“Who ever thought it was a good idea?” Iowa Writers’ Workshop professor and alumnus Garth Greenwell asks in a Substack post published on Wednesday morning.
Titled “Why I Don’t Believe in Workshop Anymore,” the essay lays out why Greenwell has decided not to teach “traditional, critique-based” writing workshops going forward.
“That’s a slightly scary pronouncement, since teaching traditional workshops has been a big part of how I’ve made my living over the past decade,” writes Greenwell, an award-winning novelist and literary critic who earned his MFA in Fiction at the University of Iowa in 2015. However, he’s concluded that the model is “fraudulent,” if not without merit.
Greenwell, who lead such workshops as recently as the spring semester, describes a traditional prose workshop as, “Ten or twelve students sitting around a table, the professor at its head, pronouncing on fifteen or twenty newly drafted pages—likely, at the beginning of the semester at least, the only writing anybody has seen from the student under review; while said student sits, head down and silent, supposedly listening and taking notes but actually, much of the time, too indignant or defeated or humiliated—or excited and flattered and exhilarated—to take anything in.”
An “ethos of cruelty” pervaded these workshops in the 20th century, he writes. “Frank Conroy, who directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for almost twenty years, reportedly believed a workshop wasn’t a success if nobody cried; even in a softer, more student-focused age, tears sometimes flow.”
All this stress isn’t necessary, nor does it necessarily produce good work, Greenwell argues. His attempts to “massage the model” from within over the years have proven futile.
“Workshop tempts artists into thinking that success means appealing to the largest number of people around the table, but that’s always a fool’s errand, a recipe for awfulness,” he writes.
Greenwell points to the endless and “tiresome” critical discourse around Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation as an extension of the misguided principle of workshop: “that our purpose in gathering to talk about art is always to ask how we can make something better, which means that our focus is always on results. This is deeply and unpleasantly perverse.”
“The desire to ‘make something better’ also means that there can be a homogenizing pressure, a sense that, to achieve a more polished, more professional result, whatever is rough, eccentric, not immediately legible as ‘working,’ is better off just cut away,” he continues.
By contrast, “[T]he experience of working on my first novel with my editor was a more valuable education than anything I ever learned in workshop, than both my MFAs combined.”
Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You (2016), won a British Book Award, was a finalist for Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, among other honors. Greenwell explains his editor approached the draft with the care and interest of someone already invested in the author’s vision, not forced to engage with it in the classroom.
“I do think that a different model might allow for something more fruitful, more fertile, more creative, more generative than traditional workshop. Anytime I’ve suggested this in an academic environment, though, it’s been shot down as not being in line with student expectations.”
Greenwell also writes of a positive and promising experience he had this summer leading a nontraditional, five-day generative fiction workshop at the Collegeville Institute at St. John’s University in Minnesota. The immersive program included screen-free class discussions, open-ended writing prompts (for example, “write a scene in which someone’s intense conviction makes them act in ways incomprehensible to others”), film screenings, readings, word games and time to explore campus.
“I’m pretty sure it was the best week of teaching I’ve ever experienced,” Greenwell writes.
“I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to create some kind of retreat model here in Iowa City, generative seminars built around other themes. Watch this space: we’ll see what comes of it.”
Greenwell’s Substack “To a Green Thought” is a twice-monthly newsletter with both free and paywalled blogposts about music, art, film and books. It is free to subscribe.
