(Alexander Chee, Jennine Capó Crucet, Danielle Evans, Mat Johnson, Christine Lee) Writers and creative writing instructors discuss teaching strategies for addressing sexist/homophobic/racist work in the classroom. What opportunities exist when encountered with such work? How does one dismantle pejorative workshop commentary that promotes marginalization while maintaining open dialogue? The diverse panel will explore topics of artistic integrity around the author/narrator/character convergence, as well as provide pedagogical tools to address classroom prejudice head on.

Published Date: August 5, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Alexander Chi, Janine Capo Cruset, Danielle Evans, Matt Johnson, and Christine Lee. You will now hear Christine Lee provide introductions

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Next year. Good morning everybody. Thanks for coming on the last day of a w p holler at all the people who were able to get up on the last day. I'm Christine Lee. Welcome to the panel on striving for balance between language and prejudice and teaching writing. So we're going to discuss a lot of stuff around sexist, homophobic, and racist work in the classroom and how we would manage it as instructors and how we can dismantle pejorative workshop language that promotes marginalization while making sure that we keep dialogue open. I'm Christine Lee and I'm proud of this panel. I assembled a very small group of engaging and charismatic writers whom you all may have met on Twitter. So I want to introduce each of the panel panelists to my right. First. To my right is Alex Chi, who has written Edinborough and the forthcoming Queen of the Night. He's a recipient of the White Writing Writers Award and N E A Fellowship and M C C A fellowship. He's taught at the Iowa's writer, Iowa Writers Workshop, Amherst College, Columbia University's M F A program. And Sarah Lawrence to his right is Janine Capo Cruset and she is the author of the Novel Home

Speaker 1 (00:02:01):

Among Stranger

Speaker 2 (00:02:02):

Make Your Home Among Strangers, sorry. And The Story Collection, how to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa State and the John Gardner book Prize and the Devil's Kitchen Award. And she's the winner of an O Henry Prize in the Picado Fellowship and she teaches at Florida State University. To my left is Matt Johnson. He's written a gazillion novels. He writes creative nonfiction comics. He's written PIM Drop Hunting in Harlem and the forthcoming novel Loving Day, which is out next month. Next month. He's a recipient of the United States Artists James Baldwin Fellowship, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, a Barnes and Noble Discover, great new writer selection, and the John Do Pasos prize for literature and he teaches at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. And to his left is Danielle Evans, who is the author of the Story Collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and she teaches at the University of Wisconsin Madison. So how many of you here are teachers or instructors? Alright. Okay, just want to get, so I just want to get started and ask each of the panelists, what did you choose to be on this panel and what is it you hope to address

Speaker 3 (00:03:23):

All these years of a p? And I still haven't learned, you never sit on the end of a panel. I think part of the reason I wanted to be on this panel is I think that there are situations where there isn't an easy and obvious answer. And so it would be useful for us to all talk it through. I think probably for me, my sense of some of my greatest classroom failings have come around this topic and some of it I've learned through trial and error. And I think making a space to have these kinds of conversations to leave space for art that takes risks without those risks coming at the cost of other people in your classroom is really important. And I dunno that there's a formula for it, but it seems like it's very much important that we explore it and acknowledge that this is a thing that's happening.

Speaker 4 (00:04:07):

Victor Laval called in Sick. That's part of it, just progressive. So much of our workshops are based on the dynamic of the room, right? And the students oftentimes don't realize that a successful workshop or a workshop that completely bombs often has more to do with the students than it has to do with the professors. And of course when it goes really well, you claim all the credit and when it goes really poorly, you just kind of shrug and point at the pain in the ass kid in the corner. But when language comes up or scenes come up that are problematic, racist, sexist, homophobic, it can sink your entire class in really kind of dramatic ways. And I'm tenured, so as long as I don't kill anybody, I'm basically fine. But when you're with dealing with professors who are also at a point where their evaluations really matter, these are the classes that can create really ugly evaluations and also can create a lot of uncomfortable feelings. And you're in a tough position because if you overstep in, you can kind of squash the energy of the room and it can be ugly. But if you just let it go and hope nobody gets too upset about it, you lose the trust of the students. So I'm looking forward to talking about how I've been trying to balance it and also hearing other strategies for trying to negotiate this.

Speaker 5 (00:05:30):

I am remembering when I was a student myself at the I Writers Workshop in the nineties and I had come from San Francisco and participating in Act Up and Queer Nation Direct Action Politics, and I would go and see the assistant director of the program just about every week to talk about my complaints about the workshop because I didn't really have any tools except to just kind of pop off in class at my classmates. And I remember at one point she said to me, I'll put the whole workshop in sensitivity training if that's what you want. And I remember thinking, is that what I want? And that actually wasn't what I wanted. I realized it would instantly make me a kind of enemy of my classmates. It was going to be the sort of thing that would pretty much instantly fail whatever I was trying to do.

