Sycamore Hill 2011, pt.2

I'm just hours from beginning my week teaching at Clarion West. and I'm now a few weeks post-Sycamore Hill, which I never finished reporting on. (I've been battling an upper respiratory infection aggravated by allergies.) As I've been moving away from the memory of Sycamore Hill and begun looking forward to Clarion West, I've been thinking about how both workshops are modeled on the Milford workshops of the mid-fifties, and yet are actually very different. Maureen McHugh once tried explaining Sycamore Hill to some of the goldsmiths sharing the retreat space; she characterized it as a "master workshop for experienced writers." She had in mind that a lot of Syc Hill attendees teach writing classes, either in college or university creative writing programs or in workshops like Clarion and Clarion West. Although Sycamore Hill tends to be a high-energy week, the writers bring finished stories, and they write critiques, not stories. At Clarion West, the students produce a story a week as well as delivering brief (three-minute rather than ten-minute) critiques of one another's work. And they do this for six weeks.

I don't think I can make any other comparisons beyond that, since I didn't attend Clarion West as a student myself. But what I find most satisfying and sometimes amazing about Sycamore Hill is the level of technical craft discussion. Around the workshop table, that discussion tends to zoom in on very specific rather than general situations. But certain themes emerge out of those workshop discussions, themes that spontaneously erupt into the conversations we have at meals and in other social situations.A couple of years ago, the role of voice continually cropped up in discussions of several of that year's stories. The narrative voice, in each case, played a prominent role in the story, and sometimes created ambiguities that critiquers either liked and wanted more of or distrusted or even detested. This year we found ourselves discussing metafictional narratives as well as the use of nonfictional modes of narrative (where the text might or might not actually be fictional). To what extent must a story riffing on another text be comprehensible to readers unfamiliar with the original mastertext? The question, of course, was in part a practical one, of great interest to the two authors of metafictional stories. But the issue also, of course, raised a more general question about whether such stories ought to be crafted in such a way that they can engage and entertain readers as stand-alone stories, even when their readers are unfamiliar with the mastertext. Though we never took a vote, my impression is that the group take was that while making such stories stand-alone was desirable for reaching a larger audience, it wasn't aesthetically necessary (i.e., it was necessary only to the extent that market considerations mattered). I suspect such an attitude had more to do with the composition of the group than anything else. I can easily imagine other writers insisting that only "universally" intelligible stories were worth writing.

Another recurring subject: whether or not we know a story's any good before we get feedback we trust. The answer to this varied from person to person and seemed to have little to do with how long the person had been writing. It strikes me that either way, such a feeling about new work must be the result of a complex interior calculus I can't imagine trying to graph, involving that mysterious, private thing that happens when each of sits down and shifts into the space that produces the self that is the author. (I think perhaps I might be too superstitious even to want to be try graphing it: surely one is not meant to tamper with something that actually works?)

I mentioned fountain pens in my earlier post. It turns out that not only Veronica, but also both Christopher Rowe and Greg Frost prefer fountain pens. I don't recall actually making the decision to switch from using a fountain pen to using an unending series of felt tips (and later rollerballs), but I know it happened in the late seventies. I have the sneaking suspicion that it happened accidentally, on my losing my fountain pen and for one reason or another not replacing it. Or maybe it was because I began using the typewriter in the mid-seventies as much as possible. I do know that once I started composing essays and research papers on the typewriter, I lost the habit of working out my thoughts with pen and paper (except when I get stuck: writing longhand is still what I do when I need to get started or re-started and am getting a blank staring at the white space on the screen). At some point, the lovely flow of ink, which I've always associated with the flow of ideas, no longer seemed necessary. Perhaps working at the typewriter gave me a false sense of clarity? A few years later when I got my first computer, the experience was something else entirely. (Sitting in the dark in the middle of the night, with glowing green phosphorescent words spurting out across the screen...the Marq'ssan Cycle just seemed to write itself.)

At any rate, you all know I'll be very busy over the next week, right?

