Free to Write
Transforming Community Writing Workshops with Radical Strategies
Welcome to my SUBSTACK
:
Free to Write,
In 2021, I was supervising a master’s student, S, teach a community writing workshop. S was a graduate student in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco taking my class, Theories of Creativity and Teaching Creative Writing. I built this course over many years at my home school, Mills College. We studied creative writing theory from western and eastern perspectives, examined and critiqued the popular workshop practices, and developed strategies to lead workshops. (more on these topics later). The class required each student to design and lead a 6 to 8 week writing workshop in the community.
The semester I exported the class to USF, the country was in the pandemic lock down. Fulfilling the requirement of the practicum felt impossible. We sat in class, masked, struggling to imagine who is going to attend a writing workshop in a public space, when we couldn’t even go to the movies. The students, 18 in all, had to find venues and create opportunities to hold workshops in safe spaces. It took a lot of calls, chasing connections, visiting sites, but by the second month of the semester, they all had landed a workshop. Some chose Zoom-based classes on experimental poetry or writing your grief; others gathered in libraries and bookstores where the participants were masked and sitting six feet apart discussing the craft of fiction.
S was a diligent writer, an excellent and responsive student, and was determined to earn her masters, write her memoir, and give creative writing workshops for the rest of her life. She was from India, had left a tech career to come to USF, and earn her MFA.
S’s writing workshop proposal focused on guiding women writers to build memoirs. On Zoom. It was perfect for S, because she wanted other women in the Indian Diaspora to write their stories. She threw her net wide, across the world, and the class filled with ten women in less than a week. But that didn’t mean it was easy. The time zone configuration for meeting required nothing short of quantum physics.
Once S had her participants on board, she went hard on her class designs. She was earnest, thorough and detailed to the last minute. Related readings, check; powerpoint on pov, check; in-class exercises, check. Clear, detailed, scheduled down to the last minute, in fourteen pages.
I wondered though, with all of this deep planning, what about her back pocket. Although it’s not an original concept, I emphasized back pocket in class: Always have a plan B, a cool prompt, an impromptu group exercise…be ready, because anything can happen. (you’ll find out more later).
S smiled confidently and forged on.
I attended the workshops of all the graduate students in my class. By the time I was able to drop in on S’s, she was in her third session. The participants were familiar with each other at that point and did a little on-line catch up before the class began. How was your daughter’s baby? How many hours did you work today? From this easy chit-chat, I expected, a lively and responsive group in the workshop.
Watching them, I noticed something unusual. After three semesters of teaching online, I had become accustomed to students in pajamas, hats, ripped tee shirts, or with their cameras off. S’s participants dressed as if they were attending a conference in another city; neat blouses, blazers, neck scarves, coordinated jewelry. They were glued to the screen, taking notes on world building from S’s power point presentation.
S’s enthusiasm bubbled--she asked her participants to describe a room that held meaning for them when they were a child. They were quiet, not volunteering right away. Then she called on them by name. Each one answered factually, describing a bedroom, a kitchen, an uncle’s library and a back porch. S was getting a little frustrated, she pushed for details, color? any particular object that you remember? any smell? —they answered without creating an emotional connection to the room. She wanted the world-building to be meaningful, to inform them about their story and themselves.
S reached into her back pocket. She went for it. “Draw it,” she said. “I want you to take out some paper, and a pen and draw that room.” The discomfort was immediately noticeable-- eyes dropped away from the screen, a hand to the head: they didn’t draw, they moaned, this was beyond their capability. S insisted. “Just anything,” she said, “stick figures, boxes, windows.” A few seconds of stand-off and then each one started their sketches.
Later, when they held up their drawings, described the spaces, stories poured out. One about the uncle who taught his niece to play a tabla, another about a mother’s handkerchief, and one about the family teapot with a crack in the spout. S smiled and nodded as her students displayed their worlds.
Later, when we talked about the workshop, I congratulated S on her quick thinking and asked her how she knew this exercise would work. She explained that they were used to answering questions, being correct, and performing as good students—they came from the business, tech, and medical fields. They had all been perfect students at university in their chosen subjects. As long as she kept them in a space adjacent to something familiar, they would stay in that mode. Drawing would release them, ask them to do something a little riskier, take them out of their comfort zone.
The exercise S pulled from her back pocket wasn’t new or radical. Books, articles, media sites, all have great prompts that will inspire uncovering detail and putting writers in the flow. Many include making art.
What S achieved was understanding who was in the room, what their “go to” responses were and how she could disrupt them.
This is also the reasoning I use to insist that these graduate students teach a community workshop instead of a class at school.
