Playing Catch-Up: Nonfiction News

The whole staff went to Switzerland last week, lolled along the beach in Lake Geneva in the fine warm weather, and ate raclette in the back of stretch limousines.  That was fun of a sort, but we have been neglecting the blog, so here are some things we missed:

Ploughshares expands the Emerging Writer Competition to include three genres.

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THE STATE, a journal and sociohistorical forum investigating the space between print and audio-visual experiences and their transition to mediated online forms, welcomes submissions around the theme of ‘Voicings/Articulations/Utterances,’ and encourage experimentation with form, transmedia, and (web)site-specific installations.

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Six writing professors, including Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore, respond on Huffington Post to Anis Shivani’s trolling attacks on the teaching of creative writing.

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Puppies!!!!

 

Rebutting Shivani

There seem to be two states of mind regarding Anis Shivani, the constant critic of contemporary creative writing who has somehow found a regular spot on the Huffington Post books page.  One side says “Ignore him, he only wants the attention and is encouraged by our outrage.” We were about to be swayed in that direction until we read Karen Babine’s crisp rebuttal.  Here is a bit of her opening:

…it was my instinct to employ silence as a rhetorical device and not even engage him, because it really seems like his purpose is to incite, not provoke legitimate dialogue—but then once I realized that not saying anything was part of his goal in silencing, that put my back up, and here we are.

And then she moves on to her major arguments:

…the main issue that Shivani overlooks—whether intentional or not, in his purpose to incite as much reaction as possible in his readers—is the difference between creative writing and literature: literature is artifact. As my fiction students identified last week, artifact brings to mind archaeology, digging, brushing away, interpreting this long-dead item for what it can tell us. Creative writing, on the other hand, considers a text as a living, breathing thing, something that puts my students in a chair next to Raymond Carver, because “Cathedral” did not spring, fully-formed, from the mind of Carver. He was once a beginning writer too. He wasn’t always Raymond Carver.

 And:

What is clear, however, that Shivani has equated creative writing with the feminine, and “real” writing with the masculine, for the purpose of silencing voices other than his own. Calling creative writing “Oprahfied” certainly genders the creative writing in terms that call to mind powerful women, mass appeal, and to him, little substance.From this argument, only women go to therapy; men do not. But what is particularly interesting about this phrasing is that it is a female mindset that phallically penetrates the workshop. He genders the workshop itself in other ways, using “she” to represent the creative workshop teacher—though it is interesting that as Shivani also argues that students are guided to imitate the models that the female teacher brings to class (Carver, Hemingway, Barthelme, Plat, Glück, and Levine are the ones he mentions), two women, four men, but the method of imitation that he rails against comes strictly out of this classical, masculine, rhetorical tradition.

… Until recent decades, women writing about their bodies and their experiences has been confined to “confessional” writing—and demeaned in the doing—but even as I write those phrases, women writing illness narratives, addiction narratives, and other deeply personal things is still largely dismissed in the writing world, often shelved in “self-help.” Even Susan Sontag, writing Illness as Metaphor at the beginning of this phase, could only write about her experiences will illness in a form that did not recognize her personal experience as a valuable source of knowledge and understanding.

Many folks are taking Shivani’s arguments apart these past few days, but Babine’s counter-punch is one of the best. Her extensive and thorough argument can be read in full on her blog State of Mind.

Would someone give Anis Shivani a nice warm cup of milk?

Would someone give Anis Shivani a nice warm cup of milk and put him to bed?

Creative writing is not literary writing as has been understood for all of the history of writing. Creative writing is a subset of therapy, with the same essential modalities — except, like everything else in our culture, it comes in a stripped, dumbed down version that partakes little of the rigors of psychotherapy. More appropriately, we might call it the Oprahfied mindset that penetrates workshop. Life lessons and living a more authentic life are always just beneath the surface of any workshop discussion.

The full RIDICULOUS SCREED can be read here.