At Sycamore Hill 2011

I'm in North Carolina this week, attending the Sycamore Hill Writers Conference, in the mountains at the Wildacres retreat. We are only eleven this year, which means I'm not having to wake up at six (or earlier!) every morning to get my critiques prepared in time. Internet access is thinner than the last time I attended (in 2009), so I'm feeling a bit more out of touch than in previous years. But that's fine. As with writing retreats, isolation only contributes to the intensity and tightness of focus on our shared professional, technical interests.

Veronica Schanoes is again my roommate this year. She works mostly in the classroom, while I mostly work the small desk in our room. Last night while I was working in our room she came in to refill her fountain pen, which prompted me to remark, since I was in the middle of writing a critique of a story set in 1943, of how there was a reason the character used only pencil and fountain pen to write, which prompted Veronica to recall her mother talking about how wonderful the invention of the ballpoint pen was, and in turn sent me into a reverie about when in school I was required to acquire a fountain pen and learn to use it, wells in our desks in grade school for holding ink bottles, and the importance of buying washable ink because accidents were inevitable. I promise you, I didn't feel in the least nostalgic.

We had extreme, wild thunderstorms on Tuesday. Looking out the windows in our classroom building at around 3:30, I watched hailstones bouncing down the stairs down to our building. I was sure, given the volume of rain that pounded us, that the ground would be soggy and covered with puddles the following day. No such thing. All of the water was easily absorbed. (And of course the air was as humid as it had been before the storm.)

We left the retreat compound last night to go out for dinner. (Meals here are more about talking than anything: the less attention one pays to the food, the better. I will only say there's a good reason we have a budget for the "snack food" that we munch in the classroom.)  More later, with more pictures. But I have to dash now, to finish preparing the next critique.

Back from Syacmore Hill

I returned home from Sycamore Hill late Friday night (sans checked luggage)-- only to wake at four the morning after with a full-blown, brutal cold and a cough that makes my chest burn. I'm drowning in not only mucus, but also in email. If you're one of the many people waiting for a reply from me, I beg you to be patient. I'll be getting to you soon. (I hope.)

Sycamore Hill was, as ever, wonderful. This year it rained most of the time, and the food was subpar. (Thank god for the salad bar.) But the stories the attendees brought were excellent and the company witty (Karen Joy Fowler was with us), stimulating, and often fun. Most of us, regardless of gender, painted our toenails garish colors at our end-of-the-workshop party on the last night. And as if that weren't enough fun, there was much singing, and several attendees burst into delightful song just before their stories were critiqued. (photos in this post by Jim Kelly.)

I wrote the following (hoping to finish and post it the next day, before the critiques began) on Friday, June 12 on a plane en route to Asheville:

By coincidence, the issue of the American Book Review that arrived in my mail box this week(May/June 2009) features a focus "Why Teach Creative Writing," while the issue of the New Yorker that arrived a couple of days earlier (June 8 & 15, 2009) has an essay by Louis Menand, "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught," that apparently takes its impetus from Mark McGurl's The Program Era, a book about creative writing programs recently published by Harvard University Press.

Menand's essay begins by revisiting the old argument about whether creative writing can be taught, then moves away from the specificity of that question to consider what creative writing programs are able to do (or not do) for their students, providing a bit of history of such programs along the way. The most striking statement Menand makes is this: "As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature." Menand's essay does not set out to discuss this, so I can't fault him for expanding on this; but this point certainly merits thorough consideration. And I think it'd be particularly interesting to consider the bearing this has on genre fiction in the US today (as opposed, say, to the status of genre fiction before the years in which creative writing programs proliferated).

Menand offers up a lot of entertaining anecdotes about famous writers teaching creative writing classes. My favorite is his story of of what Angela Carter said once on the first day of class when she was teaching at Brown and a student asked her what her own writing was like: "My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis." According to Menand, "the course turned out not to be oversubscribed." He also quotes McGurl's book on how certain styles have been adopted by "lower middle-class" writers like Carver and Oates as a means for "dealing with the highbrow world of the academy," to "shield oneself with words." And he rightly observes that "no one seems to agree on what the goal of good writing is, anyway." Interestingly, Menand concludes his essay by noting that he stopped writing poetry after he graduated and never published a poem which, he says, "places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing course." He comments, "I don't think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things."

