Some Thoughts on Teaching
Creative Writing

The best creative writing classes don’t start with lectures, nor with formal instruction – though they probably include some of both. They start with questions from the instructor and answers from the rest of the class. The teacher fixes a place on the collective mental map and begins to cut a path, so the whole group may arrive there together. Learning to write, a life-long process, is a highly individual experience. As a creative writing teacher, I try to make the process as collective as possible for three reasons:

• to minimize the inevitable loneliness of writing,

• to mitigate the competition that too often arises in the writing workshop, and

• to help students understand they are part of a wide, international community of writers and readers.

In the end, though, creative writing is an individual process – grit, imagination, fortitude, and eloquence must all be invoked at the lonely desk. For that reason, the mentorship model is central to my teaching of creative writing. Whether I am working as a writing coach with a professional writer,  or standing before 25 eleventh-graders in a public high school, I think of my relationship with each new writer as a individual, reciprocal one. This orientation comes from my experience attending a low-residency MFA program, but it also reaches much farther back, to those early childhood evenings spent listening to my parents read books and tell stories to me.

In a society where fewer and fewer read books, I am committed to nurturing literary appreciation. I have deep faith in the ability of creative nonfiction to foster that appreciation, because the genre offers a way for students of all ages to write their own lives and to reach far beyond their personal experience, engaging with global political, social, and cultural issues.

In the classroom and workshop, I most often use literature (rather than examples of student work) to teach issues of craft, structure, and grammar. Group discussions of student writing focus on the generative process and revision strategies. I want to ensure that the workshop experience doesn’t strangle the creative process. Writing practice is an essential part of every class I lead.

I draw inspiration from the pedagogical writings of Carol Bly, Peter Elbow, Paulo Freire, John Gardner and Ursula K.
Le Guin, and from having participated in the writing workshops of Barbara Lazear Ascher, Sven Birkerts, Ted Conover, Phillip Lopate, and Liliana Valenzuela.

As a teacher of creative writing, I bring a toolbox, pass around the tools, and we build things together. At heart, my process is the same, whether the setting is a café, county jail, library, literary center, newsroom, public high school, university classroom, or professional writers’ conference.