Theme Essay by Theresa Williams
Learning About Yourself Is What Matters
Every so often, a discussion erupts on Facebook about the legitimacy of degree programs in creative writing. The discussions are usually initiated and controlled by people who have never taught or who have taught for only a few semesters. Either way, their argument goes like this: University creative writing programs are ruining American literature.
These detractors think people are either born to be writers or they’re not. Degree programs are therefore worthless, and the work produced in them is clogging America’s literary output and reputation. The detractors get really steamed about someone receiving a degree that says “Bachelor” or “Master” on it when the degree holder has not yet mastered the writing craft.
These critics are missing something basic.
I’ve been teaching creative writing at a university for more than twenty years, and I’ve come to realize that teaching writing is about more than producing the next Whitman, Pound, Woolf, Gluck, or Rilke. It’s also about teaching people to be human beings.
When students at a university try to write poems, stories, novels, and plays, they learn to analyze their doubts, assumptions, capacities, and demons. They learn how to look closely at human nature.
Life’s more than a little confusing; it’s a minefield littered with the bodies of the unlucky. Even the lucky can be destroyed: Shakespeare’s heroes reach their finest moments and then die. Most of the time, however, we continue on, our lives becoming a series of quests for knowledge of one kind or another. Each search takes place over dangerous ground. We collect our truths. We hope that eventually our truths will add up to something.
Perhaps in writing stories and poems, students are searching for a version of the truth.
What’s “truth”? Ultimate knowledge that shines like a diamond on a hill? Not really. It’s more like an ordinary rock. We pick it up, put it in our pocket, and continue on our way. But every so often we reach back into the pocket and touch it, and when we do, we feel centered. If it’s a good truth, it guides us; it develops a patina from frequent use.
Much of what we encounter in our lives conspires to keep us from self-knowledge. Expectations and distractions multiply with each passing year. If creative writing students leave our universities believing these ordinary rocks, these truths, will help them to better understand their lives, then we’ve achieved something.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters to Franz Kappus, a 19-year-old student at the Military Academy of Vienna when he first sought Rilke’s advice on his writing, are noteworthy in that they aren’t littered with critiques. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke tells Kappus to develop his capacity to see within himself. He shows Kappus how to deal with doubt, which can be the writer’s worst enemy:
Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers—perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.
Our students, too, need this kind of instruction. Rilke encourages Kappus to call on his intuition for help, telling him that art isn’t just something we do. It’s a way of life.
The writing program critics complain that students are passionless and that their work is mediocre. To this I say, “Really?” That hasn’t been my experience.
When students know and trust us, they reveal their passion. Like truth, passion is secreted in the pockets of trousers and coats and in backpacks. When a student at last reveals it, it’s a marvelous thing, the moment when real teaching can begin.
Student poems and stories may seem mediocre, but I’d wager that every word felt electric when it was committed to paper. Sometimes students can be taught techniques to help them better translate feelings and experiences into words, but usually they simply haven’t lived long enough to achieve the necessary distance from their topics. If nothing else, we can then remind them of Rilke’s own dark nights of the soul.
Most of the students graduating with creative writing degrees won’t win Pulitzers or get their work in the best magazines. But Rilke doesn’t tell Kappus that the most important thing is publication. Instead:
Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: Must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple, “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity.”
Sooner or later, students will determine for themselves if writing’s worth the energy that goes into it. If they decide it’s not, I wouldn’t call that failure; I’d call that learning.
If we've done our job as teachers, students will leave the university as better people. Their truths will accumulate. They might even have enough to build themselves a life someday.
Publishing information
- Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, first edition published by W.W. Norton in 1934 (Modern Library edition, translated by Stephen Mitchell, 2001). The letters were originally written in 1903.
Art Information
- “Pebbles” © James Hill; Creative Commons license
- “Rocks” © Chris Jones; Creative Commons license
- “Rock Cairn” © Michael B.; Creative Commons license
Theresa Williams is a contributing writer at Talking Writing.
"I loved the library. Everything—tables, doors, books—was solemn and heavy, church-like. That was how I thought of education, as a calling. There in the carrel, I’d dream about what I might achieve."—The Study Carrel
