I am Matthew Williams and You are Not

Act I, Scene 1

The dingy yellow radiator occasionally clunks, a poster hangs precariously on its last thumbtack off of a overflowing cork board, and every where the air is filled with the dry powdery scent of chalk that has been collecting in the carpet, the wood trim, the areas above shelves that are skipped when dusting, and even in the clothes of children that hang in washrooms toward the back. No one really notices this, though…except one person. He sits in the back wearing a plaid shirt and tennis shoes that are only laced halfway up. The jeans he wears jeans are from WalMart and his sandy blonde hair is matted down on one side of his head. Most of the time he is quiet, silently observing everything else going on around him. He watches two girls get up to go talk to another girl. He catches a friend of his out of the corner of his eye go to sharpen a pencil at the grey crank sharpener bolted to the door frame. In front of him is a mess of paper; mostly torn from a green spiral notebook he keeps stashed inside his pop-up desk. His handwriting is awkward and nearly illegible, something his sixth grade teacher had reminded him about earlier in the year. In a bit he is going to go share what he has written on it with the teacher. For the moment, however, he is lost to his senses taking in the swirling hustle and bustle of a class humming with activity.

Act I, Scene II

It is early fall and the stuffiness left over from the hot afternoon has not yet left the building, despite every window in the cramped room being opened. Inside, eleven adults sit around four uneven tables pushed together to make one very large square. There are papers strewn all over the table, some in neat piles, others arranged as though they were playing cards being set down on a blackjack table. There is a seriousness that is accentuated by the amplified sound of papers being shuffled and thoughtful murmurs being exchanged. There is a young man sitting at the corner of the large square. He is wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and sits in total silence as others pour over the typed manuscript in front of them. These are the rules of the workshop: the author may not speak. Next to him sits a teacher who dresses as though she were a thoughtful senator's wife. She has just flown back from giving a reading in New York. Later that week she will fly to Los Angeles to give another reading. Across from her sits a retired preacher who lives in a retirement community. Next to him sits a blonde, waife-like twenty something graduate student who is wearing a low cut t-shirt and metallic bracelets. The rest of the class is just as uniform. Before them is a fragmented piece about this particular young man's mentally disabled older sister. No one dares refer to her as "his" sister. Instead, any reference to this young man is replaced by the term "the author's." As the discussion goes on, the young man finds himself looking out the window into a courtyard as a chilly breeze pulls red leaves off a mushroom shaped Serviceberry tree.

Act II, Scene I

The reason I have written about the above scenes is that they are both about me. Not only are they both about writing, but also they are both about writing in a community. And while there are other similarities I'm sure (mostly revolving around my interaction in the community), the differences between the two scenes are the ones that I find most illuminating. Here we have a contrast between production and analysis, between children and adults, between the act of writing and the act of reading, and, most importantly, between the metaphors of voice and narrative. While notion of community is requisite for both scenes, how community is employed and for what purpose could not be any more different. The rest of this play is about how two different theorists, Donald Graves and Barbara Kamler, depict a writing community and the implications this has on a larger theoretical scale. I want to re-read the function of community through the lens of a larger democratic project and to ultimately argue that the loss of voice as a metaphor impoverishes notions of democracy.

Continue reading "Story And Voice: Meditations on Community" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continue reading "Creative Constructivism: Teaching Writing Without Literature (Pt 2)" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While I have been working towards a definition of 'english studies' that pits composition against literature and creative writing, what is more important is the underlying ideologies beneath each of them. I'm not the first to point this out, but this seems to me to be generally true and a helpful way of understanding why things are they way they are.

Literature and creative writing adhere to a structuralist mode of thinking (and this includes post-structuralism, as well). That is, to say, that what literature and CW are doing are looking for structures as a method of interpretation. Pedagogically, what is generally taught are structures of literature, whether it be for pure interpretation (literature) or for literary production (creative writing). Practically, what this means is that in most classes students are given a model (i.e., "great" literature) and asked to learn about the structure of it so that they may mimic it or interpret it. The great "truth" is that truth itself is an essential being and can be located and discovered.

Conversely, on the other side of the hall is composition, and composition generally takes a constructivist bent. That is, what is taught is that truth is not some 'reality' that can be discovered through interpretation, but that truth is an entity that is always being formed or constructed through human perception and experience. Students, instead of finding the truth through an investigation of models and structures, are asked (in varying degrees, at least) to be a participant in the creation of this truth or knowledge. What is valued is this is the constructed reality as opposed to any form of ontological reality or truth.

