Callaloo and the Creative Writing Workshop*

AVANT:

Offering workshops across the Black Diaspora, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop is held at Brown University in Providence, RI, University of West Indies in Cave Hill, and the University of Oxford in England. It’s a transformative workshop like no other I have witnessed. Today we have Helen Elaine Lee, Vievee Francis, Ravi Howard, and Gregory Pardlo to speak on the workshops as the poetry and fiction workshop leaders. I suggest that each of these speakers will offer insight into their own pedagogy and role as workshop leaders, and testify to the importance of the workshop to the growing mission of Callaloo as a journal, the workshop as a life changing entry point for many new writers at any age into the field of literature, and the outstanding mentorship that often times develops as a result of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. We will give each speaker ten or so minutes, give or take, however long or short you feel like speaking, and after the speakers, we will exchange seats with our four respondents. So whoever wants to go kick this off.

PARDLO:

There are a number Callaloo alum here who will testify, so I feel like I am being redundant a bit, but there is nothing like, and this is not grandstanding, there is nothing like the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop anywhere, anywhere. Not undergraduate level, not at a summer workshop level. What makes Callaloo’s so unique is—there’s a phrase that came up, I’m pretty sure it was mine, that we practice to describe it—it’s radical individualism. So we’ve had many years of the collective, the importance of the collective, very productive years where the notion was our work should serve some collective social goal or agenda. And we aren’t dispensing with that at all, but we’re moving the question more towards, we are empowering the individual to interpret that question. So I think a lot of times in many of the workshops that I have been in, and the expectation I find that people have coming into the workshop, is that the poem is out there, and we will just tinker with the poem, we’ll shift the line break here, we’ll play with the diction there. When the question we should be asking and the question that we do ask at Callaloo is: why are you writing this poem? Why does this poem need to exist? What is this poem contributing to the world that we don’t already have? If the poem is confirming things that we already believe about society, about each other, about how humans operate, then how do you justify the poem? So we will go through the poem and there will be an errant line in the poem that stands out for whatever reason. I often call it the sore thumb moment. And in a typical workshop, the workshop leader would say, “Well you need to get rid of this. This doesn’t fit. This isn’t working.” And I think our philosophy is rather: there is something unique going on here where you clearly let your guard down and this is the place where we need to investigate. What happened here? How did this thing intrude upon the poem? So rather than—again, this is more towards this notion of individualism—rather than smooth the poem out, we ask the hard questions. Though I don’t think people can ask at a university workshop, because they’re personal. They’re probing. They’re revealing. And so we demand a level of trust, and I’m absolutely confident in saying we earn a level of trust in the workshops where there is no guard. Do not. Don’t bring your guard in. Knowing looks from . . . The guard is the thing that prevents us, that keeps us, that separates...