Toni Morrison once wrote “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move to where I was.” This has been my guiding mantra as I try to improve on my pedagogy and persevere to build spaces (inside and outside of the classroom) where no one has to exist in the margins of the tiny ecosystem that is my class. Since their formation, creative writing workshops have followed the traditional model, also called the Iowa model, where the author remains silent as their peers discuss their work while the author takes notes and asks questions, if any, at the end. This model is valuable as it emulates the reading process and experience, but it fails to take advantage of the unique dynamic of a workshop ecosystem where an artist’s work-in-progress can be brought closer to the artist’s vision with the help of their peers and the facilitator. Not only that, the traditional model becomes problematic as it creates inequity for writers and stories that are minority. Taking inspiration for authors like Matthew Salesses, Alexander Chee, and Felicia Rose Chavez, I employ an anti-racist, author-centric model in my workshops.
The goal for an anti-racist model is to help students see value in their work, to help them realize their artistic vision. I hold pre-workshop conferences where students about to be workshopped (author) bring in questions, prioritized by urgency, that generate conversation around their drafts and their needs as a writer. These conversations include topics such as possible venues for the student to submit their work, or development of craft like point of telling from which the character is telling the story, or the student’s emotional discomfort in sharing work that is too personal. After the conference, the author shares their vision in an artist statement. Based on their vision, the author defines the parameters of the workshop discussion and the types of feedback they are willing to accept. For workshop, the class follows an adapted version of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process where the author reads part of their work in front of the class and the class provides them “statements of meaning” (what they found to be evocative in the work). Then the author gets the space to ask questions to the group—these questions can be the same as the ones provided in the artist statement, or different. The next step of the process is to ask the author neutral questions about the work. These questions are often about the inspiration or motivation of the author behind specific craft decisions such as what was the inspiration behind the eerie setting etc. The last step is where the class gives suggestions to the author. At any point in the discussion, the author can interrupt if the conversation is not productive for them. After the workshop, the student meets with me once again to discuss their experience of the workshop, to ask any lingering questions, or just to celebrate the big achievement of having been workshopped. Writing is a skill, a craft, and so is workshopping, and through this meticulous and intentional approach, I teach students not just the former but also the latter.
Students in my class read and learn from a diverse range of writers. These writers are varied not only in terms of their identity but also in the kind of creative work they produce. Some of the readings include works by Ursula Le Guin, Kim Fu, Karen Russell, Marie Howe, Bryan Washington, Ocean Vuong, Akwaeke Emezi, Octavia Butler, Jamil Jan Kochai, Amitava Kumar among others. In academia, literary realism is often stressed as the artistic genre, and often other forms of genre/writing are minimized. In doing so, non-western modes of storytelling can get rejected as being lesser. Hence, another way to ensure that all kinds of stories are celebrated in workshop is to make space for genre as well as speculative and the magical.
As a gender/queer, immigrant of color, I have often occupied margins within the literary world and academia—both inside and outside the classroom. Whenever I have struggled with such marginalization, my mentors and writing community have helped me voice myself, voice my characters, and find a niche in this intersecting world of literature and academia. I want to do the same for the students I teach—provide a space where they do not feel marginalized.