The ABR focus section on "Why Teach Creative Writing" offers a spread of takes on the subject of creative writing by creative writing teachers, eliciting markedly different attitudes toward the question and understanding of its semantics. I found Lance Olsen's answer the most congenial. He believes that creative writing classes teach a method of reading. (Which may or may not be useful for student writers). My experience of writing workshops (which granted has always been as a teacher or a peer) confirms this. Interestingly, another teacher, Leslee Becker, takes the question personally, as in why she herself teaches creative writing (rather than why anyone should teach creative writing). Teacher Kelly Cherry recalls being a student of creative writing herself, saying that creative writing classes gives would-be writers "permission" to write, which for her, as a student, was "liberating and life-saving."

Some of the pieces in the ABR focus section assumed a defensive posture, most curiously Steve Tomasula's, which took the question as an attack on not only the very notion of making creative writing classes and programs available but even on the notion of creative writing itself. Given that the people asking the question were inspired to do it after attending the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) meeting, this interpretation suggests an uncomfortable degree of sensitivity. (Easy to imagine how such a sensitivity could develop in the early 21st-century US.) Tomasula zooms in on the atmosphere in post 9/11 "Middle America": "everyone wants to live in a world where great stories make it easy to draw a line between good and evil." Although he doesn't say so directly, he implies that learning to understand "how language can be manipulated to create effects-- get us to vote, buy, feel sympathy or anger-- that to learn by doing in a creative writing classroom where manipulators and their audience meet face-to-face and feedback is immediate" will make students immune to the manipulative effects of narrative. The contrarian in me wonders whether it won't also produce more effective manipulators. Do most creative writing courses spend a significant amount of their time exploring ethical issues? I wonder. The people who use narrative to achieve certain effects are, after all, accomplished craftspeople and can be assumed to have learned their craft in the same classes that attempt to wise-up students about the manipulative effects of certain narratives. Certainly I know many people (among them numerous writers) who define successful narratives as those that entertain the majority of people reading or viewing them while making them feel optimistic, smug, and safe.

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pretty much forgot about having started the above post while I was at Sycamore Hill, until one of the goldsmiths approached a group of us to anxiously urge us to read Louis Menand's essay. He seemed to think we needed to read it to help us understand something about our peer workshop. I'm utterly clueless about what he might have had in mind (except that maybe he felt we needed to submit ourselves to the middlebrow authority it represented to him by virtue of having been published in the New Yorker, we being mere science fiction writers). In fact, we spent the week taking apart and examining one another's fictions, continually worrying at narrative and its workings-- and above all, as critical readers, excavating and even constructing stories out of the narrative when they weren't at all obvious (as was often the case)-- and seeking to persuade everyone else of the validity of our readings. For me, peer workshops like Sycamore Hill chiefly offer insight into how readers engage with texts and how a group of readers negotiate collectively to produce meanings as they interrogate texts. Obviously, such insight is invaluable to fiction writers. But it occurs to me to wonder why literary critics don't workshop in a similar way. I suspect they could learn a lot about their craft as well as the works they write about if they did so. But I suppose most scholars of literature feel that their classroom work already teaches them as much as they need to know about how readers collectively engage with texts.

More Photos

Alice Kim has posted more photos of Sycamore Hill 2008. Her photostream includes pictures of the setting as well as a photo capturing a Special Moment in the dining hall near the end of our week there. (Hint: it's titled "Messianistic Mikey.") In retrospect, I find myself wondering just what other unsuspected talents my colleagues might have...

Sycamore Hill 2008: The Photo

I know I promised photos in the plural, but it turns out that I've got only one photo to offer. Sorry. None of us were as camera-happy as, say, Jim Kelly was in past years. But here's one of the posed group photos, courtesy of Andy Duncan. We were, as you can see, facing into the sun.

ETA: I take it back-- Meghan McCarron took some pictures that you can check out here.

This year at Sycamore Hill

I'm now at the end of the 2008 Sycamore Hill Writers Conference, which was held this year in the mountains of North Carolina. It was an intense week. For obvious reasons I'm sworn to secrecy about what was said during the critique sessions themselves, but I can talk generally about the experience. This is my third time at Sycamore Hill. Each year has been different, for the combination of writers chaanges every year. This year saw an absence of some of the people I most associate with Syc Hill (John Kessel, Karen Joy Fowler, Jim Kelly, Maureen McHugh, and Kelly Link), which made me wonder beforehand whether it would be really, really different. (It wasn't.) This year's combination included, besides me, Judith Berman, Richard Butner, Ted Chiang, Haddayr Copley-Woods, Andy Duncan, Gavin Grant, Eileen Gunn, Alice Kim, Meghan McCarron, Karen Meisner, Chris Nakashima-Brown, and Michaela Roessner.

