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Art and Trauma
Danger and Dynamics in
the Creative Writing Workshop
Gaylene Perry
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Creativity itself is always risky and
can be said to put the practitioner in a vulnerable position.
And, in many senses, students can be said to be vulnerable.
When a student takes part in a writing workshop, the
risks and vulnerabilities increase in significance again
as raw creative work is exposed and is publicly worked
upon by a group. And if the workshop takes place online,
then a whole new set of risks and vulnerabilities may
arise.
Now, add the common practice of students
choosing to write about particularly personal and/or
sensitive subject matter, such as, for example, a
student who chooses to write about traumatic personal
experiences, either implicitly within, say, a fiction
writing workshop, or explicitly, say, in a life writing
workshop. Such workshops can become dynamic and exciting
spaces for students and teachers. They may also be fraught
with ethical, pedagogical and health-related dangers.
How might a fine balance be achieved
between the teacher’s
professional responsibilities to the individual,
the class, and the institution, thereby creating an effective
collaborative space for learning and, hopefully, for
facilitating groundbreaking creative work?
∞
I would like to cite an actual teaching and learning situation.
It involves a series of episodes described in Lucky,
the memoir by Alice Sebold (2002a), which preceded her
bestselling novel, The Lovely Bones (2002b). Sebold
was raped on campus at Syracuse University at the end
of her first semester of college. To the surprise of
many, she resumed her studies in the following semester. Lucky is
the story of the rape and the times that followed.
To
put the sections in context—Alice Sebold wrote
a poem about her rape, which she submitted to her poetry
writing tutor, Tess Gallagher. Gallagher suggested an
alternative approach, giving Alice a first line: ‘If
they caught you…’ (Sebold 2002a, 106).
Alice wrote a second poem, which by her admission ‘wobbles
as a poem’ (107), but is nevertheless
important to her. Gallagher is adamant that they workshop
this new poem in class. Here is what happens.
I passed the poem out and then, as was standard practice,
I read it aloud to my fellow students. I was, as I read
it, hot. My skin blushed and I could feel the blood rush
to my face, prickle along the tops of my ears and the ends
of my fingers. I could feel the class around me. They were
riveted. They were staring at me.
When I was
done, Gallagher had me read it again. Before she did
this, she told the class that she expected everyone to
comment. I read it again, and this time it felt like
torture, an instant replay of something that had been
hard enough the first time. I still question why Gallagher
was so insistent that I workshop ‘Conviction’ and
that each and every student—this was not standard—respond
to it afterward. It was an important poem by her standards,
in that it dealt with important material. Perhaps, by
her actions, she meant to emphasize that not only to
the class, but to me as well.
But the
eyes of most of my peers had a hard time meeting mine.
‘Who
wants to start?’ Gallagher asked. She was direct.
By her example she was telling the class: This is what
we do here.
Most of
the students were shy. They buried their response in
words like brave, or important, or bold. One or two were
angry that they had to respond, felt the poem, combined
with Gallagher’s admonition that they react, was
an act of aggression on her part and mine.
Al Tripodi
[fellow student] said, ‘You don’t really
feel that way, do you?’
He was looking
right at me. I thought of my father. Suddenly, there was no one else in the
room.
‘Like
what?’
‘You
don’t want to shoot him in the knees and that other stuff with the knives.
You can’t feel that way.’
‘Yes,
I do,’ I said. ‘I want to kill him.’
The room
was still. Only Maria Flores, a quiet Latino girl, had yet to speak (108-9).
Maria does
not end up speaking. She leaves, instead. A few pages
later, we hear more about Maria: ‘Maria Flores, from Tess’s workshop, fell from a window’ (154).
Alice goes to visit her in hospital.
A nurse led me into the room. Standing beside Maria’s
bed were her father and her brothers. I waved to Maria
and then shook the men’s hands. I said my name and
that I was in her poetry class. None of them was very responsive
[…] (155).
The men left the room, and Maria spoke to Alice. This
is what follows:
‘It
was your poem,’ she said now. ‘It brought
it all back.’
I sat there as she whispered to me her own facts. The
man and boys who had just left the room had raped her
for a period of years when she was growing up (155).
Maria’s ‘fall’ from the window had in
fact been a suicide attempt.
