The current New Yorker offers a smart, well-balanced article on the history of creative writing programs. “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught” is actually an essay-review of a recent book by Mark McGurl, “The Program Era” (Harvard; $35). Written by Louis Menand, one of the best general critics of literature and culture today, the article takes up the topic of the early development of programs at places such as Breadloaf (Middlebury), the University of Iowa, and Johns Hopkins, and then the explosion of others over the past forty years. According to Menand, in the early 1980s there were roughly 79 degree-granting creative writing programs in the U.S. Today, he tells us, there are 822. Woah.The question that Menand foregrounds is whether, in fact, creative writing can be “taught”–that is whether at its core there are skills and strategies about writing poems or stories that can be transmitted from teacher to student in some similar ways to the use of mathematical logarithms or, for that matter, the grammatical construction of a sentence.
My own answer would be: sure, such skills and strategies can be taught. There are many ways to do so. But not by a long shot does it guarantee that a student will be able to create a powerful story or a moving poem. (Not even with an MFA parchment in hand.)
Rather than addressing the question head on, Menand evokes the various personalities and pedagogical stances of many of the founding eminences of famous workshops, from Paul Engel to Wallace Stegner to Gordon Lish. Each of them–and the many others mentioned here–had his or her own method or lack thereof.
Two related and salutary points emerge. First, many of the old shibboleths handed down as if of eternal verity, such as “show don’t tell,” are little more than fashions of a moment or an era. Tastes and styles and fashions have changed over the last fifty years, and creative writing workshops have reflected exactly that.
Second, and for my money much more important, is the debunking of the notion that the institutionalization of art is necessarily corrupting. For one thing, such an assumption is founded on a purely romantic notion that true artists and writers must be rebels, critics who stand outside the “system.” This may sometimes be true, but it need not always be.
McGurl argues [says Menand] that, far from homogenizing literature or turning it into an academic exercise, creative-writing programs have been a success on purely literary grounds. “There has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period,” he says, and he offers the same proof that Barth offered in his Times article: there is more good fiction out there than anyone has time to read. The system must be doing something right.
My own long-time quibble with creative writing programs is the implicit and inescapable promise–no matter how often denied–that if a student enrolls, jumps through all the hoops, and comes out the other end in a year or two with that Latin-inscribed scrap of parchment, then he or she will be certified as a writer, with reasonable hopes of being published, and as a qualified teacher of creative writing with reasonable hopes of employment. With 822 degree programs what are the odds on either count?
Okay, I’m not actually suggesting that creative writing programs are frauds or should be done away with. Let’s just be more candid about what they do do well.
In fact, I happen to think that such pursuits are noble. No kidding. Unlike most modern-day education, which the vast majority of Americans see as no more than a means to an end–i.e. a job or profession–a creative writing program, properly seen, must be, can reasonably only be, an end in itself. It gives students (and faculty) the chance to, well, be creative. To read and write and hang out with each other for the sake of merely doing that. There’s no great fame or fortune likely to be had on the other end. Rather, there’s a sense of community and shared purpose, on a scale probably never seen before in history. That may be the single best result of the “program era,” and it may well be enough.