So while I'm going to conveniently sidestep any debate over the incommensurability of these competing frameworks (generally I think it doesn't work to cram both into the same class), I do want to investigate the potential for a creative writing classroom that is based on social constructivism as opposed to structuralist theories.

This leads me to this project: how do you teach the writing of literature with out relying on models? I have a few ideas...and hopefully I'll be posting more ideas when they come to me.

Continue reading "Creative Constructivism: Teaching Writing Without Literature (Pt 1)" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(From my other blog)

Once the questions of "can writing be taught" and "should it be taught" are overcome, the general framework for creative writing classes seems to grow from a response to two problems. The first problem is a question concerning models. What "models" of "good writing" do we use? What ideological motivations are behind those selections? The second problem is a problem of application: once we select a model, what do we do with it?

The current-traditional mode of creative writing has answered these two questions in the same way since its inception. On the first hand, what counts as a "model" has always meant some form of canonical literature. This, in whatever form, is almost always some piece of published literature. Usually, it is a "major" work or one that has won several awards. This method always ignores the rather pertinent question of "what exactly constitutes 'good' writing?" The answer is bound with the response to the second problem...

Current-traditional methods answer the "what do we do with it" question rather simply: we interpret it. This is a direct appropriation of literary studies methods. In particular, the methods of new criticism. The lingua franca of any class discussion over writing in a creative writing class is always the "close reading" in which students are asked to analyze through some quasi-scientific method of reading what is "going on" in a text. To further shove this into the "new criticism" mold, in most workshops the author cannot speak, just in case you thought that something might exist "outside of the text."

Interestingly, what counts as "good literature" in the literary canon are works that literary criticism can be done on. Consequently, the "good literature" we are asking students to read in a writing class are generally works that are "good literature" to do literary criticism on because they fit a specific mold. Ponder this: a student creates a piece of work that is so new and so original that no one knows what to say about it. In this scenario, the entire process would break down. The writing would have no 'academic value' to the class, and as such, would be considered worthless in the academic sense. But this is why the confusion of literary interpretation and literary production is so dangerous: this piece of work might be a great piece of art that is tossed in the trash bin because it doesn't look like literature ought.

Continue reading "Writing for interpretation" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(From my other blog)

In any English department, there are, at the least, three main "areas" or "groups" of inquiry/study/scholarship.

These three are:

Composition
Literature Studies
Creative Writing.

In a strange twist of common sense, however, there exists two competing and often antagonistically opposing camps: Those who see Literary Studies as the most important thing, and composition. Creative writing, interestingly, is a part of literary studies, NOT composition.

Think about it:
In most creative writing classes, students are required to read a "wide variety" of poetry. They are asked to engage in the interpretation of those works as well as the interpretations of the works of others. They may even be asked to read common literary criticism of works they are reading.

In Literature classes, students are required to read a wide variety of poetry. They are asked to engage in the interpretation of those works. They are generally asked to read common literary criticism of the works they are reading as well.

The only difference between a literature class is the output. Students in a creative writing class are expected to turn literary studies into literature. Students in a literature class are asked to turn literary studies into literary criticism. But while the output is different, the methods are generally the same.

Composition, on the other hand, concerns most of its work and scholarship with the actual processes that produce writing. It combines both the rhetorical tradition as well as the more recent "composition studies" tradition which is where most of the mainstream process orientated writing theories have come from.

Composition studies, since it is a forward looking inquiry, can do work into how to break genre lines. Literary studies can only, at best, recognize where the lines exist. This, in my opinion, helps to explain why most poetry that comes out of a poetry class is really, frankly, dull. We aren't teaching them to be innovators or revolutionaries. Rather, we're teaching them to look backwards, interpret, describe, and then mimic.

As I've said before, creative writing when it utilizes the literary studies approach to writing can only result in the fulfillment of a pre-determined idea, form, or conception of what poetry "is." And by "is," I mean what already has been.

Craft-Criticism

In Tim Mayer's book (Re)Writing Craft, there are several ideas that I think are just crazy enough to work. The main one is his idea of craft-criticism.

