Maggie's Response

[Sondra Perl]

#334

We’re sitting in our basement classroom workshopping one of my drafts and I’m trying to sink into the floor. The reason I’m trying to sink into the floor is not that my piece is getting crucified; quite the opposite. I am in agony because the instructor is waxing eloquent about all of the things he likes about this piece in response to a—relatively minor—value judgment given by one of my classmates. He is, in fact, doing a lot of what our text for this week talks about in the section on active listening: saying what he heard and what it made him think about.
The reason it is so excruciating is because we have just gone through half an hour of torture workshopping a previous piece and the instructor was not acting the same way at all. He was certainly not curbing value judgments (I think he may have been making some of his own actually, but that memory might just be my overactive guilt complex) and there wasn’t a lot of active listening or working from strength going on. It was actually pretty brutal.
In retrospect, I can see that our group was working with some challenges. Our class had lots of history together, both in the department and in the university. There were strong personalities, bad dynamics, and people who rubbed each other the wrong way but wouldn’t have hated each another if they hadn’t been forced to live together for the past three years. We never tried to be mean, but I don’t think we ever felt really safe either. There was always the chance that one of these workshops would go off the rails and someone would get really humiliated and we didn’t quite know what to do about it. We wanted to create a safe space, but we didn’t know how to offer helpful feedback in a way that didn’t have the potential to turn into a horror show. Our only options seemed to be offering empty praise or being brutally honest, neither of which were very useful.
What spoke to me about this chapter was that it explains why supportive rather than critical models actually work, not just that supportive models make writers feel better. By explaining why simply telling the writer what you hear helps them re-envision the piece, it makes it okay (rather than cowardly) not to be “critical.” By explaining how asking questions can help the writer figure out how to rewrite, it removes the burden of having to “fix” a piece. These are the kind of techniques and explanations we were missing in that Fiction Writing class, techniques create a structure in which we could feel safe, even with all of the external dynamics in the room.

[Sondra Perl]

#346

Yes. Absolutely. It’s not about ‘feeling good’ — it’s about the way meaning gets constructed, developed, supported and what enables writers to go from what is likely implicit (in their bodies and on the page) to explicit. More on this later on in the term.

[Sondra Perl]

#354

Yes, Maggie, I agree too about supportive models being more useful than critical models. I have a friend who often says that when one focuses on what is good, it usually grows. Conversely, when one focuses on what is bad, that tends to grow too. I think these critical techniques say a lot about the uncanny, almost mystical nature of attention, how the manner in which we choose to focus our attention has dramatic ramifications–both good and bad.

I am also really drawn to one of your great points: “techniques create a structure in which we could feel safe, even with all of the external dynamics in the room.” I completely agree with you. I find that most of the time, writers in workshops are looking for ways to say something helpful. I don’t think anyone steps into the workshop with the goal of being destructive or limiting. Instead, I think that students simply don’t know how to give good criticism; and I think that’s why this chapter was so practical and useful. It outlined a clear methodology for criticizing work. I really wish this reading had been assigned in my workshops when I was getting my MFA, because it really would have created, as you put it, a “safe” space, unburdened by external dynamics.

[Sondra Perl]

#383

The task of structured feedback brings to mind being on jury duty. Since jurors are made up of a sampling of the population; diverse personalities, intricate individual experiences and a multitude of cultural nuances, more often than not tends to yield an assortment of unpredictable outcomes. The jurors deliberating the case often add extraneous material that muddies the discussions. The jurors must be mindful stay with the charge from the judge. In workshopping, although we are all writers, we must be mindful of the workshopping structure and process. I would think that over time, this task can become a well-honed skill.

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