Statement of Teaching Philosophy

In my view, creative writing is not self-expression but rather its opposite: the expression of otherness, a connection between self and other, the writer and his community, the writer and her world, the writer and experience. "Creative" writing, the act of making something new with words, cannot come from the writer alone, and must necessarily come from the writer’s engagement with the world. I’m primarily a fiction writer. Like poet/fiction writer David Huddle, I believe there are only two resources for fiction: memory and imagination. I also believe that all stories are both remembered and imagined, even stories with no human characters, set on planets that do not exist, in times that may never come. Creative writing–in any genre–explores, tests, and seeks the proper form to express relationships between self and other. When a writer has done her job well, out of this process something new, a fresh vision of experience, is created.

It seems to me the two major goals of creative writing instruction are to inform and to nurture. A creative writing professor is responsible for teaching students the conventions of their chosen genres and assisting them in sampling important and individually relevant works in the same traditions. A creative writing professor must also help nurture students’ individual creative talents. The two principal means of achieving these goals are the creative writing workshop and individual mentoring.

As the late poet Richard Hugo put it, "the creative writing workshop is one of the few places where what goes on really matters." The story, poem, or essay a student shares with a workshop reflects the student’s deepest sense of how things are, the nature of her own experience, his relationship with the world. Any piece of writing that expresses eloquently the writer’s vision of any subject will have implications for human action, will make the reader feel or think about the world in different ways. As a workshop leader, I insist that we try to be disinterested readers, to take each work on its own terms, regardless of our individual tastes, views, or political values. While I accept in principle the postmodern notion that all writing is political, as a creative writer I also insist that writing is not only political. I believe that by its nature, creative writing resists any notion of political correctness, liberal or conservative. That doesn’t mean that creative writing cannot express ideologies (much great writing does), nor that as readers we should accept the values that underlie every story, poem, or essay. It means that in the creative writing workshop we are concerned first and foremost with form, the way the thing is made. Our task is to help the author shape the story, poem, or essay into its best, most functional form in order to achieve its own intentions, whatever they are. As Huddle puts it, "to make the thing beautiful, no matter who reads it." This is my main concern as a creative writing teacher, whether working with a class or an individual student.

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