The Cart Before the Horse
On the first day of a new semester, I like to ask my undergraduate
creative writing classes two questions: What do you like to
read? And why are you here? I’m not sure why I ask my
students this. I can already guess the answers to the questions,
but for whatever reason I always ask, as if expecting a new
response, some young Conrad to rise from the ranks and proclaim
something brilliant about stainless steel cutlery and the
dignity of man in the modern world. And it doesn’t trouble
me that most of the students answer with a fidgety, but unabashed,
I don’t know; at their age I wouldn’t have known
either. What does trouble me is that in proposing these questions,
I’m not only instigating trouble by widening the distance
between myself and my students, but I’m also perpetuating
the problem by putting the cart before the horse. And believe
me, horses can be quite stubborn about walking backwards.
It’s not that the students haven’t read, many
of the more daring students will offer the latest installment
of Nicholas Sparks, John Grisham, or R.K. Rowling, but more
often than not the answer is an unabashed, I don’t know,
or I needed another elective—which is a different problem
altogether. The fact is most of the students have read and
do read on occasion, but the majority of their reading seems
to be portions of what is assigned to them and what they cull
from internet blogs and their friends’ facebooks, rather
than out of any real love of literature. And though I can
understand their fascination with the sort of voyeurism the
internet provides, especially as an alternate to assigned
reading, it troubles me when the first words out of a student’s
mouth are I don’t like to read, which is almost inevitably
followed by, I want to be a published writer . . .
I can understand why a student would be reluctant to admit
that the last book she read was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone; however, in understanding this, I do my best to
champion these efforts. At least she is reading, and, although
I’d rather she said The Collected Poems of Robert
Lowell or To the Lighthouse, to my mind getting
students to read is half the battle. More often than not,
though I’ve struggled with this idea, I find the majority
of my time in creative writing classes is spent teaching the
students how to read. There is little doubt in my mind when
I ask a student to read a poem by Li Young-Lee and no less
than six words are mispronounced that he cannot be finding
pleasure in the poem, or, really, learning anything from it.
And yet, we struggle through. However, the problem here seems
indicative of a much larger problem with younger writers that
extends well beyond the classroom.
One of my colleagues recently bragged to me that in her entire
time as creative writing MFA student she never once read the
assigned reading in any of her classes because she didn’t
want to become overly influenced by other writers and destroy
her own originality. Another colleague once stated to me that
he didn’t read fiction. After all, he was a poet—why
would he? These same colleagues, however, could tell you the
winners of nearly every national writing competition for the
last five years, and both have relatively good careers teaching
at private universities, which apparently require very little
reading. Another colleague of mine reads virtually every national
book prize the moment it comes off the press, but when asked
about Yeats, appears befuddled and confused, seemingly projecting
the idea that reading Yeats would do nothing to further his
chances at a book deal, and is, therefore, of little use to
him.
I am being more than a little facetious here; however, the
problem seems very real to me. While working on my MFA, one
of my professors liked to repeat the old adage that creative
writing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration; like my students,
I preferred to think of writing as something that just happened—pen
touches paper and brilliance ensues. Obviously, this isn’t
the case, and though I would have detested the word “craft”
as a student, more and more I see writing as exactly that.
And if, in the words of Robert Duncan, “often I am permitted
to return to a meadow,” it is a meadow of my own making,
a “made place” of the active mind—not randomness,
not chance.
In my own teaching endeavors I try to dispel this belief as
quickly as I can, and I am hopeful that the problem here is
not necessarily a problem with students, but rather a problem
in my teaching methods. Initially, I used a lot of negative
reinforcement to require students to read, such as putting
those students who have clearly not read on the spot during
classroom discussions and assigning unannounced quizzes, and
though these methods are effective, they don’t really
create any excitement in the students and, more-often-than-not,
the better students harbor resentment for such treatment.
More recently, however, rather than fighting with my students
about reading, I’ve found a better way to affect the
same result is to allow for greater leniency in our discussion
of what they are reading. With the plethora of writing be
published in the world today, there truly is something for
everyone, and I use this to my advantage: when a student admits
that he actually does like a poem by Harryette Mullen, or
even a television show such as Law & Order, I
take this information and work from there using a horribly
unoriginal sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon method. Obviously,
Harryette Mullen must have been influenced by someone, and
probably someone as talented as, or more talented than, herself.
Likewise, Law & Order can most certainly be traced
back to a culturally pertinent root, such as noir fiction
and Agatha Christie. By utilizing this method, I can better
guide my students and really begin to tap into whatever it
is they are looking for in their reading. Often this leads
them to other writers working in very similar veins, which
in turn, generates excitement for the students, stronger reading
skills, and ultimately better writing.
Reading is not prerequisite for writing, and I am certainly
not suggesting that we let tradition outweigh the importance
of contemporary writing, but I am suggesting there is much
we can learn from both of them. And, perhaps more importantly,
I am concerned that too many of today’s younger writers,
and I include myself in this category, become so caught up
in the business of writing that I can’t help but wonder
if we are quickly becoming a generation of non-readers, a
generation of sound bites and irrelevant factoids, of flash
and dash, of book-of-the-month and poem-a-day, cheap jokes
and top-tens, a generation of writers all walking on our hands,
pushing a cart with nothing in it.
