Writers and Mentors

The author of The Ice Storm and Demonology thinks back to his earliest years
as a writer, and the kind of teaching that helped or hindered him
RICK MOODY

FICTION ISSUE 2005 ISSUE | CULTURE

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I studied in writing workshops from age fteen to age twenty-six. The

rst was in high school, where a benevolent chemistry teacher, Mr.
Burns, who read a lot of John Cheever on the side, presided over us. We
were a group of mists and outcasts, yet he almost never criticized us.
This was before the writing workshopa regular meeting in which
writers-in-training read and criticize one another's workhardened into
the structure we know now. It was the mid-1970s, and writing
workshops were not so numerous as they are today.

After high school I was lucky enough to go to Brown University, a

wellspring for the experimental or so-called postmodern school of
American writing. And there I chanced to study in workshops with three
of the great voices of experimental writing: Angela Carter, Robert
Coover, and John Hawkes.

On the rst day of my workshop with Angela Carter, in my sophomore

year, Carter was charged with reducing the number of would-be
participants in her class to fourteen. Maybe thirty people were in the
room, and she simply stood before us and tried to take questions. Some
young guy in the back, rather too full of himself, raised his hand and,
with a sort of withering skepticism, asked, "Well, what's your work like?"

You have to have heard Carter speak to know how funny the next
moment was. She had a reedy and somewhat thin British voice, toward
the upper end of the scale, and she paused a lot when she spoke. There
were a lot of ums and ahs. Before she replied, she cocked her head and
said "um" once or twice. Then she said, "My work cuts like a steel blade
at the base of a man's penis."

The room emptied out at the break, and I'm not sure a quorum of
fourteen returned. Maybe only eleven or twelve.

Carter did not conduct her workshop in the manner now familiar. She
didn't care if anyone brought in work, and she was content to give
disquisitions on how Mozart's The Magic Flute made it impossible to
imitate folkloric material in ction. She was proud of having seen Pink
Floyd play back in swinging London, she liked the Doors, and she
thought Franklin Roosevelt was the only American president worth
talking about. I remember that she also once boasted that she rarely
made eye contact.
I thought, This is the teacher for me.

For those who had ears to hearonly four or ve of us took her class both
semesters she taught at Brownthe Angela Carter workshop was an
amazing experience. I felt not only that I grew as a writer but that I
improved as a person. Carter had the audacity to tell me that drugs were
not good for my work and that I was reading crap; she said she would be
happy to give me a reading list. I read every book she told me to read,
and these included The Thief's Journal, by Jean Genet; Naked Lunch, by
William Burroughs; and everything by Bruno Schulz. In fact, I did more
or less whatever Carter told me to do.

Angela Carter's class was important to me because it relied on a

completely alien tradition of writing instructionalien, that is, to what
we more often experience here in the United States. Were I compelled to
name this alternative style, I think I would call it mentorship. I don't
think that Carter, if she were still alive, would admit to having mentored
meto having explained to me how to live a little bit, and how to act like
a writer, instead of merely dreaming of being one. But she did all these
things, regardless of how much or how little work I turned in, or how bad
the work was.

When Carter, who had just a one-year appointment at Brown, went back
to England, John Hawkes returned from a sabbatical. I spent three of my
next four semesters at Brown studying with Hawkes. (I also took a
literature class with Robert Coover.)

Hawkes favored mentorship too. If he liked you, he kind of loved you. He

could be both lacerating and challengingor, on the other hand,
completely devoted (even so, it was sometimes hard to believe that he
had read the piece of junk you'd handed in that week). He had a nearly
photographic memory for people's stories, which was particularly
amazing because he was so scattered in other areas. Months after you'd
handed it in, he could recite specic sentences from your work and
discuss them in detail.

The goal of Hawkes's class was to induce us to think like writers. He

sometimes didn't seem to care whether a specic story was made t for
publication. He had a low opinion of professionalism. He wanted us to
think about language and dramatic structure, and how these worked in
literature, and he wanted us to delight in these things when done well.
He wanted us to believe in literature. He felt he had done his job if we
could explain why The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was a masterpiece,
from the standpoint of language and construction.

Hawkes played favorites, which was bad; and he loved women a lot more
than men, which was bad too; and he allowed us to drink wine in class,
which in my case was an incredibly bad idea, since I was developing a
drinking problem. All these things were inadvisable, but what was not
was the idea of emotional commitment to the process, a strong
relationship between student and professor. These worked for me
despite the diculties.

I wrote to please Angela Carter, and I wrote to please John Hawkes, and
this may seem like a callow, naive motive for writing, especially since
they were both astringent, complicated people. But the fact is that I got
better by writing in order to please them, and their responses made me
excited to go back and work, and excited to learn more.

After Brown I took a year o, a year in which I wrote probably as many

would-be writers have donedesperately, while working nine-to-ve in
a sequence of horrible jobs, which for me included selling recorded tours
at a museum. I was worried about the possibility of lapsing in my writing.
I was worried about not writing because I was overwhelmed by the idea
of paying the rent and living day to day withoutbecause of my English
majorprofessional skills of any kind. Hawkes had always said that we
should write a thousand words a day, but I wasn't even writing a
thousand words a week, so I made the decision others have made: I
applied to graduate school, to get my M.F.A. In the fall of 1984 I entered
Columbia University.