At the graduate level, the students, like S, already had years of workshops in academic settings. They knew the techniques, the etiquette, the process.
Academic institutions have several gimmes that make workshops successful: 1. the class can be ten to fifteen weeks long, allowing time for the group to “know” the writer and support their development; 2. every institution has standards of behavior that most students follow. The fifteen-week semester in a college cultivates norms of exchange.; 3. writers in a university workshop have invested time and money to be there; (They are also getting graded); and 4. the commitment to be in the workshop is similar for everyone in the room. The syllabus is often explicit about the “guidelines for the workshop.”
Unlike writers in university or college classroom, community writers haven’t subscribed to the culture of the academy with its guidelines for being in the space of a writing workshop.
The demographic can be vastly complex-- they bring their practices- professional, personal, and creative with them. They bring religious beliefs, work ethics, family dynamics into the room-- everyone who walks into the door, virtual or physical, has their languages, behaviors, cultures, ideologies, that distinguishes them from one another. The workshop leader may not be able to find the baseline until they get to know them better. And if they’re teaching something that’s say, only ninety minutes, is it possible?
That is what brings me to this substack, Free to Write, Transforming Community Writing Workshops with Radical Strategies. I want to study and discuss with you what we’re doing in these precious moments where people arrive at a writing workshop with personal goals. Which can be different for each participant. It’s an expansive opportunity. Instructors might find these differences as barriers, but I see them as pathways. That lead us to reflecting on our practices, on seeing if what we know and do serves the participants. What can we do to serve and individual and the group? What basic principles guide us. (I’ll tell you mine).
The Title is Intentional
Free to write
I investigated why community writing workshops are so popular; and yes, wildly popular during the pandemic. Here’s what I’ve heard (not scientific and in no particular order):
· I have a story to tell
· I want to be seen/heard
· no one understands my people/culture/family/experience
· I’ve learned something in my life and want to share it
· I want community
· I don’t know how to write and want to learn how
Here are the apprehensions that new participants have:
· I might embarrass myself with lousy writing
· what I want to write feels shameful
· I’m not creative
· I don’t know what to say about others’ writings
· I’m nobody
Still, they come, because the writing workshop, especially in a non-threatening space, where they are not graded or judged, provides the opportunity to tackle their fears, and move toward a goal, tangible, or intangible. They are looking for a space where they are free to write.
When we recognize that they are seeking this freedom, our positions as leaders or facilitators or how ever we perceive ourselves (more on that later), must embody qualities that nurture the freedom.
Transforming Writing Workshops
Lots of smart studying and critiquing has been generated around the writing workshop--from Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom, to Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping to David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey. These and many other works contribute to freeing the workshop, especially in the college space.
In the college workshop, our outcomes for our classes are well-stated. The students should understand craft, be able to articulate ideas about writing, etc. Our approach responds to those indicators, no matter how heavy handed or gentle we are.
In community workshops, meeting outcomes is a little wiggly. Writers may be at very different levels of development, may not have a common language to talk about writing, may not be accustomed to being heard in a place of learning. We could mess with the equation of instruction, critiquing and instructing, as we go, if we stay aware and free. Managing all that is a little daunting, so what do we do when it’s a 90-minute class online, for instance?
We need to do the same kind of interrogating of our practices as the works cited above and ask ourselves if we’re stuck in the workshop rut or do we have plan b’s?
Other writing workshop leaders add to this conversation, sharing, from interviews, what their strategies are and what inspires their leadership style.
Radical Strategies
So here are my guiding principles. I want to shape a workshop with a culture of generosity, based in justice, to create transformational moments, and ultimately deliver on the promise of creating a space to write, be seen, and heard. And ultimately give them writers’ tools to make the experience worthwhile on all levels. This does not come easily. The reflex to “manage” the space rubs up against the freedom, but the community cannot function without method. We can create back pocket ideas, not just about leading workshops but also how to be in a free to write community.
I’ve been leading writing workshops since 1979. In classrooms, in libraries, community centers, political organization sites, online, in a gallery, in my house. Not to mention in a jungle in India, a music center in Venezuela, and a women’s university in Palestine. I’ve learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes. So, this intro is a taste of what I ask myself and others about how to go about being a community workshop leader.
Some of it will be practical and some tactical. Some emotional and some intellectual. You might hang with the substack, Free to Write, to mediate on your own practices, or find out how to be a radical workshop leader (of any subject), or to be in discussion with others in a common place.
A lot of ideas, scenarios, strategies and question are ahead. I am anxious to talk.
Welcome to Free to Write.