Speaker 5 (00:06:30):

And so ever since that moment, I've been trying really hard to think about how you handle this question, the difference between is the story racist or homophobic or is it addressing racism and homophobia? Are there things that are happening within the text that are unconscious or more directly spiteful? And how do you address that with the person in a way that gives them more access to whatever it is they're trying to write about and also makes room for everybody else? Because I realized and when I began teaching myself that what I was up to was helping them to write about the hardest things. And that can't happen if they can't talk about it. And so the reason why I'm here basically is talk some more about figuring that out. That's what I hope for.

Speaker 6 (00:07:34):

Yeah, like Alex, my experiences as a teacher are very much informed by my experiences as a student in an M F A program where I was the only Latina in the program and the only person of color in the program for the three years that I was there. And so I actually wrote out my answer because I've also learned that I'm a little bit of a nervous teacher. And this was the only question I knew way in advance was coming. My response is, why am I on this panel? Because when I've asked my colleagues and my graduate students how they address this topic in their course design and specifically on their syllabi, they usually don't have an answer because they aren't addressing it there or anywhere. They aren't tackling it head on instead of beginning the conversation, they're either not anticipating it. I should specify that all my colleagues where I currently teach are white.

Speaker 6 (00:08:15):

They either aren't anticipating it or hoping it won't come up. Two strategies, if you can call them that, that are not available to me as a professor of color who does not have that particular facet of privilege. When the opportunity for dialogue about prejudice in the workshop isn't built into your course design, an instructor is left only with the option of addressing inflammatory or racially charged remarks as they occur. Rather than taking charge of that conversation from day one by talking about the role diversity must play in any workshop happening in America today, I'm on this panel because in my experience, too many instructors are reluctant to directly acknowledge in their course design that the workshop is a place where acts of bigotry will occur and that these range from unintentional microaggressions to larger, more purposeful acts of bigotry and appropriation and that they must prepare their students for these instances by laying out in writing and via class discussion the methods by which the class together will address and dismantle those moments when not if they arise.

Speaker 2 (00:09:13):

So I am going to get back to your point, I liked your point about the difference between, or the line between racist work and work that addresses racism or all the isms, but I also want to get this next question addressed before we move on to that and which is what do each of you think the purpose of the workshop is? And some of you have addressed that, and how do these issues in writing play into that?

Speaker 5 (00:09:41):

Well, I think of workshop as a place in the ideal sense, a place where the student comes with their work to learn how to be more of themselves as a writer and to get from the reading that they get from their classmates to get a picture of what they're doing. Writing is one of those arts where the more you work on something, the more invisible it becomes to you. And so the only way that you end up being able to see it is to radically change your sense of it through other people reading it, setting it aside, et cetera. In workshop, you get access to a conversation about your work that you could otherwise only imagine when people are reading you. And so these issues are, they play out because they play out in everyone's lives. They're issues we all live with. Diversity is a word that I think of whenever I hear it now.

Speaker 5 (00:10:42):

I increasingly think of diversity, a k, a, what my life is like increasingly feels like code for something that I see as just, I don't think of myself as having a diverse life. I think of myself as having a life and other people who don't have that might see that as diverse, in other words. So I think of a moment I had in class about five or six years ago where a student went off on another student for antisemitism in her story and she was Jewish and all the characters were Jewish and she was writing, she was essentially writing about her family over the holidays and was trying to write about internalized antisemitism. And I let him go on for a while, but I could see that he had entered into some kind of strange mode where he himself, who was not a Jew, was prepared to really go all out in defense of what he saw as an attack on Jewish people by a Jewish writer in the classroom.

Speaker 5 (00:11:54):

And I had to shut him down. I just said, that's enough for now. And that was an awkward moment because I don't like to make those kinds of interventions when people cross that line on the one hand. But on the other hand, I feel like my responsibility as the teacher is a responsibility to all of the students, not just the one that wants to speak. And I got a three page email from him later about how wrong I was. The classroom discussion moved on, he and I met privately, I met privately with the student who was being workshopped. But it's true that there wasn't a system in place in the way that you're talking about in the course design, and I love what you had to say about that. And I think that's something that I would actually actively want to put in place going forward. I think that idea of a system that gives them a sense that they'll be heard and you a sense that there's a process in place so that you're not making it up as you go along is an incredibly intelligent approach.

Speaker 3 (00:13:03):

So my very first graduate school workshop, the professor said in the first day of class, if you're in a workshop where 15% of the feedback you hear is useful, you're in a really good workshop. And I think for me, the crucial part of workshop is figuring out which 15%, that's the filter that you're there to develop. The blank page never gets any easier, but your editorial muscle hopefully develops over time. And I think that part of what workshop does is let you filter out what you listen to. And so the reason I think these issues are so critically important is because they get in the way of how much useful feedback you're getting and how much of it you can hear. I think on the one hand, there are students I've had come to me because they're the only person of color in the workshop, they're the only person of their background in the workshop.