I didn't want to go to Columbia. I wanted to go to Johns Hopkins, in fact,

to work with John Barth. But I got turned down. I got turned down by a
number of places, including (it must be said) the Iowa Writers'
Workshop, so I went to school in New York, where at least I felt at home.
I'd been born there, and had lived within its shadow most of my life.

It seems to me that part of what happened in the seventies (and in some

cases even earlier), even as I was beginning to be mentored by the
experimental writers of Providence, Rhode Island, is that the University
of Iowa's success as a venue for instruction in creative writing began to
spawn similar venues. Suddenly a lot of places had not only workshops
but M.F.A. programs: Syracuse, Sarah Lawrence, the University of
Arizona, UC Irvine. Close on their heels were others, like the University
of Alabama and the University of Virginia. These early programs all had
pretty good reputations. Among them, of course, was Columbia, where
Susan Minot had gone, and Tama Janowitz, and Mona Simpson, and Jill
Eisenstadt.

What I found in graduate school, however, was a notion of how to run a

class in creative writing completely dierent from the one I had
experienced as an undergraduate. A reductive way of describing this
would be to say that not a mentor was in sight. Columbia was famous for
commuter professorsmen and (less frequently) women who came
uptown from apartments in the seventies and eighties on the Upper West
Side, or from farther aeld, and who were in one or two instances
observed correcting student papers on the subway.

A lot of the students commuted too, from downtown or elsewhere.

These students were paying a lot of money to be at Columbia; as a result
they believed themselves to be, in essence, in charge of the form of the
classes. They selected a new workshop instructor each semester, and the
instructors represented very dierent avors. These instructors were not
celebrated, not in the way that the writers at Brown had been. They were
often teachers who wrote, rather than writers who taught, and they were
often carrying heavy course loads, and they were therefore attracted to
formula, predictability, a certain way of clocking in and out. The
students seemed to have agreed to this. They agreed, that is, that the
classes should be run in a certain way, in order to streamline the results.
The writing program at Columbia enrolled a lot of students, almost a
hundred of them, and they wanted quality control. Who can blame
them?
Also, Columbia was a place with very considerable competitive pressure.
People could be heard to say "I'm the only real southern writer in this
class!" and so on. They would eviscerate their enemies and lionize their
friends. I was often among the eviscerated. And because of this
competitive pressure, the Hawkesian tendency to play favoritesthe
imposition of completely partisan meritocracyhad to be discarded in
favor of something far more predictable.

I don't know if the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the rst great American
laboratory of creative writing, experienced a similar streamlining,
though I know that Iowa has often been a very competitive program. At
Iowa, even more than at Columbia, students compete for fellowship
money. Whether this is the origin of competitive nonsense among
writing students I don't know, but I do know that at Columbia the writing
workshop had been scoured of anything extraneous, until what
remained was something resembling a focus group, or the test screening
of a Hollywood lm.

W hen you go to a test screening these days, you are often given a
checklist and a pencil and encouraged to rate aspects of the lm. Did you
like the ending? Did you like this character? Would you tell a friend to see
this lm? Right away we begin with the broadest questions. And the
problem with such a test screening is that you never actually get to ask
the narrowly focused questions. What does light signify? Why doesn't
the lmmaker use more of the color red? What if the heroine wore black
throughout? What's with all the bird imagery?

The reason you never get beyond the broad questions is that for the
purposes of the Hollywood test screening, you have become part of a
demographic sampling. You are essentially voting on what to do about
the lm. When Ang Lee, who directed the lm that was made of my
novel The Ice Storm, screened that lm, he (or so I was told) wound up
with a big stack of written suggestions from studio executives and others
as to how he might "x" it. As the story was recounted to me, he turned
to James Schamus, the producer, and said, "What should I do with
these?" The two of them thought about it for a while, and then they just
threw them all away.

The creative-writing workshop that is shorn of all ornament, that pre-

emptively restrains the eruption of personality, that simply goes about its
businessphotocopying stories, handing them out, collecting responses,
handing back the responsesis, similarly, creative writing by
committee. And because it is creative writing by committee, it hews to
the statistical mean, which is to say the mediocre.

If the mentorship model of instruction is based on the Socratic method

a model that has existed throughout the history of education, in such
strongholds of Western civilization as the monastery and the
Renaissance painters' guildthe contemporary workshop comes to us
more from the organizational or corporate theories of the 1950s. The
workshop is, in fact, about sales and marketing. It is about pitching your
story or poem or essay to the audience in such a way that the response
will be predictable, measurable, and easily understood. It is about
making your story do exactly what stories (or poems, or essays) have
always done.
As may be evident, I disliked graduate school. On the rst day of class at
Columbia my workshop instructor, a now successful novelist of
something like popular thrillers, remarked that he had dropped out of
Stanford because he had been required to read several novels by John
Hawkes. This was a red ag for me, and I was right to perceive it as such.
During a workshop the same guy said of one of my stories, "I don't have
anything to say about this story, so I'm just going to let the rest of you
talk about it." Later in the semester he told me and one of the few others
in the class who went on to publish that we would "never be writers."

