Postcards from the Program
In case you haven't noticed, Fiction Writing faculty have gone international. First, it began with Prague and then quickly hopped the channel to England, doubled back to Florence, Italy, and in 2007 made its first inroads in China. We are on the move, spreading the Story Workshop(R) method, and gaining converts as we go--all the while encouraging writing students across the globe to "see it" and find the perfect gesture that best tells their stories. Students and alumni are no strangers to the power of the Story Workshop semicircle and the compulsive need to fill pages of our journals.
We are writers no matter where we lay our heads. But how does a foreign place change your point of view? Does travel affect your sense of audience? Luckily, five of our Fiction Writing faculty have given some serious thought to these questions and more, with regard to taking their writing and teaching on the road during the last year.
Eric May / Prague
When I was in Prague in 2007 and 2008, I got a lot of writing done because there were fewer distractions than at home. With more time on my hands, I was able to do things like take the tram to Old Town Square, sit on a bench in a shaded park just east of where the horse-drawn carriages line up, read Nabokov short stories, and write in my journal, all while listening to Sibelius on my iPod.
It is true that being far away in a place so unlike home in language, customs, and landscape, has a filtering effect on the imaginative process. By that I mean, when I was over there [Prague], almost always, in the opening moments of my reflections, I saw the places of my fiction that's set in Chicago from some distance back. Being a long ways from Chicago seemed to cause my imagination to naturally shift to a long, overall view of the places where my novel chapters were set.
In Prague, there was a wealth of public places to write. The aforementioned Old Town Square, the riverside, a huge wooded park just north of the bed and breakfast where we stayed, coffee shops, and restaurants. Over there, the eateries don't seem to mind if you sit scribbling away for hours in your journal.
I think travel can have many positive effects, providing you're in a place that's comfortable for you and conducive to your writing process. I don't know if I would say travel is integral to my writing, although I will say that I have tried, especially after returning home this past summer, to integrate some of the positive things I did in Prague into my writing process here, such as turn off the telephone all day when I'm writing at home, or taking my journal somewhere--the lakefront, a park, my front porch, even--to do reading and writing in the outdoors.
Randall Albers / Florence
I find that being away from everything and settled in a spot where I can do nothing but write, take walks, and write some more, allows for a focus that I can't get for more than a few hours at a time in the midst of chairing a department. It shakes something loose in the writing that doesn't come at other times--as if being on the road, seeing new people and places, brings movement to the story, a fresh perspective that encourages freedom, experimentation, and unwilled associations feeding the imaginative process.
I perhaps never journal as much as when I am traveling. For one thing, it is the only thing I can do while I am actually on the move. Then, when I arrive, especially when it's a place where I am relatively free of interruptions and my time is my own, I find that I have a carryover and my journal time continues to expand.
In Florence this last summer, I was getting up very early to write for a couple of hours in the quiet of my darkened apartment before heading out to teach. Then, after class, I would come back, eat lunch, and set to it again, taking breaks every so often to go outside just to feel that I was still among the living. On these breaks, I would often walk to the end of my block and stand in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and watch the parade of people passing by. Across the plaza was a large hotel, the Grand Minerva, and each time I walked out for another break, I would look at its high roof and think, "They would be crazy not to have an outdoor bar up there." Finally, late one afternoon, I ambled over to the hotel and ducked into the lobby. The first thing I spotted was a sign that read "The rooftop terrace will be open until midnight." I hurried right back to my apartment, grabbed my journal, and nearly sprinted back to the hotel. Heading up a small elevator, then a set of stairs, and finally emerging onto a terrace, I took one look and thought, "Perfect." The space consisted of two levels built around a pool, and from the upper level, you could see the red rooftops of the city's buildings jumbled along both sides of the Arno and extending all the way to the green Tuscan hills in the distance. Many evenings after that, I would adjourn to that rooftop terrace with a Negroni and my journal to sit in the high breeze, watch the sun set in glorious orange, and write. If that place wasn't ideal, it was pretty close.
When you are seeing so many new things, having so many new experiences, interacting with so many new people in so many new situations, you just want to hurry up and get them down while the perceptions are fresh. And the act of getting them down gives them shape, deepens the experience, and focuses attention for observing even more sharply the next time you are riding the experience flood. Journaling feeds the fiction by enabling you to note material that is taking your attention and by allowing you to practice getting images down, but it also encourages you to reflect upon and understand those experiences and images. And reflection is a good thing.