Were Tess Gallagher’s actions ethical? Reasonable?
Inspired? What about Sebold’s actions in allowing
the poem to be workshopped? If Maria’s suicide attempt
had been successful: what then? Would Gallagher, Sebold,
and/or Syracuse University have borne any responsibility?
Or is it impossible to cocoon such a wounded individual
as Maria? Does the contention remain that an overly policed
writing workshop is not a suitable environment for
learning or teaching?
I suspect
the answer to this last question is a qualified yes. A writing workshop
cannot be a cocoon. Vicki Lindner writes:
Curing
the sick and wounded, however, is not the traditional
province of university-level creative writing instruction.
[…] Writers, who teach for
a living, often avow that they can’t and don’t want to be therapists. (2004,
7)
Lindner seems to be suggesting that the
creative writing classroom is not the place for therapy
but rather for art, although complex overlapping of those
activities can and may take place, regardless of the structure
of the workshop and the attitudes of the teachers and students.
Lindner describes two case studies of her own,
the second study involves a horrific experience written
by a student about the day her mother committed suicide
after having plotted to have her sixteen-year-old daughter
be the one to find her body. Lindner coped with this teaching
and learning moment by using the attitude quoted earlier
in this writing—focusing on the art of the
story. The student, code-named Bethany Two,
suffered a severe emotional crisis while trying to redraft
her story for assessment.
I
knew I bore responsibility for what could have been
a serious disaster.
What I thought I was doing was asking Bethany
Two to construct
an effective memoir. Deceived by this feisty young woman’s
readiness to reveal her mother’s suicide, her psychological
acuity, and resilience, I believed she would be able to
objectify the pain she still felt
as part of an artistic process, as I would myself. I didn’t
realise—actually—that
Bethany Two created a detailed trauma narrative without
laying the necessary groundwork: years of therapy with
a trained therapist. Although my Drill Sergeant teaching
tactics had created a safe atmosphere, allowing this
student to achieve self-control and mastery, they had
not provided her with an easy way out. (12)
No classroom of any kind can be a cocoon.
Institutions and teachers have a duty to provide safe learning
and teaching spaces, and we should always be aware of that,
but we also need space that is tactile and robust enough
to allow the testing of boundaries.
∞
Recently, I designed and taught a graduate unit in life
writing that combined theory and practice. I alternated
weeks of lectures/seminars on historical,
philosophical, and theoretical concepts of life writing
with workshops of set writing exercises and development
of students’ projects.
The unit was offered both on campus and online. I also
taught a fiction writing unit at the same level, with
some students enrolled in both units.
I approached the design of the
life writing course with caution. I was reasonably confident
about running the fiction writing workshops; classes
could be structured around sturdy theory relating to
technique and ideas. Students (and teachers, for that
matter) have easy access to an overt disguise when treating
personally sensitive material in fiction—after
all, it's only fiction, right? But, of course, fiction
can be close-to-the-bone, and tutors must
be sensitive to the vulnerability of any individual
making his or her own creations public.
There seems to be an assumption that creative writing
courses are more likely than other courses to be faced
with dilemmas of personal exposure and vulnerability. But
it can be confidently stated that those situations are
not confined to creative writing. As Michelle Payne writes
in her book Bodily
Discourses: When Students Write About Abuse and Eating
Disorders (2000):
A student’s first year writing course is only one
of many in the university experience, and it is humbling
to discover that students don’t just choose nurturing
writing courses as places to disclose. (116)
Perhaps one key difference is that most subjects outside
the creative arts disciplines do not make common use of
workshop classes. A student may expose and disclose in
a women’s
studies or sociology class, but his or her work is usually
viewed only by the student and his or her marker. Even
if the piece is a class presentation, I imagine that the
resulting discussion would focus mostly on subject matter
and theoretical concerns, and less explicitly so on expression,
technique, and theories of writing. Yet issues of expression,
technique, and theory can pose some of the steepest ethical
and safety issues in creative writing workshops.
When I taught
the life writing unit for the first time, I noticed a slightly troubling dynamic
developing, partly fuelled, perhaps, by me. When I designed
the course, I had been wary of making it too much like
my fiction units. In fiction, we spend half the classes
in a semester workshopping full-length drafts. Workshopping
is compulsory. But in life writing, I was reluctant to
impose compulsory workshopping. It felt unreasonable and
possibly dangerous. Nor was I sure that workshopping
full-length drafts was appropriate, either, when I could
not anticipate what subject matter would materialise,
and how the class—and I—would feel
about it.