Everyone has anecdotes like this. I have more of them. In my second

semester I watched a professor fall asleep while reading aloud from a
student's work. In my third semester a professor asked for a hand count
of class members who thought my work was boring. I spent almost my
entire fourth semester drinking, without any ill eects on my day-to-day
life at Columbia. And so on.

Admittedly, I was not writing in the prevailing style of 1984: the style of
Raymond Carver and, soon enough, of Richard Ford, Mona Simpson,
and others of the dirty-realism school. These are writers I occasionally
enjoy, so I am not denigrating the genre. I am merely pointing out that
with an apparatus as inexible as the corporate-era writing workshop,
students will rarely have the chance to discuss approaches and ideas that
lie outside a prevailing orientation, an already agreed-upon list of
inuences and/or values. Indeed, Carver and Ford are products not only
of this corporate era but also of the Reagan-Bush period, so in a way the
preference for them in a workshop setting is tautological: the system
selects for itself, for its own kind of product.
The present-day growth in creative-writing programs at universities
around the country surely reects corporate pressures at the university
level. Unlike, say, a chemistry program or a pre-med programwhich
requires signicant capital investment, not to mention government
grantsa creative-writing program requires only one piece of apparatus:
a photocopying machine. Moreover, most of the faculty members who
sta these workshops attempt to avoid full-time commitment. In fact,
the more desirable a creative-writing instructor is, the less likely he or
she is to want a tenure-track position. As far as hiring goes (I'm trying to
think like a dean here), you can make do with part-timers and adjunct
faculty. And since a lot of students want to go to grad school in writing,
schools with such programs can reap a hefty tuition income while
keeping costs down. As a corporate investment, creative writing makes
good sense.

Columbia has treated its writing program this way, on and o, for
decades. Good corporate governance is evident at the topmost levels of
Columbia University, and its ethics must certainly trickle down into
individual departments. Streamline, simplify, avoid complexity, avoid
ambiguity, avoid heterogeneity: these are the hallmarks of such a
philosophy.

Now, once an audience begins to experience itself as a community with

power, it begins to ask certain questions about stories. I'm sure that
analogous questions are asked about poems and essays in workshops
every day, but I have less experience with those forms. Pardon me, then,
if I conne myself to the kinds of questions that are a commonplace of
the contemporary ction workshop.
This is just o the top of my head. Many other such questions can be
imagined. To the extent that a student comes to expect these questions,
or to the extent that he or she writes in expectation of them, the likely
product will be stories (or poems or essays) that reduce the chances of
innovation, that ratify the workshop as a system, and that ratify the idea
of the university but do little for the development of the form or for our
language as a whole.

If I had it to do myself, I might instead ask questions like these:

I am not suggesting, of course, that traditional workshop questions are

entirely without merit (though I personally will have no truck with the
idea of likeability, which is the hobgoblin of small minds), nor am I
suggesting that even quite innovative stories are without conict or
character (although one does recall John Hawkes's famous remark that
"the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme").
What I am suggesting is that a workshop structure that becomes oriented
toward what is easy to say about a story will, by its very nature, default on
its responsibility when faced with two kinds of work: the very good and
the very bad. What gets lost, therefore, is what is at the margins of
convention, and that is potentially catastrophic, because a literary form
is dened in part by the marginal, by what is impossible, by what is
grandiose and revolutionary, whether in the good sense or in the bad.

If all the houses on the street were gray, you would never know if gray
was a better color than lavender.

W e need to be alert in the workshop setting to the problems inherent in

the very structure of the workshop. We need to ask in workshops exactly
where workshop blindness sets in, and we need to be alert to the
possibility that some ways of reading literature are quite dierent from
the way we read in workshops.

For example: In general, we read alone. In general, the bond between

reader and writer is a bond between two people, and it is therefore an
intimate bond. In general, a story is read in the way that one listens to a
friend whisper. A story is not read in the way that one listens to a lecture,
or to a PowerPoint presentation. When you listen to someone whisper,
you accept him or her according to certain assumptionsthe
assumptions of intimate exchangeand these are more in the forefront
of our reading consciousness when we are not writing comments in the
margin of a piece or preparing to say something about it in class.

For example, one way to read in a workshop would be to read as though

you were going to trust the story, no matter how idiosyncratic, rather
than as though you were going to distrust it.

What would happen if we understood the workshop to be not tidy and

orderly but large, unpredictable, and uncertain? What if long
monologues about German metaphysics could sit right beside
arguments from the stylebook of Flannery O'Connor? What if the worst
story of the semester were subjected to a half hour of sentence-
diagramming exercises? What if no one turned in a story for three weeks,
and all you did was sit around talking about the ugliest kid you knew in
childhood, or the worst job you ever had? What if all you did in class was
assignments? What if you rewrote one sentence all semester? What if
everyone got a chance to be the instructor, and everyone got a chance to
be the student?

Then, I think, we'd be getting somewhere.