[When traveling], the trick is to resist the temptation to float through all of these experiences passively, however enervating they might be, and to simply relegate them to the past, where they remain static--what Wright Morris calls so many "memory stings"--incapable of activating the imagination or rising above the cliche. Life is learning, and if we are going to grow, as writers and as people, we need to find ways of reactivating those moments in the present. That is the work of that supremely active and transforming faculty of imagination.
John Schultz / Fudan University, Shanghai, China
We were brought to Fudan University, one of the two top universities in China, to help Fudan start the first master's program in creative writing in China. Set at an edge of Shanghai more than an hour from downtown by even a determined taxi, Fudan had just finished its Twin Towers, two quite tall buildings with a lower middle building, all of it raised up in the middle of its campus to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2005. Our classes were in the West Tower, 12th floor. Fresh and traditional at once, the campus that surrounded the Towers possessed modern and older buildings with groups--in fact, thousands--of students in jeans and the usual casual clothing of college students in every part of the world.
Our grad students came from all parts of China, brought to Fudan and Beijing and other universities by the national tests, from the Yalu River in the north, to the provinces near Tibet and Myanmar, to a southern province near Vietnam, as well as from the south central area around Shanghai.
The Story Workshop(R) method was like nothing they had seen before, though they had heard that it would be different--creative to be sure--they hardly knew what that meant. The students were accustomed to the Language and Literature Department for forms of literary criticism. The semicircle was new to them, but the students accommodated quickly, mystified but willing to humor us, pretty much like students here who haven't sat in a semicircle in a college classroom before.
We started with dreams as the first concentration. And lucky us, it meant we started with Kafka's "The Bucket Rider." We found--you guessed it--Kafka's stories cross all borders. So long as the language in which they appear on the page is understood, a Kafka story needs little or no explanation in any country.
The classes followed pretty much the same rough pattern of development as we would expect of a graduate-level Fiction I in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia. We had to slow down in the readings and keep an alert eye for when a few of them were confused, looking back and forth, not getting it. Often, we had to say things two or three different ways before they would be understood. In regards to [the] one word [exercise], I simply said, "Just do it. Listen to the coachings, and see what happens." I saw the expression on the face of one young woman, Yingying, change, developing that remarkable inward concentration that characterizes those who are listening to the words and for whom an inner life is happening in response to seeing what the words gave her to see.
All of the Story Workshop exercises--take a place, person-action-person, and the basic forms assignments--worked with the Chinese students pretty much as they do in the States. This shouldn't be a surprise, since the story and image and sense of audience are all universal capacities.
Betty Shiflett / Fudan University, Shanghai, China
The Chinese people are very practical, adaptable, good at improvising to get the job done. However, there was one culturally-required academic habit of good manners that they physically could not break. I did not know it existed, and this will make you laugh: they could not leave the classroom either at break or dismissal if I were still in the room. They could not get out of their chairs! This baffled me, over and over. I would get up out of my chair and go right out to the front of their semicircle, and tell them to go out in the hall, to the restrooms, get a snack, walk around, talk to each other--they would smile up into my eyes and giggle, politely, obviously wanting to please me, but unable to do so.
Sometimes, if I persisted in standing in front of their knees, one of them would lock eyes with me, looking up in a begging way and say, "Thank you for teaching us, teacher." This would set off an echo ripple of "Thank you for teaching's" around the semicircle. Their English was more than good enough to understand my instructions, but they would not leave their chairs. Same at the end of class. I looked up from sorting out my books and papers on the floor, and every chair in the semicircle had a student in it. "Go ahead, you can go now!" I tried to shoo them, got up and waved my arms. Finally, I learned that as soon as I went through the door, they funneled out right behind me.
So how did we know when they were engaged in rapt listening, were actively and pleasurably "seeing" everything being told or read or recalled? Why, they showed exactly the same glazed-over eyes, the same intent concentration on the imaginative task--the signals we all recognize of work going on in the theatre of the mind, as we call it in the Story Workshop method. One word? Worked the same as it does in your semicircles, for the same human reasons. Take-a-place? Person-action-person? Way too complicated, you think? No way! They all worked on precisely the same principles of seeing, voice, audience, and movement, just like they work for you, for us, for anybody. Fancy that! And boy, were we relieved. But it only took that first session to figure it all out. (One or two more to believe it.) We were weak and giddy with success when our first ever Chinese workshops let out that initial Tuesday afternoon. Everything, blessedly, was possible.
