Literary Legacies and Critical Transformations: Teaching Creative Writing in the Public Urban University

Undergraduate interest in creative writing is on the rise. At the City University of New York (CUNY), where I teach, creative writing classes are always oversubscribed. At Queens College, CUNY, as at many schools, creative writing as a discipline is firmly entrenched in the English department. Yet the conversations most crucial to the development of literary studies have not begun in creative writing. While English becomes more and more interdisciplinary, a dichotomy opposing "literary" study and "creative" writing creates troubling exclusions. Significantly, at the public urban university with a diverse student body this opposition is particularly difficult, even painful, for students and faculty. I will suggest that the traditional model of teaching creative writing requires revision as I focus on two questions arising from literary studies that would prove useful for creative writing. First, creative writing pedagogy claims to foster in students a distinctive voice, yet we have not fully examined the network of assumptions surrounding voice as a category. Second, American New Criticism, installed as a pedagogy by the first graduate writing workshops, still holds enormous power in the creative writing classroom; it often limits our students. Thus I would like to suggest how we might broaden our array of critical tools in creative writing and, at the same time, how creative writing and literary studies can invigorate one another as pedagogical theories and practices.

No matter how often I describe the importance of persona and tell my students that their short stories need not be autobiographical, I find that creative writing has a complicated relationship to individual experience, voice, authority, and, more broadly, essentialism. The diversity of CUNY students puts these relations into sharp relief, and the teaching of creative writing further complicates them. As a teacher of creative writing, I have read many student-authored texts about highly personal subject matter. This has been intellectually engaging but also heartbreaking; I often think of a female student's poem about gang rape titled "E.P.A.R."—rape spelled backward, the title designed to obscure the content of a poem horrifying in its concrete representation of the experience. One challenge is to figure out how to work with student writing that is so personal and frequently painful. But what is most crucial about creative writing classes is that I am not the only one who reads this work; it is offered up to the rest of the class for critique, through workshop sessions. Workshop is both the most essential and the most problematic aspect of teaching creative writing. As a graduate student in fiction writing at the University of Iowa, I was shocked by the ruthlessness of these critiques.

Having observed many hostile interactions during workshop when I was a student, I was determined not to re-create them in my own classroom. Thus, when I began to teach creative writing, a cornerstone of my pedagogy was the anonymous workshop. Student poems and stories circulated with no names on them—only I, the teacher, knew who had written them—and the authors were allowed to speak only as critics of their work, without identifying themselves. This strategy has several advantages: it emphasizes that we are discussing the text and not the writer; it ensures that the writers cannot defend their work, which would derail discussion of it; and it allows students to make honest, constructive comments. For two years at the small liberal arts college where I taught, this method worked well. My students often came to my office to tell me how much they liked the way we workshopped, and they praised the strategy in their evaluations of my teaching.

When I came to Queens in 1999, however, my method began to trouble me. I came to realize that it was a mistake to erase identity from the work. If writing is about becoming a speaking subject, then my method undermined that adoption of voice. I...