When Mayer's talks of craft, he's not talking about what most in creative writing think when they think of craft: technique. Rather, Mayer's argues for a radically exploded definition of craft that is so wide that it can even question its own tenants. Craft-criticism in this formation can even be utilized to address the question of "what IS craft, anyway?" and "what IS the function of the poet-critic."

Academic literary criticism is preoccupied with the question of interpretation. Craft-criticism, while it may use interpretation as a tool, is more concerned with the question of production.

Literary criticism asked "what does this mean?" Craft-criticism asks "how can this happen?" One is always looking back, the other has the potential to look forward.

Craft-Criticism as Radical Pedagogy

In a sense, this is what I am trying to set up in my advanced poetry class. A community of writers who are engaging in craft-criticism. Why this is so radical is that it turns the current-traditional pedagogical methods of creative writing completely upside down and runs the risk (although a healthy one) of turning its own guns on itself. By allowing and even encouraging craft-criticism to happen, the doors open to allowing harsh and brutal interrogations and investigations into the hows and whys of "creative writing" that have, traditionally, been feared to the point of censorship by the vast majority of those who teach creative writing.

The end result that I see in this is that it does something very important: It returns the power to the student over their own definitions of writing. It gives them a voice in their own writing processes, and a weapon to use against future attempts at order and institutionalized process censorship.

Posted by Matthew Williams at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In random order (since everything is random in my life right now).

I don't think it is too far of a stretch to understand the obsession with the amount of labor as being a determining in the level of quality in art and literature as a byproduct of Lockeian notions of the value of property...that is, the more labor that is applied to the property, the more value it has. Interestingly, a similar notion, the Labor Theory of Value, seems to also apply. That is, the more effort that is put into a commodity, the more value it contains. This helps to explain the obsession that many artists seem to have (that is, you have to pay your dues and put a ton of effort into something for it to be worth something).

But, and I'm fascinated with this, it seems to also have bled into composition classes where we require students to write and then revise the living hell out of any document...the idea being that more work always equals higher quality.

Of course, this isn't true. It isn't true for Art and it isn't true for writing. As Joseph Kossuth notes in his essay Art After Philosophy,

"The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying 'what they added to the conception of art' or what wasn't there before they started. Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art's nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneself with the handed-down 'language' of traditional art, as this activity is based on the assumption that there is only one way of framing art propositions. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly related to 'creating' new propositions."

What I find most interesting is what Kossuth is doing is still appealing to the L.T.V., in a sense, but what he is not doing is locating the value of labor within the finished product. To Kossuth, it wasn't that Duchamp labored for years to learn how to write "R. Mutt" on a urinal. What matters is that Duchamp added a new layer to the existing idea of art.

The lesson I think that can be translated to writing classes is that it isn't the amount of labor that you add to your paper to make it "perfect," "clean," or, "polished" that matters because those sorts of goals only reinforce a forgone conclusion or form. Rather, what adds value to a paper is what sorts of ideas can be added to the pre-existing notion of writing both within each individual student as well as within the larger socio-cultural sphere.

Continue reading "Rainy day coffee shop notes..." »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(from Mind and Society, p. 57)

"An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one. Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applied equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals."

It seems to me that if we are to grant one purpose of creative writing classes to unlock higher order thinking in students, then traditionally we have been going about it completely backwards. The effort in the workshop always goes in at the front end, and the comments we recieve afterward are looked at amusingly but with little weight. The point, traditionally, has been to protect the "autonomy" of the individual creativity.

Continue reading "L.S. Vygotskii and Higher Psychological Functions" »

Posted by Matthew Williams at 2:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The question of "can writing be taught," and "should writing be taught" used to be the two biggest questions in my mind.

But now, as I think more and more about Freire...I wonder...are these questions valid questions to begin with?

The idea that writing will be "taught" to someone implies some sort of transfer of knowledge, not a creation of knowledge.

And the transfer of knowledge involves a power dynamic...a power dynamic that is oppressive in nature. Oppressive because it is built upon the idea that instructors hold the correct, or true version of knowledge and it is their task to implant it into the minds of the students. But this is not asking the students to think for themselves. It is forcing them to rely on the information of others...a learned helplessness if you will. All too often I have heard the phrase "i want to learn what to do when I write..." even from graduate students. What about students thinking for themselves.

and I wonder...

Is that what we really wish to do to our artists?

Perhaps this means the question goes back to the idea that writing cannot be taught, but must be learned. But how?

Posted by Matthew Williams at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)