Patty McNair / Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
I think it is a really good idea to get out of your regular routine in order to shake things loose with the writing. You have to claim your space and mark your place--like you do in the semicircle. Being somewhere new really will help you look at your work in new lighting, and being in a different culture can clarify things for you--once you get past the newness and awe and potential cliches of being a stranger in a strange land. I also think that our own place, where we come from and are often writing about, looks different from across the ocean. Things you take for granted become important, who you are in your everyday life is challenged. These can all be very good things for the writer's process.
I am always a prolific journal writer, no matter if I am at home on the sunporch or in a cafe in Old Town Square in Prague or on a bus to campus in Bath. I draw more in my journal when I travel, and I puzzle things out a bit more that look different to me here--observed instances, etc. I am usually a real ritual-and-rhythm person, and while I can write on my journal anywhere, I do like to have a routine for the "real" writing. I have to make my work space comfortable, with my things around me (pens, notes, notebook, journal, etc.). I like to work facing a wall instead of a window so I am distracted by the story only and not the goings-on outside. When I am writing in my journal, I like to look around a lot and jot things down as I notice them. In some ways, my process becomes more regimented when I travel because it is comforting to me.
I have noticed that while being at Bath Spa my sense of audience has changed. I am very aware of being the stranger, and the need to make my voice heard as it is, as I understand it. We (English and Americans) share a common language, but not a language that is exactly the same. I've been keeping a list of strange cautionary notes and signs. "No Fly Tipping" (No Dumping); "Shake well. Works best with lid still on." And there's a sign on a doorway here that has "Polite Notice" written at the top, and at the bottom it says "Thank You." Not at all sure what that means. Remember to be courteous?
I think everyone should try to travel abroad, but in a way that allows them to sit and write away from the distractions of their everyday lives back home. Stay away from the e-mail, turn off the television, grab your journal, and find a quiet place. If you are in a country where you don't know the language at all, you won't even be distracted by the overheard conversations, but have a sort of white noise around you. And having something other than a narrow view of the world--one that only comes from being within miles of your whole life--I think limits a writer's possibilities. I know that not everyone agrees with this, but I believe it wholeheartedly.
We are writers no matter where we lay our heads. But how does a foreign place change your point of view? Does travel affect your sense of audience? Luckily, five of our Fiction Writing faculty have given some serious thought to these questions and more, with regard to taking their writing and teaching on the road during the last year.
Eric May / Prague
When I was in Prague in 2007 and 2008, I got a lot of writing done because there were fewer distractions than at home. With more time on my hands, I was able to do things like take the tram to Old Town Square, sit on a bench in a shaded park just east of where the horse-drawn carriages line up, read Nabokov short stories, and write in my journal, all while listening to Sibelius on my iPod.
It is true that being far away in a place so unlike home in language, customs, and landscape, has a filtering effect on the imaginative process. By that I mean, when I was over there [Prague], almost always, in the opening moments of my reflections, I saw the places of my fiction that's set in Chicago from some distance back. Being a long ways from Chicago seemed to cause my imagination to naturally shift to a long, overall view of the places where my novel chapters were set.
In Prague, there was a wealth of public places to write. The aforementioned Old Town Square, the riverside, a huge wooded park just north of the bed and breakfast where we stayed, coffee shops, and restaurants. Over there, the eateries don't seem to mind if you sit scribbling away for hours in your journal.
I think travel can have many positive effects, providing you're in a place that's comfortable for you and conducive to your writing process. I don't know if I would say travel is integral to my writing, although I will say that I have tried, especially after returning home this past summer, to integrate some of the positive things I did in Prague into my writing process here, such as turn off the telephone all day when I'm writing at home, or taking my journal somewhere--the lakefront, a park, my front porch, even--to do reading and writing in the outdoors.
Randall Albers / Florence
I find that being away from everything and settled in a spot where I can do nothing but write, take walks, and write some more, allows for a focus that I can't get for more than a few hours at a time in the midst of chairing a department. It shakes something loose in the writing that doesn't come at other times--as if being on the road, seeing new people and places, brings movement to the story, a fresh perspective that encourages freedom, experimentation, and unwilled associations feeding the imaginative process.
