The Teacherly Personality

In "Show and Tell," the Louis Menand/New Yorker essay on creative writing programs (June 8/15, 2009), these words arise:

Personality is a job requirement for the workshop teacher, and it doesn't matter what sort. Teachers are the books that students read most closely, and this is especially true in the case of teachers who are living models for exactly what the student aspires one day to be—a published writer.

John Gardner, Menand says, "was a flamboyant and intensely personal teacher. His preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples." Donald Barthelme, for his part, "assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashberry's 'Three Poems'." And then there was Gordon Lish, who "had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence."

I'll be teaching the advanced nonfiction workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and so Menand's essay gave me pause. I hadn't, for example, planned on having my students empty out the nearest liquor store. I also thought that I might give my students more leash than the first few words. But more than that, I plan to teach, along with the writing, so much essential reading, for it is only by reading that writers—aspiring or not—gain footholds against language and idea. I'll be encouraging students to read not me, but the books that I believe will matter most in their long-long evolution.

My course description for the few who bravely enter in:

“Maybe the best we can do is leave ourselves unprotected…” the poet-novelist Forrest Gander has written. “To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain.” In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will seek, and leverage, exposure. We’ll be reading writers contemplating writing—Natalia Ginzburg, Larry Woiwode, Vivian Gornick, Terrence des Pres, Annie Dillard. We’ll be reading writers writing their own lives—Gretel Ehrlich, Anthony Doerr, Stanley Kunitz, Brooks Hansen, Jean-Dominique Bauby—as well as writers writing the lives of others—Frederick Busch on Terrence des Pres, for example, Patricia Hampl on her parents, Michael Ondaatje on the utterly cinematic characters of his childhood. The point will be to get close to the bone of things. Students should each be prepared to craft and to workshop six new short pieces of analysis, memoir, and literary reportage.