Speaker 3 (00:13:43):

And I sometimes just have to tell them, look, you're going to get less than 15%. You're going to have to learn to filter out more, and I wish that I could do something besides tell you that. And there are other students who need to hear more than they're hearing because their position is this sort of sense of they will not be stifled as an artist. And so sometimes some of these issues they get very defensive about because they feel like any pushback against the representations in their work is a form of censorship and not asking 'em to sort of think more complexly around the world. And I don't think it's always obvious. I mean, the moment I come back to, and I'm thinking about this, I had a student who very much crossed a line. There were two students of color in otherwise white workshop, and one of them just said something wildly inappropriate to there essentially that she was not in touch enough with her own ethnicity and that's why her characters, the word whitewashed was used.

Speaker 3 (00:14:31):

So I had to shut that down and talk to that student after class and say, you can't say that. You need to apologize to her. And we eventually got to the point where he accepted that he should apologize to her, but he was hurt because he felt that in a previous workshop he'd taken with me, someone else had turned in a story with a really racist first person narrator. And we talked about the racism of the story. We openly use the word racism, but I hadn't made that student apologize to him. And I felt like pedagogically it made sense to me that I treat differently like what you say as a person to another person versus what a first person narrator says. But emotionally, I could understand why as the only black male student in the program reading that story felt like that kid had said it to him in a way that I could intellectually understand that it wasn't my role in the classroom to say you could never have a character in a first person story, see something racist. But I also can't, I didn't want to completely write off that feeling as absurd. And I don't know exactly what you do about that except foreground it, which is part of why when I start a workshop now, I try to start with a conversation about how those things come up and it doesn't solve everything, but at least it's on the table.

Speaker 4 (00:15:39):

It's funny, I tell her this all the time, but the very first workshop I ever taught, she was in it as a student. And I always think if I had just quit right there, I would've had a great success rate. But the way I've been dealing with it, I've been teaching for almost 15 years, I have a basic feeling that when I go into the classroom in that classroom, I love all my students, I love them and I want them to do really well, even the little shits. I want them to do really well and I want them while we're in the room, I want them to love each other. So just dealing with family members, a lot of the times this comes up and honestly, I notice that the most with this straight misogyny because as a society we've often been trained to watch out for exposing our own racism.

Speaker 4 (00:16:35):

And lately, very recently, people have been more conscious about exposing their own homophobia. So those moments to me, there are exceptions, but there's a lot of lit bross, and they come up with characters. And I'm saying as somebody who's certain who probably been guilty of this in the past, it definitely has, they come up with characters that are based on the effects of living in a misogynist society. And so you see a lot of it there, and I see it with racism and I see it with homophobia and transphobia and anything else. And what I try and do is give the student an out in the room if I can do that. So I had a student who handed in this piece that was like, it was just gloriously offensive. I don't mean that as a compliment to him, I just mean I don't think he thought he was being edgy and he didn't realize he was just being a horrible person.

Speaker 4 (00:17:29):

And so what I had to do was be like, well clearly be kind of dismissive. Well, clearly this is a racist archetype that hearkens back to immigration, Asian immigration in the 1920s. And we don't want people to think that this story, this lovely story, is unknowingly having this really horrible racist character here. So we should really address that. Probably you should take that out. I know he didn't know that when he did the piece. I know when he has this comic scene where somebody turns out to be trans that he's making fun of that character, but I pretend like I don't just to give him an out. And then I say really vicious stuff to this guy about how to do it. And I kind of try and keep up that energy the whole way through. And I'm like, I'm mixed black and white. I've seen the first workshop I ever saw somebody crying was my first workshop.

Speaker 4 (00:18:25):

I was in Columbia and there was a mixed woman character written by a white author, and there was a line at the end of it that's talked about. She was mixed, but she was beautiful. And there was other woman next to me, Amy Barnett, used to be until recently, she was the editor of Ebony, and she just tore into this woman for 50 minutes. By the end, I felt sorry for the woman and the woman, she exposed her own racist shit. I have my own and there's no one up on this panel and there's no one in this room that doesn't have the baggage of being in a society that we need to deal with. So with that idea of group love of the room and also maybe this kind of Catholic idea of everyone in the room is a sinner, I try and negotiate that.

Speaker 4 (00:19:12):

And that's one of the tricky things with our discussions period on this is that, and you mentioned Twitter in the beginning, Twitter's a great example of it. We have this idea that there is a politically pure persona and everybody else is evil. And so everybody's petrified of showing the things that might deviate from that persona. But if we get in that mode, it kills the conversation like Alex, you were saying, just kills it. You want to get that there on the table. And one of the things about loving my students, I want them to do well. So bad love my students library journal doesn't give a shit about my students. So I'd rather them mess up with me and I can call them on their stuff in a kind of controlled way than have them go out in the world and have people who will take glee in kind of destroying their work. So yeah, I'd love to hear some strategies too to how to do it. It is very prickly. And even that student who's saying the stupid stuff, we're trying to help them too.

