Melding Form and Content

Page 5 May–June 2009 A B E V I E W http://americanbookreview.org SUBSCRIBING TO IT IS AN ACT OF LITERARY RESPONSIBLITY. ONE OF THE NATION’S LIVELIEST GENERAL-PURPOSE READER’S GUIDES TO EVERYTHING. —The Wilson Library Bulletin —Michael Bérubé M E R I C A N O O K R experience with language. The workshop—all workshops—awakens their curiosities as much as it awakens their talent; it teaches them to be more sophisticated and engaged and enthusiastic readers, and it requires them to sacrifice—their time, ego, ulterior motives, and agendas—for a power higher than themselves: the process of getting a soul on the page. The whole shebang is an act of faith, an act of courage, a protest against the fragility and limits of the body. Students leave creative writing classes more aware, more engaged, more sensitive to the nuances and textures and beautifully strange frequencies of life. The question isn’t why teach creative writing, the question is why the courses aren’t required. Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. He directs the creative program at Harvard University and can be reached on the Web at http://www.bretanthonyjohnston .com. Melding Form and Content Anna Leahy I’d like to think that American Book Review’s feature signals that we are finally beyond the question , “Can creative writing be taught?” The question is an accusation in disguise. A growing body of literature answers that charge by documenting how we really do teach this subject. So, let’s agree to put that old question out of its misery. But ABR forefronts a different, much better question: “Why teach creative writing?” Purpose—why—is vital to creativity. Neurologist Alice W. Flaherty, in The Midnight Disease (2004), notes that researchers have difficulty establishing a relationship between, for instance, intelligence and creativity. Drive, however, increases the likelihood of learning to do something well. Flaherty suggests that internal motivations like curiosity and fascination encourage creativity and also keep a writer focused on the work, engaged with the language, and less susceptible to distraction. Why matters a lot, both in terms of how I myself write and publish poems and how I teach. Like many writers, I came to creative writing without a conscious career decision. I hoarded paper by the time I was five. While my attorney mother sat at her desk at home, I sat on the floor next to her and scrawled nonsense cursive on yellow legal pads; we wrote the Illinois Constitution together. My fourthgrade haiku won a local radio contest; I enjoyed counting syllables while writing about a hamburger. In high school, I was reprimanded for penning a poem for the school newspaper that might hurt the feelings of the nun who ran the cafeteria and was lauded for a feature comparing the nun who made girls cry in math class to J. R. Ewing from Dallas. My first year at Knox College, I took a fiction writing workshop with few guidelines; my stories paled in comparison with those of upper-class majors who filled the course, but that challenged, rather than fazed, me. Looking back through my rosy-rationalization glasses, I see that writing mattered to me all along, and that’s why someone published my poetry collection . I was driven to and by the process of writing by forces beyond my control, or so it seemed. My drive to teach, however, did not come naturally. It was my sister, not I, who gave her dolls and stuffed animals after-school lessons in the basement playroom , teaching them math or spelling, while I read Nancy Drew or the World Book Encyclopedia or watched Charlie’s Angels. As an undergraduate, I did not speak in class for two years. When I started a graduate program, I taught composition because a teaching assistantship was the means by which I could afford focused, mentored writing time. Though I was diligent in those early courses, my curiosity fueled my writing, not my teaching. Only after I had mastered the mechanics— planning a syllabus, grading fairly without being...