Creative Writing Class as Crucible

 We need to pay attention to student writing and emotional response in the post–Virginia Tech classroom.

By Monica Barron

I’ve been teaching writing and literature for more than twenty years now, many of those years at a public liberal arts university in Missouri. What changes every semester is who gets taught and how they learn what they learn. One semester there seemed to be a lot of writing about serial killers, rapists, slashers, and murderers—so much writing that I started a file and told a friend, if I end up dead, go to my office and get the file marked “suspects.” Some of the writing was simply the over-the-top work of young men who didn’t write very well (it wasn’t the women writing this stuff). Some of it wasn’t. That same semester, a man called and left a message on my home answering machine that said, “I’m gonna get you, get you, get you . . . out of the closet.”

I suspected that the messenger was a member of my creative writing class. I took the tape to the campus police, and the head of public safety told me to get Southwestern Bell to put a tap on my line for thirty days. I didn’t call Southwestern Bell, but I told my class about the message and that I had called Southwestern Bell; I got no more of those messages. But between the suspects file and the message, my traumas were getting excavated. Growing up in Detroit, I had had a steady diet of gristle—murder and rape—in the papers, on the TV, and on the streets. Coming out was gristly in its own way.

Even though I was freaked out, I kept trying to do the teacherly things. One-on-one conferences, for instance. JP was writing fiction about a serial killer. In exhaustive detail. In conference I asked, what are you trying to do to your audience? What effects are you going for?

He seemed to have no conception of audience. He wasn’t in a rhetorical situation as far as he was concerned. He claimed to want to be a cop, “maybe FBI,” wanted to try to understand the mind of a serial killer. He was taking a serial-killer course in the psychology department at the same time that he was taking creative writing.

But what about the reader? I pressed the point. If you are writing genre fiction . . . What’s that? he asked.

A type of fiction that has conventions, that has a following of readers who know the conventions. . . . I trailed off. He didn’t nod, oh yes, I know what you mean. Cliché time: my heart sank. I know the genre only cursorily. Growing up in Detroit was enough gristle for me, thank you. I have never aspired to write like Elmore Leonard. Listen, I said, if you’re trying to scare me, you’re doing a damn good job. You got to me, okay?

He got bug-eyed in a way that let me know he used the big eyes effectively and often, mostly on women. Okay, that’s all, I said. Now next assignment, could you show me a little range as a writer? Try something else? After he left I thought about the videotape of Ted Bundy with the Barbie doll at a frat party. Bundy had been trying to scare people, of course. We know now he was also premeditating. The creative writing teacher’s standard invocation—make me believe it’s real—became, for the rest of the term, something else, a whispered, “I sure hope you don’t really mean this.”

Community of Writers

Students from many different majors take creative writing classes. Many have already discovered the pleasure of putting words on the page. What I can help them learn are the difficulties that present themselves once words are on the page, how to attenuate the process of writing in order to examine how a literary representation was made and how to ponder the effects of that representation on any reader they might be lucky enough to have.

About those readers: students in these classes have a keen ability to recognize the age specific experience encoded in each other’s language on the page.
Closeness in age and similarity of experience drive the reading of each other’s work as much as or more than the words on the page. Students recognize the stories of the tribe and congratulate each other for retelling them so economically. Theirs are the authorized readings in class. Many use a one-draft process of composition.

But there’s another reader in the room: the teacher, who values the uncritical congratulatory discourse of the students because it marks the presence of human connection and regard in the learning community. But my reading comes from another place, one distant in age, training, and experience. From there I read the words on the page as well as the class. Reading the class I see the strain of class on those struggling to pay rising tuition; the strain of being an ethnic minority or an international student on a mostly white campus; the strain of being lesbian or gay when everyone is at least acting straight; the strains of gendered college experience, of parental apron strings fraying as they are stretched; and the strain of someone’s first big spiritual crisis. If I can see evidence of these strains in the students’ texts, I can make teaching moments out of them by being the bearer of the unauthorized reading, the cheerleader for the unauthorized account of college life. The energy in the room changes. Perhaps not everyone is reading the text the same way. Or the world.

But if the students are persuaded to share my unauthorized way of reading the text and the class, will they be persuaded to take up the mostly unauthorized (by undergraduates) practice of revision? Here is the practice that will enable the unauthorized account of life to emerge. And once it does, perhaps the writer will find readers beyond the classroom.