The week is always grueling. Participants arrive on Saturday afternoon, do orientation that evening as well as collect copies of everyone's story. Critique sessions start at 9:30 on Sunday morning. Cafeteria meals are served three times a day, at 8 a.m., 12:30 noon, and 6 p.m. Staff at the facility ring a bell at 7:30 in the morning to warn everyone they've got thirty minutes to prepare for breakfast. At 7:50 and 8 the bell is rung again, and breakfast begins. The ten-minute warning bell is rung at the two other meals. Most of the people sharing the facilities with us are goldsmiths; Sycamore Hill gets assigned two of the many large round tables filling the dining hall. At meals we seat ourselves at random, so that most meals featured a shifting combination of people sharing the same table. Critique sessions were scheduled at 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., with the third critique of the day following ten or fifteen minutes after the end of the second one. Most of the rest of our time was spent reading the stories and writing critiques for them and in conversation. We all went short of sleep this week. I regularly rose at 6:15 except for this morning, when I needed to get up at 5:30 in order to finish preparing for the final two critique
sessions held this morning. Some people stayed up really late.

We did enjoy a few breaks in the routine. Last night, for instance, we took seventy minutes out of our reading time to watch a 1940s horror flick in which pacifist Satanists [sic] harrow the life of a rich young woman (whom they fleeced and then pushed into suicide, in supposed accordance with their Gandhian principles), enticingly titled The Seventh Victim. (Said film makes an appearance in the story Andy Duncan brought to be critiqued this week). On Tuesday night we went out to dinner at a restaurant off the Blue Ridge Parkway. On Monday night we had a Scotch and Bourbon party. Other breaks included walks, hikes, and runs, entirely delightful in this mountain location.

Does this sound like an easy schedule? After all, you may be thinking, we had each come with already drafted (or almost drafted) stories in hand, so how could it possibly be grueling? If all we had to do for our critiques was read the story and then give a list of positives and negatives (which is what many workshop critiques amount to), there would indeed have been a lot of time to party and just goof off. But Sycamore Hill critiques involve a great deal more than merely discussing what's "good" and "bad" in a story, or even what "works" or "doesn't work." As in the previous years I attended, many writers brought stories they were stretching themselves to write, stories with challenging technical problems. In every case, critiquing the story meant excavating its narrative structure and addressing aspects of craft using highly conscious, sophisticated approaches. This is something that naive writers simply can't do. To perform this task two or three times a day and then bring one's critique to the table and engage with the other eleven critiques presented is hard work requiring a level of concentration that eventually becomes exhausting.

I've attended relatively few workshops in my life because unless they're of this caliber they end up taking more from me than I give to them. But Sycamore Hill is different. I think it's fair to say that this week I learned something from each critique session I participated in. If you already know quite a lot about how narrative works and want to understand more, Sycamore Hill can help you do that.

Sycamore Hill is also rewarding in briefly creating a sense of community among colleagues that writers aren't often afforded. This is not only achieved by Sycamore Hill's "no assholes rule." There's something about bringing such a disciplined level of concentration to one another's work, with the earnest intention of helping the writer to find a way to make it a stronger and better piece of fiction, that inspires mutual respect. And, of course, one does tend to bond with people who've survived the mutual risk-taking that is involved in a workshop like Sycamore Hill. During this week we each surrendered a piece of our writing to the scarily sharp scalpels of our colleagues and wielded our own scalpels in turn with an honesty many people can't bring themselves to essay in critiques of friends' work (much less in reviews). I think for me it's the courage to be honest and the humility to accept no-holds-barred critiques from colleagues that makes Sycamore Hill what it is.

It's time to join the others on the porch, where we'll hang out and talk and drink for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow's a travel day, but I'll be back posting on the weekend, probably-- at the very least, a photo or two of the group.