Speaker 6 (00:20:17):

Just to quickly address the question since I haven't talked on it, but what is the purpose of the workshop? I agree with everything that you guys have said. I'll add the one thing that I think at the undergraduate level, not everybody that is in that classroom is going to go on to continue writing. So part of my pedagogical approach is that the workshop is a space where we learn how to talk to other people and how to listen to other people. And so I have very small goals. I'm like, please just learn empathy here. And for my students, we really, I think part of the goal for me is for them to be able to transcend workshop and never need one again. Eventually to get to that point where they're like, I can't ever take another workshop. I already know what needs to happen. So they sort of internalize that.

Speaker 6 (00:21:00):

So as far as how does I think, how does issues of misogyny, homophobia, the questions are here, which is really nice. So if I forgot what it was in listening to everybody's awesome comments, I'm like, oh yeah, this is the question. In the first scenario with undergraduate students, we've all actually used the phrase, at some point I had to shut it down or I had to stop this sort of thing. And I've come to question, I've done it myself. I've had to do that and been like the whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, kind of thing. But I've also learned how I make a distinction in my syllabus in a diversity side of statement. It's called diversity of opinions and experiences and its role in class discussion. And I make a distinction on the first day between unintentional acts of bigotry and purposeful acts of bigotry.

Speaker 6 (00:21:43):

And I talk about my course as a place where unintentional acts of bigotry need to arise because that's how you learn that it is an act of bigotry. And then we call out more, we talk about calling things out rather than sort of shutting things down. But I mean, you do have to do that because sometimes people, there's an agenda that's going on and don't factor into all these things that you're dealing with individual personalities of people. And I sort of don't know how we do what we do when you start thinking about it that way. So I'll stop there before it gets depressing.

Speaker 2 (00:22:12):

I'm going to segue a little bit off what you just said, Janine. And I also want to segue off what Alex mentioned earlier. So the lines between misogynistic, sexist, homophobic, racist, writing and then work that addresses each. So I kind of want the panel to figure out how you define that and also how you would address it with your students who if that comes up clearly don't understand that line, and also when you let it ride and when you shut it down, because yeah, I am interested in how you figure out those lines and which line to fall on.

Speaker 6 (00:22:56):

So as far as that question of when do you let it ride? And you've also heard everyone in here at some point reference their own experience as a student in workshop. And so clearly those experiences are informing who we are as teachers when it comes to this topic. One of the workshops that I was in as a graduate student is a very small program. My family's Cuban, and I was writing a story about an angry family that happened to be Cuban and maybe 20 minutes into the workshop, an older white male who was in my cohort, she just took my story and did this across the table and he was like, I don't know what you're doing. If I were Latino, I would be doing all that magical realism shit. That stuff is selling so well. You're not giving yourself what you guys are laughing.

Speaker 6 (00:23:37):

But it was this insane moment for me because I was 23 and I thought, oh, he's right. He's totally, and why am I writing about these families when I really could be, I have all this, I have a kind of privilege. Maybe I can do that. Although that wasn't my literary heritage at all, maybe a different kind of ancestry, but I didn't grow up reading that stuff and those weren't the kinds of writers that I wanted to be. But I went home that night and I started to write my crazy magical realist story. I was like, here we go. Was like, you could be writing about Santoria Sania. He was like, you should be writing about witches and shit. And he's like, you could place that so easy. And so there was this sense of the market entering into the workshop. What do publishers want to see?

Speaker 6 (00:24:23):

So I went home that night and started writing this story and got to a point in the story where I had no idea what was happening because I don't know what happens in a, I don't even know what to call it, like a seance. When you go to Jeron, she's trying to do it and you were undo it. And so any writer would went to Google and was like, what happens next in this scene? And then I realized that he could have done the same thing. He could write that story. I didn't need to write that story. That wasn't what I wanted to be writing. And so I'm bringing this back to this question. This wasn't addressed by the workshop instructor at all. He sort of sat back and waited to see what happened. And I go back and forth, this is why. This is another reason why I'm on this panel.

Speaker 6 (00:25:06):

I went home and I wrote a story and then I got stuck. I didn't know what happened and I wrote the line, well, what happens next? Depends on the reader's knowledge of Sania. And that ended up being the first sentence of the second movement of the story, which completely undoes everything. The first part does, and it sort of takes on the performative aspects of identity there and what was expected, the idea that a white reader was going to go into the story and believe everything I said because I was Cuban, but maybe they shouldn't. I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. And so undid the story and then it became a first person story and it was one of the weirdest things I had ever written and also unlike anything I had ever produced. And it set the trajectory for the rest of my career.

