"The artist must be deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.  He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and harken to its words alone." -Kandinsky.

 

Several years ago I was finishing up a masters in creative writing.  I had applied to the program as a poet, but I was equally interested in writing fiction.  Therefore, I signed up for several short story workshops as well. My experience in the poetry classes led me into exciting new places as a writer, opening me up to undiscovered parts of myself and of the poetry world.  But it's taken me all these years to fully recover from the fiction workshops.

First let me say that, no, my intent here is not to bash creative writing programs.  I've found them useful in many ways.  Just being part of a community of writers can be both uplifting and grounding.  You see yourself in perspective, finding your place among gifted -- and not so gifted -- colleagues, roused to push beyond whatever boundaries you've set for  yourself and to view your work more realistically.  This experience can be liberating, good preparation later for the highly competitive world of writing and publishing.

You also learn things about craft that might take you much longer on your own.  Point of view, character development, narrative techniques, plot, voice, texture:  we went over all of these aspects of fiction, discussing how the pros handled stream of consciousness, interior monologue, dialogue.  We talked about mining our lives -- and others' -- for fictional material, about process, and about the importance of perseverance.  It was a heady, exciting time.  While the competitive beast nibbled at all of us, and this wasn't necessarily a loving sisterhood (the majority of students were female), over all I felt inspired and challenged, part of a community of writers.

But my experiences in the poetry workshops went further. As a poet I was completely turned around, introduced to the amazing work done by writers I'd not read carefully before -- many of them women -- work that was more innovative than I'd been used to: Gertrude Stein, Barbara Guest, Leslie Scalapino.  This writing didn't fit into the traditional genre of lyric poetry as I understood it, largely autobiographical material, emotional snapshots of the writers' pasts including an epiphany or "point."

I also was reading closely Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Norma Cole, Lyn Hejinian, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe.  These poets are noted for upsetting our usual expectations of language and how it's placed on a page.  Reading them was like voyaging into a totally foreign country, the music and thinking of their poetry an acquired taste: some connect with it, others don't.

I liked the way they made something happen on the page, treating it as theatre, letting the meanings emerge from the interaction of language rather than from recreating a remembered event.

Following earlier innovators, they were pushing language to its limits, attempting to bring into the poem a larger world by shattering syntax, rethinking grammar, challenging the notions of narrative as we know it.  Pushing beyond linear cause and effect thinking into new realms.  They were questioning our assumptions about poetry -- what it is, what it can be, its subject matter.  They were (and are) questioning the very fabric of our lives, the notions of subject and subjectivity, of art and its role in our culture.

What bothered me though, both in myself and others, was a tendency to bifurcate, to place these writers in opposing and sometimes hostile camps from the mainstream scene.  Rarely did I see them included in conventional literary journals or poetry anthologies, except for Ironwood, no longer in print, and occasionally now in American Poetry Review and other venues.

I was struggling myself to make the transition from writing more traditional, narrative poems -- mainly autobiographical -- to a more exploratory style that incorporated aspects of both worlds.  (I recognize that in a certain way all poetry is autobiographical, no matter how "objective" it may appear -- we are charting the geography of our own psyches as projected out into language/objects/images). In order to feel okay about this major shift in myself I needed to authenticate it in some way, to see that it needn't be totally out in left field.  I wanted to feel that it really was poetry, valid-valued.

I came to see that experimental and traditional works are part of a continuum, not either/or, better/worse.  As poets, we are all after some heightened meaning as discovered through language, some understanding of ourselves and our universe.  And we each have a particular way of doing it.  It took me some time to reach that understanding.

I've gone on this long describing my stimulating experience in poetry workshops because I think it demonstrates writing programs at their best.  I also want to point out that most of the poets who taught these classes tried to embrace a wide variety of styles, from formalist to the most experimental. (We weren't just reading poets who were then still on the fringes.) Students were free to experiment and didn't conform to one particular party line.

However, the openness and scope that I experienced in poetry did not carry over into the fiction workshops I took.  The writers teaching these classes mainly followed the conventional notions of the short story, the realistic/naturalistic tradition, or the psychologically subtle stories that have descended from Chekhov, Joyce, and James.   And, of course, minimalist fiction was hot then.

There seemed no room for what has been at the heart of American fiction since its inception -- romance, combining the ordinary with the inexplicable.  Richard Chase, author of The American Novel and Its Traditions, believes the main difference between the realistic novel and the romance is the way they view reality:  "The novel renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.  It takes a group of people and sets them going about the business of life."  The characters, involved in plausible situations, become real to us, revealing their complexities, their human foibles, their multiple motives.  In these works, "character is more important than action or plot."1 

Romance, on the other hand, "feels free to render reality in less volume and detail... Astonishing events may occur and these are likely to have a symbolic rather than a realistic plausibility.  Being less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel, the romance will more freely veer toward the mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms."2

Chase's ideas apply equally to the short story, but, as an undergraduate and graduate in creative writing, I learned something different.  When I tried to do what was natural to me -- to write symbolic dramas, contemporary folk tales/fables at times venturing into fantasy while retaining the details of every day experience and psychological authenticity -- I found the readers of these pieces did not have a context from which to judge them.  I met a blank wall. My fellow writers, including those who had been hired to teach these classes, did not have the richness of our tradition in mind.  They apparently had not read Chase's book.  I know I hadn't at that time.