That is definitely true also of fiction
workshops, but I kept reminding myself of the overt
mask that materialises as a result of labelling a piece
of writing fiction.
Of course, any kind of writing comes with a mask or series
of masks attached. Nevertheless, I felt that confessing
to a story’s
apparent truth by calling it life writing could
leave a student particularly vulnerable—intensive
preambles about theories of subjectivity, identity, self,
creativity, and memory notwithstanding.
I decided to use a
different kind of workshop to what I had been using in
my fiction writing courses—more
like a sewing-, or woodwork-, or even a dance-workshop.
During the workshopping weeks, in life writing, we looked
at short published works and excerpts of life writing and
responded to them in conversation and writing, and the
students worked on writing activities and exercises set
by me. I invited the students to read aloud parts of what
they wrote, but there was no pressure to share. I took
identical approaches to the on-campus and online cohorts,
trying my best to set up an inviting online discussion
space—mocking up a self-contained virtual room
especially dedicated to each workshopping week.
In the on-campus workshops, a couple of students always
chose to read their work aloud, but they rarely seemed
to broach controversial or particularly personal subjects,
instead using humour and life stories about people other
than themselves. A couple of others almost never shared
their work with the class. And the students in between
were the least predictable. Sometimes they read, sometimes
they didn’t, and when
they did read, their work was often raw and rough-edged—challenging
and disconcerting. It may be telling that these students,
the ones in the middle, did not end up with high grades
for the unit. As with their workshop contributions and
their remarks in discussion, colourful, exciting ideas
turned up in their final pieces of writing. But their uneven
writing techniques pulled down their overall results.
Online,
the workshops were even less successful. Participation
was slow, even among those students who were active in
the online fiction-writing workshops. I questionned the
wisdom of having an online environment for a subject as
potentially volatile as life writing. But I am not so sure
about that now.
I have concluded that I was
wrong to think that I should structure life writing differently
than fiction writing. My hesitation about the dangers of
overt disclosure caused me to shy away from a workshopping
system that was too open. Perhaps my own fear of the dangers
of disclosure within the classroom emanated to my
students and ended up being the factor that caused some
breakdown in dynamics.
Vicki Lindner,
a creative writing teacher at the University of Wyoming,
recently wrote about similar dilemmas in her own workshops,
stating, after several troubling classroom incidents:
My
students’ stories are often disquieting; they weigh
on my mind, poking their crude horror into my own writing
time. Invoking them makes my job more time-consuming
and emotionally demanding. What’s
more, there are no guidelines to help a writing teacher
engage in—and yet steer clear—of a process
resembling psychoanalysis. Wouldn’t
it be wiser to refer troubled students to a counsellor,
as Ann Landers did her letter writers? Sometimes I do.
But I also encourage them to write the story I have trained
myself to recognise they came to my class to tell, to
confide its details, and investigate its levels of meaning
with me as a guide. I say what I suspect the students
already know: Writing is better than talking or repressing.
To transform a painful, life-threatening experience into
art, an abiding, transcendent, public testimony, makes
its significance available to others while obliterating
its power over you. (2004, 8)
Therefore, rather than discourage writing
about traumatic events and experiences—which is simply
not possible (where, then, would our discouragement for
certain types of stories begin and end?)—and rather than
focusing only on matters of craft, Lindner suggests that
we can use the power of writing to make effective art.
The focus moves from craft to art. This seems to
be an extremely useful distinction to keep in mind.
∞
Theorist and lecturer Michelle Payne writes about the potential
for learning when subject matter rather than writing
techniques is seen as the main focus of a piece of work.
She discusses students who write about physical and sexual
abuse and eating disorders, suggesting that if those
subjects are banned or discouraged from writing classes
because of perceived inappropriateness or hazard, then
the student, teacher, class and institution miss out
on exciting opportunities for learning.
Payne steers
discussion of writing about trauma away from what she
terms psychotherapeutics and toward the areas
of postmodernism, feminism, and sociology. One of the
students participating in a study carried out by Payne
wrote:
This paper was difficult to write
because it’s so
personal. I had some problems being detailed because a
lot of what happened has been blacked out of my memory.