Speaker 6 (00:25:46):

And that would not have happened had the professor stepped in and said, where do you get off telling her what she can write? What I would've done I think as a teacher and been like, must protect the student. And so I've come to the conclusion for that, that the professor was very aware of what I could do, and it was a small enough program. He worked closely with me so he knew that I could handle that. I would make something out of that moment rather than let it shut me down. I don't know, other than us knowing our students, really their potential to know if they're going to continue writing and how much you have to support that and knowing them personally. Did I even come near the question? You're doing great. Okay.

Speaker 5 (00:26:30):

That's making me think of two workshop experiences I had that were somewhat related. One was my story was getting workshopped and one of my members of my cohort, he sort of did that and he was like, why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens? Why should I care if they live or die? And the whole story was about someone who has just discovered he has H I V and he's suicidal and the narrator is the friend that's coming over to try to sort him out. And he ends up getting a picture of the inside of a relationship that he thought was a very happy relationship, which in fact was an incredibly abusive one. And likewise, my workshop instructor said nothing. And I really boiled around that question, but I also think I understood that I actually in some ways what the story had to do was the story had to make him care against his fucking will.

Speaker 5 (00:27:39):

That's what it had to do. Excuse the cursing, but that was me at that moment. I was just like, that's what I have to do. And I guess I didn't do it. And in some ways that also was a powerful trajectory setting moment for me as a writer because I understood that in trying to just write about gay men at that time, based on my own experiences, that there was some way that I needed to make the story, accessible is the wrong word, but to have the story have its own kind of magnetism, he wouldn't be able to turn away from it.

Speaker 3 (00:28:21):

I'm going to say two contradictory things, which is also my favorite pedagogical tactic. One is that I think it's really important in thinking about when to intervene, when to shut things down, how to try to prevent those moments. So remember that it is not about you and the student, it's about your classroom. I think the thing that I come back to as the moment or semester that I most regret was my very first full-time teaching job. I was like 23, I had this kid, I was most of my career, I've been almost consistently the only black woman in my classroom, often the only woman of color, often the only person of color in my classroom. And so sometimes I get things that are happening in class that are very much about me and the student's sort of reaction to me. And I think my reaction at that time was to get in one of those sort of don't blink first contests.

Speaker 3 (00:29:07):

So I had a student who would turn nothing in, but violent rape scenes and stories about assassinating Obama. Seriously, everything the student turned in all semester. I think for me at the time, I didn't want to react in such a way that I let him get under my skin. I didn't want to let this take up all of my time. I think he was waiting for me to be his angry black woman professor. I was just not going to do it. But what happened was that he took up so much space in that room that other people had to deal with. That was my fuck up. I should have been the one to take that hit and deal with all of the administrative stuff that I would've to deal with to get him out of the classroom and have it be my headache because it was my classroom.

Speaker 3 (00:29:47):

On the other hand, I also feel like part of our job is to empower students to kind of call each other out on things and make that space their own. I dunno if you remember this, but so when Matt was my workshop professor when I was supposed to have Victor Lele and I was terrified of Matt because he wasn't Victor mostly I thought that workshop was a thing you could study for. And so you came in and I had no idea who you were and prepped in the first couple weeks of class, you gave us this story that was super mediocre and kind of racist. But I was like, but Matt Johnson gave us this story, so there must be something that I'm missing in it. It must be a good story. Then we got to class and you were like, I gave you guys the story super mediocre and kind of racist.

Speaker 3 (00:30:25):

I don't want you to think that just because somebody published something or somebody gave you something that you can't say that we were all kind of trying to gingerly talk around that for 10 minutes. And I think that finding a way to make that kind of space in your classroom where students are like, no, I don't have to. I want my students to be able to push back against me. I'm not always right. I don't always make, I want them to be able to push back against each other even when they're doing stuff that is sort of aesthetically lovely. I want them to be able to push back against the published work and talk about, and not in a way that shuts it down or says that it can't exist, but that sort of thinks about those issues and makes them feel like We're not here to filter down aesthetic judgements. We're here to make our own. And so I think that space between owning the classroom and realizing that you are ultimately the person responsible for it and creating a sense of communal responsibility is the tricky part. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:31:15):

That's awesome. I'm wondering in this room, how many people are now going to use that to open up conversation, pick a really super mediocre story with major sociological issues in it? So I do want to move on to strategies and creating space for students because Danielle, you brought up the fact that as a teacher, you've got the whole classroom, you're not dealing with the one student or that one piece of work. So I also wanted, we're a little bit from our questions, but how do you empower students to participate and engage in these sticky conversations and in general, what are some of your strategies? I do want to talk about practical stuff. I mean, we all acknowledge it's a problem.

