of your time being critiqued by other young writers with no more experience than you have? You might as well post your writing on fucking Reddit, and I wouldn’t suggest that either. Your “peers” with whom you share your unfinished work and whose opinions you seek should be those you choose yourself because you respect them and their work, not people who just happen to occupy a seat next to you in class.

4. Embrace an aesthetic.

Each creative writing “school” should be organized around shared artistic principles and choose its mentors accordingly. They should have defined sets of goals, and students should choose the “schools” whose goals speak to them.

A lack of ideologues is one of the greatest existential problems facing the arts today, and is tied to what I have previously termed “aesthetic nihilism,” something I plan to explore in greater depth on its own at a later point. Organizations should emerge not out of some nebulous desire to “teach writing” in the abstract—something writers have never needed and have managed without for millennia—but, instead, they should emerge to advance aesthetic agendas, ones which may arise to challenge others or be challenged themselves. Western art must escape from nihilism and pastiche and become wilfully dialectical once more, and you can read more about Discordia’s stance on this here:

So there you go. These systems should emerge out of writing collectives and movements, and not

By this definition of “creative writing” program perhaps Discordia should establish its own amateur “school.”

Scribbling this out very quickly as I’ve been very busy. Hope this has been at all coherent, as it was something I was literally thinking about in the shower. But I’m trying to go back to embracing “quick work” on this blog anyhow—not necessarily work I consider “low effort” but work I think meets the expectations of a “traditional blog,” i.e. “charmingly” less polished.

Toodles.

1. Twenty years later, Jae Won Chung, a Columbia creative writing instructor, wrote a letter to The Atlantic thinking back on Moody’s essay.

Two decades have passed since Rick Moody spent his years in Columbia’s M.F.A. program being miserable […] He might like it better now. The program is still big, yes, but many of us view its size as a strength. Columbia fiction students represent a wide range of style, subject matter, and thematic occupation unavailable at smaller programs. Moreover, the program is no longer internally competitive the way Moody describes, allowing us to lean on those individual voices for reactions that extend our understanding of both our readers and our own work. The faculty as a whole subscribes to no specific aesthetic, the range of teachers’ interests reflecting the diversity of their students.

What Chung here describes just sounds like an even more efficient focus group. Sounds great, dude. Definitely fixes what Moody was talking about.