I’m glad to get it off my chest. It’s been
bothering me this past year. As I wrote about it I
discovered that the incident has affected me more than
I thought. Please focus on the subject itself as opposed
to the grammar. (Payne 2000, 25)
A teacher participating in the study wrote:
I think our college classes here
are a safe environment for those papers, and it’s
especially safe because we are less concerned with
mechanical correctness, we are less worried about modes
of discourse, we are more concerned about a personal
sense of voice and meaning, and so on. (68)
In Payne’s
view, shunning student-writing about trauma is an act of violence and repression:
it represents a silencing and alienating of the student-writer. I wonder if
she is indeed establishing a very special and sophisticated kind of writing
workshop—but one I would not necessarily want to participate
in as a teacher or student.
Is Payne advocating the creation of workshops for ultimately
unfinished writing? This interests me, because as a writer
as well as a lecturer, I know that writing is never finished
as such. I have not read my book Midnight Water (2004)
in its published form—if I am like most other
writers I know, I will immediately spy sentences I would
now rewrite, phrases I find cumbersome, and so on. I know,
too, that I rarely mark a final student draft that is truly
finished. Even in those cases when I tell a student that
a piece of writing is ready for submission to a journal
or the like, it is highly possible that the student will
change something of their own accord before posting off
the story. Then, editors may suggest changes. And the student-writer
is just as likely as the rest of us to look at the published
version and wish she or he could delete that word
or tweak that sentence one more time.
So—in nurturing the student’s efforts; taking
subject matter seriously no matter what the style or technique;
contextualising the subject matter via theoretical discourse
and giving it space in the institution—do Payne
and her like-minded colleagues have a more realistic approach
to the writing workshop than many other teachers of creative
writing? A student may leave one of Payne’s writing
classes with a draft that is nowhere near publishable—a
mess of errors, clichés, and other weaknesses. Yet,
with increased self-esteem and a broader theoretical perspective,
maybe the student will go on to write a much more accomplished
piece of writing. Maybe.
But I cannot find reference to actual grading in Payne’s
book. She discusses assessment and includes reproduced
student drafts complete with markers’ annotations.
She describes meetings where students are asked if they
want a particular work to be assessed, and/or workshopped.
I keep wanting to know the grades awarded
to the students’ work.
How does one mark writing that is far from being
considered a final draft?
And then, I wonder if my own models are unrealistic and
ultimately misleading for students. I workshop, and then
I mark a revised, polished draft at the end of the process.
I am reluctant to give high grades, awarding them
only to stories that are close to what I consider to be
a publishable standard. When my students graduate, do they
have false expectations of the publishability of their
writing? Are some students crushed—not because
I did not let them write about personal and perhaps traumatic
subject matter; I have no problem with that—but
because while I praised their ideas and innovations, I
also criticised their style and expression: their capabilities
as writers?
I am not sure if this constitutes a crisis, but it has
caused me to recall the words of trauma theorist Shoshana
Felman:
I would venture to propose […] that teaching in
itself, teaching as such, takes place precisely only through
a crisis: if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis,
if it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the
explosiveness of an (explicit or implicit) critical and
unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught…’ (1995,
55)
Real learning, the kind of learning that can change students’ and
teachers’ lives—the moments of learning that
we never forget—is usually the most risky learning.
We know how those moments feel—they thrill; they
ring our spines; they prickle and goose-pimple our skins.
That does not come without pushing boundaries and limits—it
does not arise without a teacher and a teaching environment
providing the impetus for shifting the deeper parts of
people’s psyches.
Resources
Felman, S. (1995). Education and
Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching. In Trauma: Explorations
in memory. Cathy
Caruth (Ed.). Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University
Press.
Lindner, V. (2004). The tale of two Bethanies: Trauma
in the Creative Writing Class. International
Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing,
1(0). 6-14.
Payne, M. (2000). Bodily discourses: When students write
about abuse and eating disorders. Portsmouth:
Boynton/Cook.
Perry, G. (2004). Midnight water:
A memoire. Sydney: Picador.
Sebold, A. (2002a). Lucky. New York: Little Brown.
Sebold, A. (2002b). The Lovely Bones. London: Picador.
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