Speaker 6 (00:32:07):

So one quick thing that I do is we all make syllabi, and usually in that syllabi you have a section called participation and what you're supposed to do when you say things like be on time and turn in your work and some of those basic things. I also have these two things, and what this does is it just shows that on the first day, this class is maybe a little different from other classes. And this is an every syllabus, whether it's a literature course, creative writing course, anything I'm teaching, this is going to be in there. So under the participation section, I have these two things along with don't be late. Recognize that an individual member of a particular ethnic racial religious group does not represent that entire group refrain from asking both directly and indirectly, any individual, including yourself to speak on behalf of an entire culture.

Speaker 6 (00:32:50):

It's impossible to do. And that's there. And usually when I get to that point, say this was asked of me a lot as a student, whenever I would take a class and if I was the only Latino in the room, they would say, what do the Cubans think? And I'd be like, well, as your representative Cuban, this is how we feel. So I say that and I just bring my own experience as a student into that. And then the second point right after that, on the syllabus, it says, at the same time, recognize that not every identity category is as obvious as you may think. Don't make assumptions based on who slash what you think or don't think you see. And then the next one is like, don't turn in your work late. So this is under participation. It's a huge chunk of their grade. And because I am also listing things about being to class on time, that gives it prominence in my course policies because it is a course policy. So I have other little things open in my syllabus, but I'll stop there.

Speaker 3 (00:33:46):

I've started starting undergraduate classes with a discussion on why I don't believe in trigger warnings because it's been a thing that's on some of their minds, but as a way of having a conversation about what we might be able to do instead. I think I don't believe in promising anybody a safe space because I don't think safe spaces exist for anybody really, and certainly not for anybody who's existing in any kind of marginalized body. I also think that sugars are often not topical. And so to promise anybody that we could avoid all of the things that will bring them to the bad places would be a lie on my part. It would be promising something that I couldn't deliver and asking them to promise something that I couldn't deliver. But the way that I talk about it is, one, giving things to material rather than using it that I think especially in undergrad workshops, they often want to go for what they think is the edgiest thing in the world.

Speaker 3 (00:34:32):

I tell them not to be sort of writer vampires. If you're sucking all of your energy from the fact that this is a loaded issue, what are you doing? You're making something less. And so I want them to think about handling material responsibly and handling each other responsibly, which doesn't mean including themselves. It means if you need to leave the room, you can excuse yourself. I would like you to be able to come back in the room and talk to us about where you're coming from, but you can decide how you can do that and whether you can do that. But I think just putting on the table that all of these things will be in play in the semester that you're there to help the writer get outside of their own head is important. I mean, the language I use is that sort of fiction is a practice of intelligent empathy.

Speaker 3 (00:35:13):

That part of what we're learning too as writers is to see around ourselves. And so that conversation is a really important part of the workshop process, partly because Jean, I think that since a lot of them are not going to be writers, that's part of what they're learning. But also because as a writer, you have to be able to get outside of your own head. You have to be able to anticipate how other people react to the world. And so making that part of the conversation on the first day has been, I think, useful in a way that I want to open things up rather than kind of close them down.

Speaker 4 (00:35:44):

Listening to you guys, one of the things I was thinking about was that in my head, there's two types of issues with this. One is people who unintentionally are relying on ideas that are just wrong and that it's coming out in the work. And the other typist people who are intentionally disruptive, there's some people who are just intentionally disruptive and they use this as a vehicle to be disruptive. And some of those people are people who are like, I'm doing this to be edgy. I'm just old, but I'm so sick of I'm doing this to be edgy at this point. But the people who are unintentionally sort of electrifying their work with hate speech light, those guys, the one really cool thing is that most of those issues can be covered under the section of bad writing. So usually the biggest, if you have this kind of offensive archetype in your piece, you have a crappy sort of fake character puppet in your piece.

Speaker 4 (00:36:41):

And so that to me as a writing teacher gets to be an easier way to deal with the fact that you have this character that is offensive. Usually the biggest issue is it's not well-written, so I can pull you apart with just that and I can get a lot of the work done. Another thing that's actually really helpful is to just say, well, okay, this thing over here, you had this black guy running down the street with a television that's racist and actually dates back to the 19th century. It used to be chickens during slavery because they starved the slaves and so they would sometimes steal food. And then they used that later with the television to kind of dismiss the fact that they were also experiencing overwhelming disenfranchisement and turn that into a joke. So you really don't want to do that, and then I'll spend 20 minutes talking about the character.

Speaker 4 (00:37:28):

So you just knock it out and then go into the character work. So under the guise of character and prose and dialogue, I'm able to do most of that and with the ones who are disruptive, and I teach from a masculine position and I've been in the room for a long time, so I to just shut them down in front of the room, I basically just smacked them down and I'll say these issues, I'll put out what the issues are, and I say, we're going to have to discuss those later because the other students in the room need to know that this person is being controlled because otherwise they're not going to feel comfortable going forward.