I was familiar with Marquez's and Borges' writing, where Western rationality clashes with magical native cultures, the natural and the supernatural intermingling, the living with the dead, each world as real as the other.  I'd read the symbolist stories of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and James.  For my first master's thesis (in the Humanities), I'd investigated the literary fairy tale, parables, and fables, where characters tend to be caricatures rather than fully realized imitations of humans.

But when I tried to suggest there are approaches other than the usual conflict/resolution type of short story where character is the focus, or that caricature may be valid within certain contexts, I didn't get very far.  Since I was still feeling my way around in the short story form, I wasn't able to clearly articulate yet what I was attempting in my narratives.

Many writing programs put more stress on the "creative writing" part of the curriculum than on reading extensively in fiction and criticism.  We -- and I include here many writing instructors who have not explored much beyond their turf as writers -- have little or no training in what has been written, so how can we be good critics of one another's work?  Without this breadth, we can't challenge one another's assumptions.  Hence, many critiques end up being harmful if not totally destructive because the readers are trying to fit the work into a very narrow perspective. Writing workshops can be traumatic enough without there being a misreading of the manuscripts.

One teacher, after reading a draft of a story I was working on, said, "Who are these people?"  The characters did not fit into her ideas of what should happen in a story.  She went on to say, "My over all impression at this point is that you have serious gifts in the area of the real, honest to God short story.  I do not see you succeeding as a 'magical realist' -- in fact, I see you being led down a disastrous path, away from your own power as a storyteller.  I would most strongly advise you to give all that up and start to write the real things.  I don't think you'll ever regret it."

The authority, she was saying that works of the imagination are not real; the true path is the conventional story.  I hadn't yet sufficiently discovered my voice as a fiction writer, so I couldn't rebut her criticism, either externally or within myself.  I filed the story away and am only now ready to return to it, to rescue it from her (and my) ignorance.

Just as poets do, fiction writers have a rich, multiply textured tradition to draw from that includes more than the conventional narrative, and I haven't even mentioned the fabulists and those writing metafiction.  Other pieces totally step outside the traditional idea of story but are still narratives.  In an article in The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates says, "Carol Shields' third collection of stories, Dressing Up for the Carnival, is an intelligent, provocative, and entertaining collection of variegated prose pieces, both conventional and unconventional... [T]he majority are deftly, even sunnily written, and bristling with ideas, reminding us that fiction need not be emotionally devastating or 'profound' to be worthwhile."3

Shields describes the process she went through in letting go of the rules of "what a story should be and how it must be shaped" in an essay entitled, "Arriving Late, Starting Over."  She'd been teaching the absolutes we all learn in English Lit for years, and following them herself, before she finally rebelled.  She actually had no choice.  Before she could go forward as a writer, she had to go back and release herself from the structure of the traditional story.  It was no longer large or loose enough to allow for what had bubbled up in Various Miracles, her first collection of stories that she'd written in "a mood of reckless happiness."4  They opened the way for Dressing Up for the Carnival.

While I enjoy reading all types of fiction, I don't want to be captive of the realistic story.  Reading and writing the kind of stories I've described keeps me in touch with the strangeness, the unfathomable mysteries, of life.  Realistic stories certainly can do this, too, but they tend to focus on the everyday, on what we can expect to encounter in our daytime world.  That world can be very odd.  But the stories I'm most attracted to view the world from an unusual angle, from what is invisible to ordinary consciousness -- the content we often find in dreams. Salman Rushdie's work is an example, as well as Reginald McKnights', Jeffrey Renard Allen's, and Mark Danielewski's.

Over the years, in the process of finding and accepting my particular preferences as a writer, I've had to teach myself what I didn't find in the academy.  At those times it's been helpful to remember Eudora Welty's admonition:  "Writing is such an internal, interior thing that it can hardly be reached by you, much less by another person.  I can't tell you how to write, no more than you can tell me.  We're all different from one another even in the way we breathe.  Writers must learn to trust themselves."5 

Yet this kind of trust doesn't come easily, and it's difficult dismissing the idea that conventional fiction is somehow better since it dominates not only most writing workshops but also the publishing world.

By focusing on my difficulties with the short story workshops I took, I don't want to suggest that the behavior I describe here doesn't happen in poetry workshops as well.  It does.  I just happened to get lucky.  I think most of us tend to expect other writers to fit into our notions of what makes good poetry or prose.

However, we'll never discover in our fellow writers or ourselves what we're capable of unless we consciously let go of these expectations and enlarge our repertoire.  As writers and teachers, we need to be more aware of the range we have available to us so we don't limit our own or others' imaginations.

Works Cited

1.   Chase, Richard.  The American Novel and Its Tradition.  New York: Anchor Books, 1957, p. 12.

2.   Ibid, p 13.

3.   Oates, Joyce Carol.  "An Endangered  Species," The New York Review of Books, June 29, 2000, p. 39.

4.   Shields, Carol.  "Arriving Late, Starting Over."  Metcalf, John and Struthers, J. R. (Tim), ed. How Stories Mean.  Erin, Ontario:  The Porcupine's Quill, 1993, p. 245 & 246.

5.   Dawson, Marie.  "An Interview with Eudora Welty."  Poets & Writers Magazine.  September/October 1997, p. 27.

A Canadian by birth, Ms. MacKenzie teaches English at the University of San Francisco.  In addition, she writes poetry, fiction, book reviews, travel articles, and critical and personal essays, some of which have been published in B. C.. Outdoors, The Vancouver Province, The Edmonton Journal, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Poet's Podium, Crazyquilt Quarterly, Northern Contours, Marin Review, Pilgrimage, Anima, Psychological Perspectives, and Voices in Italian American Literature.