I perhaps never journal as much as when I am traveling. For one thing, it is the only thing I can do while I am actually on the move. Then, when I arrive, especially when it's a place where I am relatively free of interruptions and my time is my own, I find that I have a carryover and my journal time continues to expand.
In Florence this last summer, I was getting up very early to write for a couple of hours in the quiet of my darkened apartment before heading out to teach. Then, after class, I would come back, eat lunch, and set to it again, taking breaks every so often to go outside just to feel that I was still among the living. On these breaks, I would often walk to the end of my block and stand in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and watch the parade of people passing by. Across the plaza was a large hotel, the Grand Minerva, and each time I walked out for another break, I would look at its high roof and think, "They would be crazy not to have an outdoor bar up there." Finally, late one afternoon, I ambled over to the hotel and ducked into the lobby. The first thing I spotted was a sign that read "The rooftop terrace will be open until midnight." I hurried right back to my apartment, grabbed my journal, and nearly sprinted back to the hotel. Heading up a small elevator, then a set of stairs, and finally emerging onto a terrace, I took one look and thought, "Perfect." The space consisted of two levels built around a pool, and from the upper level, you could see the red rooftops of the city's buildings jumbled along both sides of the Arno and extending all the way to the green Tuscan hills in the distance. Many evenings after that, I would adjourn to that rooftop terrace with a Negroni and my journal to sit in the high breeze, watch the sun set in glorious orange, and write. If that place wasn't ideal, it was pretty close.
When you are seeing so many new things, having so many new experiences, interacting with so many new people in so many new situations, you just want to hurry up and get them down while the perceptions are fresh. And the act of getting them down gives them shape, deepens the experience, and focuses attention for observing even more sharply the next time you are riding the experience flood. Journaling feeds the fiction by enabling you to note material that is taking your attention and by allowing you to practice getting images down, but it also encourages you to reflect upon and understand those experiences and images. And reflection is a good thing.
[When traveling], the trick is to resist the temptation to float through all of these experiences passively, however enervating they might be, and to simply relegate them to the past, where they remain static--what Wright Morris calls so many "memory stings"--incapable of activating the imagination or rising above the cliche. Life is learning, and if we are going to grow, as writers and as people, we need to find ways of reactivating those moments in the present. That is the work of that supremely active and transforming faculty of imagination.
John Schultz / Fudan University, Shanghai, China
We were brought to Fudan University, one of the two top universities in China, to help Fudan start the first master's program in creative writing in China. Set at an edge of Shanghai more than an hour from downtown by even a determined taxi, Fudan had just finished its Twin Towers, two quite tall buildings with a lower middle building, all of it raised up in the middle of its campus to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2005. Our classes were in the West Tower, 12th floor. Fresh and traditional at once, the campus that surrounded the Towers possessed modern and older buildings with groups--in fact, thousands--of students in jeans and the usual casual clothing of college students in every part of the world.
Our grad students came from all parts of China, brought to Fudan and Beijing and other universities by the national tests, from the Yalu River in the north, to the provinces near Tibet and Myanmar, to a southern province near Vietnam, as well as from the south central area around Shanghai.
The Story Workshop(R) method was like nothing they had seen before, though they had heard that it would be different--creative to be sure--they hardly knew what that meant. The students were accustomed to the Language and Literature Department for forms of literary criticism. The semicircle was new to them, but the students accommodated quickly, mystified but willing to humor us, pretty much like students here who haven't sat in a semicircle in a college classroom before.
We started with dreams as the first concentration. And lucky us, it meant we started with Kafka's "The Bucket Rider." We found--you guessed it--Kafka's stories cross all borders. So long as the language in which they appear on the page is understood, a Kafka story needs little or no explanation in any country.
The classes followed pretty much the same rough pattern of development as we would expect of a graduate-level Fiction I in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia. We had to slow down in the readings and keep an alert eye for when a few of them were confused, looking back and forth, not getting it. Often, we had to say things two or three different ways before they would be understood. In regards to [the] one word [exercise], I simply said, "Just do it. Listen to the coachings, and see what happens." I saw the expression on the face of one young woman, Yingying, change, developing that remarkable inward concentration that characterizes those who are listening to the words and for whom an inner life is happening in response to seeing what the words gave her to see.