Speaker 5 (00:38:07):

I've definitely used that method also, I think I learned the bad writing response early on. A classmate had said of a character that he was obviously gay and that was the only description, but everybody else, everybody else in the room was described except for the guy who was obviously gay. And I said, what does that mean to you? What are you actually trying to say about him? That's like putting a billboard up in the middle of your scene and it doesn't leave you any room or the reader any room to figure out what you mean by that. And it was a pretty useful tool. I think that I like to begin classes with a discussion about how they're there for each other as well as for what I'm going to say. I try to make the point that if they keep writing, they're probably going to see each other down the road for years, maybe decades, and that this is an opportunity for them to get to know each other and possibly to find in the classroom other readers that they might have for the rest of their careers. I do that as a way of making them real to each other past a classroom. I have also taken to instituting policy where I ask them not to share anything on social media about other students' work so that they're not Facebook shaming or Twitter shaming somebody whose work that they don't like. I do that as a part of trying to say, if you don't like something that someone's written, take it to them directly here in the classroom. That's what it's for.

Speaker 5 (00:39:53):

It's been okay. I think in some ways I won't know a lot until 10 years, 20 years out how it worked out for them. That's the thing that's a little haunting. It's why I make a point of, for example, always checking in with my former students who are queer over the years. Every year if I haven't seen them publish something, I just shoot them a little email, what's going on, what's happening? And likewise with students of color, I don't want to be the oppressive and dad, writer dad who's like, why aren't you writing when that's not the choice they made? So I do say things like, this is your annual check-in, and I do that so easy in the face of everything to just stop. And that's the thing I don't want to see them do.

Speaker 2 (00:40:47):

I also want to ask about pushback. There's always the writer who says, it's not me, it's the character or other ways to push back on the feedback or the vibe of the workshop. This question was addressed to me by someone who actually deals with it a lot. So I wanted to ask the panel how they deal with any pushback.

Speaker 4 (00:41:12):

Can I do that? Oh yeah, I don't care who and I don't care. I don't care in almost every way. I don't care. It's not an excuse in the piece. And it's also, it's not relevant at all. That's not relevant. We're trying to communicate people and we're trying to do it with this squiggly little inclines on a page. So the question of what you intended in general, I hate that in class where it's like, I meant, well, what I meant was this. Well, that's nice. That's not how people are reacting to it. So as an artistic question, I don't care. And as a personal judgment question, I don't care because I really don't. This is like my pet peeve now, and really I'm off Twitter this summer. I can't take it anymore because I feel this constant debate. It's not me as my character is just saying, I'm an innocent, I'm innocent, and I'm not a bad person.

Speaker 4 (00:42:09):

I'm just showing bad people. But I don't care if you're a bad person. I care if you're a bad writer. So I really don't care. I want you to be a good writer. There's writers who I love who are racist as hell. Most of 'em are dead, so it's easier to excuse them, but still that's not going to get my issue in the room is I'm not a racial sensitivity trainer or general xenophobic sensitivity trainer. What I'm there to do is make sure they're a good writer. And from that point of view, we all know up here, we know there's some horrible people that are good writers. You know what I mean? So if they can become good writers, certainly my students who haven't become twisted by time yet, they can become good writers as well. And so my point with them is always, it's like this is not a judgment of you.

Speaker 4 (00:42:58):

That's not the important part. The important part is the work. And if the work, the work will become limited by your limitations. And one of the things is that I believe that your progress as an artist is going to be contingent on your ability to negotiate yourself and that on a lot of emotional levels. And one of those emotional levels ends up being part of how you see the rest of humanity. So I've certainly seen people who go down because they are unable to really see themselves as they really are. And so in that sense it does matter. But in the general sense, you're having a conversation with the reader. I've been turned off in the past where I've seen stuff on the page, and it's never challenged in any way. And so the assumption it's coming from the right of themselves and then it becomes even more problematic.

Speaker 4 (00:43:47):

But the bigger issue to me is always the work. Really, I'm more concerned with the work doing well, and not just that piece, but the work this person can do over their lifetime than I am with whether or not they're guilty. If the question is, are you sexist, racist, homophobic, all these things, if you live in America, right? All those things are in there. We all have to negotiate. I'm racist against myself. I've literally walked down the street and seen who is that big scary Puerto Rican dude? Like, oh, it's me. Okay, he won't mug me. Yeah. So that part doesn't concern me as much as just trying to get the work to exist in way that's better than the person.

