The first time I came across the notorious creative writing workshop was when I was in an undergraduate fiction class. We were told to print out x number of drafts for our peers reading pleasure. Multiple hard copies could only mean one thing, other people were going to read my writing.

Us undergraduates cringed in horror as our professor chuckled at the front of the room, explaining this was part of the process. Fellow writers are considered your audience and should be able to read and critique your work. It was part of the writing life and being part of a community. He was right, workshops did indeed become part of my life for better or for worse. It is in fact, the “quintessential” pulse of most creative writing programs across the country. The first formal creative writing workshop was created in the 1930’s in Iowa, which became to be known as the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When creative writing was becoming a serious discipline, workshops was one of the main ways the “creatives” separated themselves from the “academics,” building writers a place in the ivory tower. So, if you are embarking on an MFA in the fall, you are probably wondering what a workshop is, what it does for you, and does it actually work?

The answer? It depends.

The ideal workshop experience operates like this: you walk into an MFA program with an already built foundation of specialization. You write well in one, if not multiple genres, and have a unique voice and style. You are there because the admissions committee saw potential. The intent then of workshop then, is to enhance and evolve the already established skill-set, gather new ideas from your community, and gain valuable insights about your content. As Anna Leahy puts it: “At it’s best, the workshop, therefore fosters collective wisdom, or that ability to access and use the distributed expertise efficiently… to see community- as well as quality poetry and prose. The workshop community cultivates individual creative world and achievement” (68, 69).

What comes next? The feedback. Ideally, the students in your cohort are professional and respectful regarding their responses to your work. They will understand the elements of craft, genre, and style enough to give well informed and constructive advice. Pedagogically, the workshop is supposed to be an open form, the writing stands on its own merit in the room like an entity separate from the author, and everyone has an opinion on it.  

Is the feedback helpful? Well, it gets complicated because the quality of the feedback you receive greatly depends on who is in your cohort. (Should it work this way? I have no idea.) In the real world, these people sitting around you have different educational backgrounds, life experience, personalities, and what type of writing they are drawn to. Not everyone is going to take well to your writing. I had people who always liked my content, and I had others who never had one genuinely positive thing to say about it. Then, the choice is up to you to either take it or leave it. I personally left most of my peers feedback on the cutting room floor, and only took up the advice of my professor. All feedback is not created equal.

With all of this information then,

Does the workshop work?

For me, not so much. I actually think the whole pedagogical foundation of “workshop” is unstable, (for the reasons mentioned in this post and beyond.) I have a lot of ideas about changing it, but will not get on my soapbox. To be fair, I did not have the ideal situation of having constructive peers, (of course, there were the people who were the exceptions to that rule.) Some were not knowledgeable enough to talk about creative writing at the craft level, or “how” to provide feedback. More often than not, the responses were based on how the cohort felt that day, if they liked me personally, or if they “were feeling it.” Flying by the seat of your pants benefits no one. Granted, we could have had more guidance on how to operate in a workshop space, which I believe would have helped immensely.  

Be ready to have both advocates and adversaries in the room. My writing caused huge uproars, usually with vibrantly opposing opinions. At best, the workshop works the way it was meant to, as said by Sue Roe: “response is useful, provocative, can be enlightening…a sharing of prior knowledge” (196-197). But at worst, it becomes a chaotic, unsupported, and punitive space where students have no idea what they’re talking about. “Students are overconfident, over opinionated, students have no editorial experience or judgement…” (199).

Overall, be confident in your own work, access your feedback honestly, and see what you see. I hope you have a positive experience. At the end of the day, though, it’s up to you to make your own choices no matter who is in the room.

Until next time,

Lena N. Gemmer

P.S: quotes were pulled from the book: Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? by New Writing Viewpoints. Link Here