All of the Story Workshop exercises--take a place, person-action-person, and the basic forms assignments--worked with the Chinese students pretty much as they do in the States. This shouldn't be a surprise, since the story and image and sense of audience are all universal capacities.
Betty Shiflett / Fudan University, Shanghai, China
The Chinese people are very practical, adaptable, good at improvising to get the job done. However, there was one culturally-required academic habit of good manners that they physically could not break. I did not know it existed, and this will make you laugh: they could not leave the classroom either at break or dismissal if I were still in the room. They could not get out of their chairs! This baffled me, over and over. I would get up out of my chair and go right out to the front of their semicircle, and tell them to go out in the hall, to the restrooms, get a snack, walk around, talk to each other--they would smile up into my eyes and giggle, politely, obviously wanting to please me, but unable to do so.
Sometimes, if I persisted in standing in front of their knees, one of them would lock eyes with me, looking up in a begging way and say, "Thank you for teaching us, teacher." This would set off an echo ripple of "Thank you for teaching's" around the semicircle. Their English was more than good enough to understand my instructions, but they would not leave their chairs. Same at the end of class. I looked up from sorting out my books and papers on the floor, and every chair in the semicircle had a student in it. "Go ahead, you can go now!" I tried to shoo them, got up and waved my arms. Finally, I learned that as soon as I went through the door, they funneled out right behind me.
So how did we know when they were engaged in rapt listening, were actively and pleasurably "seeing" everything being told or read or recalled? Why, they showed exactly the same glazed-over eyes, the same intent concentration on the imaginative task--the signals we all recognize of work going on in the theatre of the mind, as we call it in the Story Workshop method. One word? Worked the same as it does in your semicircles, for the same human reasons. Take-a-place? Person-action-person? Way too complicated, you think? No way! They all worked on precisely the same principles of seeing, voice, audience, and movement, just like they work for you, for us, for anybody. Fancy that! And boy, were we relieved. But it only took that first session to figure it all out. (One or two more to believe it.) We were weak and giddy with success when our first ever Chinese workshops let out that initial Tuesday afternoon. Everything, blessedly, was possible.
Patty McNair / Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
I think it is a really good idea to get out of your regular routine in order to shake things loose with the writing. You have to claim your space and mark your place--like you do in the semicircle. Being somewhere new really will help you look at your work in new lighting, and being in a different culture can clarify things for you--once you get past the newness and awe and potential cliches of being a stranger in a strange land. I also think that our own place, where we come from and are often writing about, looks different from across the ocean. Things you take for granted become important, who you are in your everyday life is challenged. These can all be very good things for the writer's process.
I am always a prolific journal writer, no matter if I am at home on the sunporch or in a cafe in Old Town Square in Prague or on a bus to campus in Bath. I draw more in my journal when I travel, and I puzzle things out a bit more that look different to me here--observed instances, etc. I am usually a real ritual-and-rhythm person, and while I can write on my journal anywhere, I do like to have a routine for the "real" writing. I have to make my work space comfortable, with my things around me (pens, notes, notebook, journal, etc.). I like to work facing a wall instead of a window so I am distracted by the story only and not the goings-on outside. When I am writing in my journal, I like to look around a lot and jot things down as I notice them. In some ways, my process becomes more regimented when I travel because it is comforting to me.
I have noticed that while being at Bath Spa my sense of audience has changed. I am very aware of being the stranger, and the need to make my voice heard as it is, as I understand it. We (English and Americans) share a common language, but not a language that is exactly the same. I've been keeping a list of strange cautionary notes and signs. "No Fly Tipping" (No Dumping); "Shake well. Works best with lid still on." And there's a sign on a doorway here that has "Polite Notice" written at the top, and at the bottom it says "Thank You." Not at all sure what that means. Remember to be courteous?
I think everyone should try to travel abroad, but in a way that allows them to sit and write away from the distractions of their everyday lives back home. Stay away from the e-mail, turn off the television, grab your journal, and find a quiet place. If you are in a country where you don't know the language at all, you won't even be distracted by the overheard conversations, but have a sort of white noise around you. And having something other than a narrow view of the world--one that only comes from being within miles of your whole life--I think limits a writer's possibilities. I know that not everyone agrees with this, but I believe it wholeheartedly.