For it isn’t just reading each other’s work that makes a classroom full of individuals a community of writers: it’s the willingness to recognize each other as writers as well. Such recognition is not based on a desire to pressure each other to write the same way, but rather on the student’s desire to live in a world peopled by writers and to be seen as one among them, heard as one among them, read as one among them. For always we write as situated writers who have growing affiliations with classmates, but who reveal in our writing our affinities with communities beyond the classroom, audiences we write to now, not someday.

So we are not simply trying to pass a few pleasant months learning the conventions of literary genres. If the only community under consideration were the classroom, then what of those who don’t seem to fit in? Wait for them to disappear, come in to argue about their grade, or reveal their disaffection in class? Far better for students to always be looking to that audience beyond the classroom: the one that reads the alternative newspaper on campus, goes to poetry slams, tries out for the Vagina Monologues or the Martin Luther King Day program. Classroom community can be constituted by learning material in common and recognizing each other’s desire to reach audiences beyond the classroom. As students advance in their study, what becomes important as well is their ability to produce a certain kind of sustained text; in so doing they become a certain kind of writer—lyric poet, satirist, novelist.

Virginia Tech Massacre

One April morning in Blacksburg, Virginia, a young man packed up his guns and went to school for the last time. He was done struggling to be part of any community of readers or writers. He was entering the community of killers. His fellow writers had noticed and remarked that he wasn’t simply retelling the stories of the tribe or trying to scare peers with over-the-top, out-of-control representations of experience; he himself was scary. His teachers were faced with a kind of reading they were unequipped to do: reading as diagnosis. By all accounts, they tried to get him a real diagnosis; he resisted. When he became unable to interact productively in any way with others, he was tutored individually.

We have a phrase to describe what eventually happened: he “went postal.” After he killed his first two victims, police mistakenly thought the murders were a result of a personal, domestic dispute. Later that morning they found that, targeting no particular classes or individuals, he managed to kill thirty people and wound others. I followed the coverage of the massacre and its aftermath in the New York Times, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and on MSNBC. I’ve thought about it as I prepare to teach this fall. The Chronicle reported on new security measures at educational institutions, including cell-phone warning systems and the capacity to lock all doors on a campus from a central site.

But all such measures presume this will happen again. Lynn Worsham, writing in Henry Giroux’s Beyond the Corporate University before the massacre at Virginia Tech, reminded me that we have all been schooled in the emotions we express. Sure, all social relations are pedagogical, and students already have an emotional makeup when they enter school. I’m aware in literature and creative writing classes of how many students seem unaware that the responses evoked by literature— by any art, really—are both intellectual and emotional. We should admit that what we teach, that how we teach, is bound to provoke some kind of emotional response. Every discipline from biology to creative writing in some way schools its students in emotions. Remember that the Virginia Tech shooter did not target those aware of his distress in the English department, the counseling center, or the public safety office; he targeted school.

Cell-phone warnings and more locks on doors are the responses administrators and public safety directors have offered us. Now as teachers, what’s our answer? I’m not sure that wholesale change in pedagogical practices can preempt violent manifestation of mental illness in a school. But let’s begin where we are, paying closer attention to the emotions evoked by the material we teach, by the classroom dynamics, by the work the students produce.

What would constitute paying closer attention to emotions? I will reveal more often to student writers how their work affects me emotionally. I admit that I sometimes just respond to a textual feature in their assignment and move on.

After Virginia Tech I want them to see my emotional intellectual response, to give them a sense of me as an audience as well as to attend to their desires for an audience beyond the classroom. will consider more fully what emotional effect the texts I choose might have on the class, watching and listening to determine what more might be going on emotionally in the group. And I will consider more fully the effects the students’ own writings are having on the group as whole. I don’t want to be diagnostician—although there are schools of literary response that do seek to diagnose. What I want is for my writing students to see my responses as those of a reader and lover of literature and as those of teacher, editor, and facilitator. Most of all, want my students to think constructively, as Seung Hui Cho could not, of themselves as members of communities and as producers of work that evokes emotion in others, for better or for worse.

Monica Barron is professor of English at Truman State University and an editor of Feminist Teacher magazine.

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