Creative Writing

In Haake’s chapter “Creative Writing” I connected with her discussion of her rosy expectations for the field as a young writer and the clashing reality she experiences now.  As an undergraduate taking as many creative writing workshops as I could while toying with the idea of majoring in the discipline, I, like Haake, was motivated by my desire to just simply write. However, after a few semesters in, I recall comments from friends’ majoring in creative writing. Like Haake, they noticed how these teachers “were almost always men. And many of them were hard living--it was not unusual, in those days, for creative writing classes to take place in bars” (164). While I never met in a bar for workshop (until after I graduated), my friend took Lorrie Moore’s advanced fiction workshop and he noted how she had encouraged students to whiskey to share in the class.  Weather the invitation was literal or ironic, my friend recalls a workshop with whiskey poured into Dixie cups. My motive here is not to tattle on Moore, but to point out the prevalence of this stereotype of writer as eccentric.  While Haake uses her example to describe the “first-wave” of master writer-teachers, I feel this image still sticks today, and the stereotype of “the writer” or the “master writer-teacher” as male and hard-living has not changed despite the fact more departments employ writers of diverse backgrounds. Why is this stereotype still so prevalent and why is it fellow writers who seem to celebrate and perpetuate it?

During my time taking undergraduate creative writing workshops, I feel I learned the most about how to discuss contemporary fiction, and not as much about how to produce or revise my own.  I was never any more satisfied after a workshop of my work than I was after receiving individual feedback from one or two of my close friends or mentors.  The learning in workshop, I feel, occurred when my peers and I were building a common language to bridge what we had learned in our literature classes, our composition classes, and psychology classes, along with our own evolving voices and opinions as young writers. Also, it is important to note that I kept signing up for workshops because of the appealing reading selections, mostly short stories. During high school, I remember reading some of the classic short stories, such as “The Rocking Horse-Winner” by D.H. Lawrence and “The Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams, and feeling out of sync with the culture and register of their writing.   But when I discovered the short stories of Junot Diaz, Kevin Brockmeier, and Jhumpa Lahiri, just to name a few, I was inspired by the different techniques and voices with which these writers were able to both reach and stretch me.

ZZ Packer should have been one of these writers I discovered, but I’m not sure I was ready.  After reading “Brownies,” I am most struck by Packer’s seamless ironies, such as Arnetta gently consoling the troop’s single pacifist, “Daphne. You don’t have to fight. We’re doing this for you,” as well as Octavia and her troop’s obliviousness to their own hegemonic echolalia (13). But some of the tension of this irony is deliciously relieved when the narrator, Laurel, reaches her epiphany when she describes how her father took the opportunity of asking an Amish family to paint his porch and not say thank you.  Laurel recalls realizing “suddenly…there was something mean in the world that I could not stop” (28). To me, contemporary short story writers craft their work with such impeccable economy that closely reading one is as satisfying as solving an impossible algebra problem.

I noticed similar concision in _________ 's free indirect discourse in her short story “All That Ails You.”  _______ controls the narrative distance with precision. At the beginning of the story in learning Lottie’s history, I felt like one of the townspeople, coming to collect my lotion or tonic, and having no true insight into Lottie’s or Blackwell’s personal motives. But then I began to learn the extent to which Blackwell is taking advantage of Lottie when “Blackwell’s hand was cramped from keeping the ledger. His head was full of coins. Sheaves of money gushed from his pockets. He could not believe his goddam luck” (3).  Here we begin to zoom in on Blackwell’s thought as the language becomes his own, especially with the final cadence in realizing “his goddam luck.”  Another example of this is at the end of the story when Lottie rides into her emancipating death: “She pulled the Seniorita up a little higher, then a little higher, then a little bit higher still” (28).  While readers understand here, painfully, that Lottie’s stepfather has dismantled the ropes on the plane, which he thought Mr. Bixby would fly, and that Lottie will die, the language is Lottie’s as she breaks from the confinement of her stepfather’s household and society’s perceptions of her handicap. Thus, when she repeats, “a little higher, then a little higher,” we can appreciate that she is accepting this fate and because of it, recognizing that not all of her efforts to break free while on land were in vain. 

As I continued my undergraduate career, I decided against adding the creative writing major to my English Education degree. It would have been relatively easy, just one more workshop and completion of a short fiction thesis, but I didn’t find the department particularly welcoming. I knew I liked to write and I wanted to teach public high or middle school, so what else did I need? While there are times I wonder what a creative writing thesis would have motivated me to produce, and where I would be now as a writer, Haake reminds me, while quoting Bishop’s Teaching Lives, there are “people who tend to think in terms of service toward. I find a better home in the latter...though I want to and try to do both--serve the writer in me and serve communities of writers” (165).  While I have been fortunate to participate in some of these writerly communities Haakes describes, such as the Greater Madison Writing Project and UWEC’s Spring Composition Retreat (and now, my graduate work), I am hoping there are many creative writer-scholars (and not just Pollyanna-me)  who agree with Haake’s view that “what we have to teach our students is perhaps the greatest gift of all--writing as a way of being in the world, an organizing practice and instruction, and, although I know I’m not supposed to say so, a method, too, to mediate the madness and magic of what makes us human” (195). This is what I want from creative writing, and what I hope I can share with my students.