Rosalie Morales Kearns. Voice of Authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy. CCC 60:4 / june 2009
Excellent critique of the "gag rule" which requires students to remain silent while others critique their work:
The gag rule not only silences the author being workshopped, but it also silences any students who are reluctant to participate in what may feel like a bullying session of a gagged target. When I started my MFA and first encoun- tered the gag rule, it struck me as a distinctly raced practice—specifically, a Euro-American practice. The expectations about spoken interaction that I have internalized as a woman of Puerto Rican descent include the understanding that staying silent or imposing silence is unacceptably rude. A discussion in which one of the parties must be silent violates all expectations of a healthy human interaction. When I saw how comfortably my fellow MFA students acquiesced to the gag rule, I felt that I was in a profoundly foreign place.//
Ironically, it has been my experience that when professors relaxed the gag rule in graduate-level workshops, the change has been negligible. Authors rarely entered the discussion even when they were allowed to. Perhaps gradu- ate students have internalized the notion that arguing or defending oneself may be seen as whining. We feel pressure to “take it on the chin”; all this fault finding is good for us, or else why would it be the predominant creative writing model in the country? (794-750)
On normativity and exclusion in the workshop:
The MFA curriculum assumes the existence of a particular type of student, a student firmly located in the Euro-American cultural tradition, sure of his right to claim the identity of Writer with a capital W. As mentioned earlier, the fault- finding, gagged-author workshop model serves to marginalize those uncomfort-//able with its adversarial, authoritarian practices. In addition, as a result of the normativity of the MFA curriculum and the larger literary discourse of which it is a part, there are many ways for students to be marginalized in relation to this “ideal” student: if our work alludes to authors and cultural practices about which he knows nothing; if we use narrative devices he dislikes or has never even seen; if we ignore his particular standards of coherence and intelligibility; if we write about subjects he considers unimportant; if we do not valorize a lone individual; if we write about topics in a way that seems “ideological” to him because he holds different values. As a result of this marginalization we are discouraged from seeing ourselves as Writers. (800-801)
Her notes toward an alternative:
Brilliant! Many thanks Rosalie.As in the classes I taught, the author introduces the story by saying as much as she wants to about the process of writing it, where she got her ideas, what revisions she is already thinking of, on what topics she would particularly like feedback, or anything else she wants to bring up. The author then facilitates the discussion, calls on students and professor, asks questions for clarification, and so on…In contrast to the seek-and-destroy paradigm of the gagged-author, fault-finding workshop, the paradigm for this egalitarian ver- sion of workshop is a conversation among equals, in which everyone (professor included) is engaged in a shared learning experience.
Comment on the work will be made in the context of an ongoing discussion about all of our various assumptions about what makes stories work. Since we will have been doing close reading of a wide range of published works (not just canonical, not just realistic, etc.), we will have a corpus of works on which to draw that utilize a range of techniques and present us with successful “viola- tions” of what we may have thought of as “rules.” We will let go of the idea that any one individual knows what good art is and has the right to impose that on others. There will be a frank discussion of classroom dynamics, and everyone will be responsible for making sure that everyone has something to say.(804)
