[stylist] School and workshopping

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Jackie,

Oh, I still write fiction, but the funny thing is that I am slightly
better at creative nonfiction. Or perhaps I should say that once
switching from fiction to creative nonfiction as my emphasis in school,
I learned a lot allowing me to apply techniques learned in both genres
to the other, giving me a distinct voice. I even like my creative
nonfiction better than most my fiction, but I still love it and enjoy
writing fiction.

As a student, some workshops were better than others. Some peers knew
how to provide truly constructive criticism while others were just
sharks feeding on chum. As the facilitators, most instructors tried to
channel all comments, good and bad,  so a constructive, learning
environment was achieved, but some instructors could be just as
heartless.

And you're correct about most learning institutions pushing for a
literary style. We had a few genre writers, mostly fantasy, who survived
by hanging on a thread because genre isn't literary, and therefore it's
not good, at least this is the attitude adopted by many an instructor
and student alike. Some of these genre writers were friends of mine, and
they were really good, but because they used a genre like fantasy as a
catalyst in which to tell a story, many automatically dismissed their
work.

Towards the end of my academic career, a new instructor was brought on
board, and she had a much more graceful and lenient approach to
workshopping. She's the one who taught the Detective Fiction class I
took, which was a form and theory class where we studied various topics
pertaining to writing. That semester, this prof offered the detective
fiction one.

The creative writing program at my school is one of the few in the
country offered as an under grad degree. It's taught in the fine arts
department and not the English department, and it's structured around
the  studio environment. The few writing classes I took in the English
department, which at my school, only nonfiction writing is offered in
English, I noticed a very distinct difference. It is a little like
artist learning in lectures about art as opposed to focusing more on
actual time in the studio drawing, painting and sculpting. Writing has
to be "done," not just learned in theory. It's also an extremely snall
program. My largest class in four years was about 25 people, and my
school, UNO, isn't exactly small. So we all know each other very well.
You see a lot of the same faces over and over, which can be good and
bad. At least you get a sense for how people work and how they critique.
You also know where the weakness is in their armor! LOL Just kidding...
I wouldn't do that!

Anyway, I have a pretty tough exterior, and though I switched my
emphasis, I didn't lose my joy for writing fiction.

Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter
Read my blog at:
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
 
"History is not what happened; history is what was written down."
The Expected One- Kathleen McGowan

Message: 20
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 19:35:28 -0700
From: "Jacqueline Williams" <jackieleepoet at cox.net>
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] Critiquing and editing with JAWS
Message-ID: <6E03BDA3473D456A8BCF410C13E8A617 at JackiLeePoet>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"

Bridget,
I do wonder, if your classmates had been reinforcing about what they
could find good about your fiction, and then gently listed their
questions about meaning, and clarifying certain points, that you might
be writing fiction now. If you still like the story, I think you should
take it out of the mothballs and possibly re-work. Remember, that in the
world of modern poetry, one has to work and re-read something six times
to get the meaning. No, I don't like this. The weird thing is that
people go to school to learn how to make their poetry more literary, and
inaccessible. So your story might have been right in style for now. . I
have had MFA teachers, and non-MFA teachers. Both can be equally good. I
just prefer to understand something at least the second time around. But
one should not be discouraged. Jackie