![]() ![]() ![]() The danger of both workshops and the idea of art as “craft” is the suggestion of routinization, that there are articulable, transmissible, replicable steps to becoming a writer, or to solving the problems of a particular poem or sentence, as there are such steps in the making of a table, say, or a soufflé. At best a writer’s conception of craft is an imaginary garden nourishing the real toads of stories and novels and poems. And I don’t think this education happens in reading books or essays on “craft”-the rubric under which I write this essay-since the stories writers tell about our processes of making are so often (you’ve been warned) fantasies, self-flattering or self-castigating, the value of which lies only in their result. ![]() (The question of how to develop a pedagogy that encourages this usefulness is one of my enduring preoccupations.) But I’m dubious of the value of workshops as places where a writer meaningfully deepens their relationship to their chosen medium, to the material, the stuff, with which they’ll spend a lifetime working: scenes, sentences, sounds, meanings. Those rooms can be useful places they can, when one has a careful teacher or brilliant peers, alert one to paths for investigation one hadn’t scented out for oneself. But what is it, then, a writer’s education? Where does it happen, and how? I feel fairly sure I know where it doesn’t happen: in seminar rooms, crowded with prejudices and neuroses, where a more or less randomly gathered group of twelve or fourteen others responds to twenty or thirty context-less pages. ![]()
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