Speaker 3 (00:44:35):

I think there's a kind of pushback that I don't care about, which is about the writer. I mean, I think it's important to me. I think so much that we write about racism is a thing that happens to people and not a thing that's produced. So I'm actually interested in people writing racist characters or sexist characters. I'm interested in not always having it from the position of victimhood because I think otherwise we erase that sort of pervasiveness. We write as though all racist or sexists are people who exist somehow apart from us and spend all day doing malevolent villain things, twirling their mustaches, and when in fact they are all around us. So I'm interested in work that does something complex with that, but it has to be there for a reason. Anything has to be destroyed for a reason. The pushback that I have more trouble with is I find that especially at the undergraduate level, I mean so many young women have internalized so much sexism that the pushback you get for calling out sexism will be from women.

Speaker 3 (00:45:24):

And I find negotiating that to be tricky sometimes because I want people to be empowered to read things. I want people to have conversations, but I also feel like there are certain things, there are certain avenues. I just don't want the class to go down. I do not let a workshop of a story about a rape turn into the 15 things the characters could have done to not be raped. That just seems not a worthwhile use of our time. But the fact that that happens so often concerns me in a way that's beyond the writing, and I don't always know what to do with it. It's the pushback that comes from not so much the writer, I don't really care. The writer can either want to be better or not. And at the end of the day, if they want to publish their story and have that be their position in the world, that's their name on the line. But I sometimes feel like there's a pushback that comes from the class to reacting to certain things that feels like it requires more conversation than we have always time for in the space of the actual workshop. Without getting away from the work itself,

Speaker 5 (00:46:25):

I actually don't build in a space for them to push back. So I use the Iowa method, which is where the writer doesn't talk while they're being discussed. And then if they try to talk, I say, yep. And I ask them to take notes. I ask them to sit with what people are saying about their work. I meet with them afterwards. That's also built in. There's a conference with me alone. And then if they have issues, we can talk about it. I allow questions if they feel like something wasn't addressed. And if they try to turn the question into a defense of themselves, I say, it's not a question. And I just keep it there at the level of the structure of the thing. And I do that because I do think that one of the most important things a workshop can do is get you to sit with what you did. And at a basic level in life, you can't just go around talking to everybody who reads your work and saying, but this is what I meant.

Speaker 5 (00:47:31):

So it's just not real to allow them, I feel it doesn't teach them anything about how to do that, how to listen to what people are saying to them. I also, I realized I did have one institution I was working at. It was very strange. They created an office whose responsibility was to suggest that professors adopt trigger warnings. And so I remember a semester where I was engaged in this kind of strange dance with that office and certain student volunteers from that office, one of whom was in my class, where they were trying very hard to get me to adopt trigger warnings for a creative writing undergraduate workshop. And I had to explain to them, if I put a trigger warning on a student's story, which is what they wanted me to do, that puts a terrible label on the student going into the class.

Speaker 5 (00:48:30):

And it doesn't help me help them, whether it's the student being workshopped or the students who are workshopping them to address the things that they were trying to write about. And it's something. And also with the workshop, you don't know what the student is going to turn in until they turn it in. And if you create a situation where there's the possibility of a trigger warning being put on a story that they've submitted, which allows, if you're doing it in the way that allows students to opt out of reading that story, then you've entered a kind of disintegration of the thing that you were trying to do. That whole thing falls apart as far as I can tell. If someone has an idea for how that can work, I'd love to hear it. But I don't want to have them be put in a situation where they begin self-censoring in a way that is trying to create these sorts of utopian stories where known as racist, sexist, or homophobic. I would say I also at one point would love to see us talk about how we encourage our students of color to talk about their own cultures, their own family stuff, home stuff. Because one thing that I have seen a lot of in terms of self-censorship is a lot of students trying to write stories where no one has any ethnicity at all.

Speaker 2 (00:50:02):

I did want to segue from there, and I did want to ask the panel, and this is sort of a closing question before we go into general q and a, is how do you encourage your female gay students of color to open up and to really talk about their cultures, especially in a workshop that might not feel safe or in a situation in which that they're going to feel vulnerable?

Speaker 6 (00:50:34):

Well, one, I have other sort of policies that I go through on the first day, which is I talk about what I call edutainment. And I tell my students that it is no one's responsibility in that classroom to educate anyone else about their culture or their ethnicity. I should also say that we talk right away on the first day that white is a race. And so I want to see everyone's most personal story and that I want to hear my students talking about their experiences, white people in the world too. We also talk about these sort of unintentional acts of bigotry. And I asked my students on the first day when we read through this on the syllabus, what that means and what those are. And I give an example one and a little bit like, Matt, what you do of, isn't it silly when everyone in the story, no race is named until a person of color shows up in the story and then all of a sudden that's your black character and no one else has race has been named.

Speaker 6 (00:51:22):

That's the kind of thing. Isn't that crazy why that happens? And all my students make a note, make sure if I have a race in the story, everyone's race is getting named. You're identifying your white characters as white characters. And that whiteness is not a default race for anybody in a story. So I make it sound innocuous and like, oh, isn't that silly? Nobody in this class would ever do that. And then it doesn't hap