Reading Response - Menand

I started reading the Menand article ("Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught?" from The New Yorker, June 2009) and thought he provided a good overview of the history of writer's workshop (which is what I'm interpreting as his "creative writing"). His lens is that of the college level workshop attended by those who aspire to be professional writers - not your average 5th grade classroom with the author's chair.

He did get me thinking a few different ways:
1. Isn't "show, don't tell" really a writer's recipe for inference? Really, it is one thing to explicitly write, "Dora is angry," and quite another to write, "Moving in on Diego from behind, Dora proceeded to smash a glass bottle over his head. That would be the last time he consulted Map without discussing it with her first."
I'm thinking a lot about how if as a writer you can use various tools like foreshadowing, aren't you better suited to identify writer's techniques as a reader - and ultimately comprehend what you have read more deeply?

2. My absolute favorite quote is the last page, 112, when he comments that, "Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be - a published writer." This makes me think of Dr. Bintz's quote, "You take the teacher, not the class."

3. In light of the fact that I recently submitted my article from a class last semester to English Journal, I thought this point was also relevant, "Writers are the products of educational systems, but stories are the products of magazine editorials practices and novels are products of publishing houses." Thus, our teachers influence only extends so far; we all have to pass through the editorial filter to come out on the other side a published writer....

Though Menand situates the writer's workshop in a historical context and outlines the nebulous nature of the workshop model, he concludes, "For, in spite of all the reasons they shouldn't, workshops work." (p. 112) And I do agree, to a large extent. Although I did give students some models for writing, I ultimately found that studying and "trying out" the craft of successful authors worked best. There is no one formula for writing, but teacher scaffolding is necessary.

Finally, I think the heart of Menand's argument (which is echoed in Monaghan and Saul's, which I've read and just haven't had time to write about yet) is that writing is production - writing is creation. You compose, therefore you exist. Menand captures it this way, "I don't think the workshops taught me much about craft, but they taught me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about the things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about the things the other people make."

This comes back to one of my inquiry ideas that writers read differently because they understand the risks and the difficulties of writing.