Alison Moncrief
We Shouldn’t Should Teach Creative Writing
When I saw Louis Menand’s “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught” in this week’s New Yorker, I cringed, sighed, and devoured the article right at the kitchen table. As one of the many MFAs and teachers of Creative Writing, I am intimately and darkly interested in this topic.
Turns out, Menand’s piece is more of a review of Mark McGurl’s new book called The Program Era, in which McGurl focuses on fiction writing programs in relation to the Marshall Plan and Post WWII Literature. The article wanders through some sound investigations and is full of surprising statistics.
Oddly enough, Menand has nothing to say about poetry programs except, “I don’t think (undergraduate) workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that others make.” He recalls his days at college where ” all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems,” and that it “seemed like a great place to be.”
My experience at NYU did indeed help inspire a type of care for “made” pieces, and graduate school was a great place to be. But studying in a Creative Writing Program did a lot more than simply inspire in me a compassion for other writers. To think that MFA programs are as Menand writes, “Designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a published poem,” is convenient for his argument, but not entirely accurate. (But not one Creative Writing Program student was interviewed for the article — also convenient.)
Many of my MFA colleagues came to the program having already published poems and essays in widely circulated journals and magazines. Many programs require their students to take at least two Theory or Critical courses for the degree. Some programs have a language requirement; some have a study abroad requirement. But all programs (that are worth their salt) will certainly compel a student to do more than only “require” students to talk about other students’ poem. Many of my teachers: Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine would bring in poems as models for the class, and would conduct mini lectures on that poem’s strengths, allusions, or patterns. We were apprentices more than we were a gaggle of “twelve-on-one group therapy” goers.
With the increase in MFA programs and graduates, as is the law of supply and demand, the cache of the degree has worn off. Yes, but questioning whether or not Creative Writing should be taught, or if it should exist in the realm of the Academy, seems like a hackneyed old pitch. (Didn’t Dana Goia go there already?)
The volte for me though, is that Menard’s article contains within its title the word “should.” Would the New Yorker publish, “Sight and Vision: Should Painting be Taught?” or “Stories upon Stories: Should Architecture be Taught?” or even “Eat Your Cake too: Should the Culinary Arts be taught?” I don’t think so. How and why is writing held to a different standard? Is it that ultimately we don’t as a nation really consider writing to be an art form? That we can’t understand that painting, buildings, and poems can all narrate humanity-just through different media?
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3 Responses to “We Shouldn’t Should Teach Creative Writing”
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Alison,
Thank you, thank you. This is a great response to the piece by Luke Menand, my erstwhile graduate school teacher of the American Modernist tradition at the City University of New York Graduate Center before he decamped for Harvard.
The problem with most criticisms of MFA programs s the insistence on mystifying the writing process and a general beholden-ness to “great” writers — Melville, Dickinson, et. al. — who did not reap the benefits of any such organized program of instruction. The irony, of course, is that there are today many, many more writers of quality today than there were then. This is in part the result of sheer numbers — more people, greater literacy, more time to write, more venues to have one’s writing distributed (publishers, websites, etc.), and, yes, MFA programs focused on the art of writing.
Images of MFA degree programs as group therapy sessions or a mistaken byway for those seeking to be the next Philip Roth or Margaret Atwood completely misapprehend them for what they are: structured attempts to refine the practice of a craft, which may or may not become one’s vocation. Too often criticism of MFA programs feels like academics looking from the outside in with little respect (and a touch of envy) for the motivating force of the participants who simply want to write finer essays, better stories, stronger poems — and not more literary criticism!
Of course, interested readers might want to take a look at my own meditation on whether literary criticism should be taught.
http://polymathparadise.blogspot.com/2008/04/literary-impressions-why-bother.html.
Bennett
Publisher
New Haven Review
“How and why is writing held to a different standard?”
Good question, but not actually on the topic: Creative writing programs don’t really teach writing. They teach creative writing (to the extent, of course, that they teach anything).
But it is a great question, still: Because the teaching of writing as craft and skill is profoundly devalued. College undergraduates are rarely taught argument, and few of them would be able to follow Menand’s tricksy essayism well enough to realize that he’s praising Caesar, not burying him. (Or, for that matter, understand the difference.)
Which does, ultimately, have something to do with Creative Writing. We could be arranging for kids to learn rhetoric and argument, which would help them understand when they’re being talked-down-to by someone who wants to rationalize his social-class ethnocentrism, or hoodwinked by politicians. Instead, we devote some fairly serious resources to promoting the kind of “honest” navel gazing that lets Menand be taken seriously when he lets forth with such howlers as “Putting [writing students] in the ivory tower puts them in touch with real life.”
Art abides. It can’t do otherwise. Art as a product of a “Program” is just another tool for the maintenance of social order. Menand does make that point, but because he is well-served by what he thinks the resulting order is, he doesn’t mind. (Would he have a different perspective if the Programs were more aesthetically controlled? Maybe we’d get more interesting art if they were: Young writers would have something real to rebel against.)
My inability to cite a source for this makes its apocryphal and me a crank, but for what it’s worth, I do remember reading an interview last winter wherein some former NEA bigwig expressed his greatest satisfaction at having been instrumental in establishing the MFA Creative Writing programs, was being able to provide employment for many of his struggling writer friends. He did not mention the generation these programs have since defrauded with hope.