In addition to his thoughts on teaching, I was interested in Ziegler’s careers as a teacher and a writer. With a number of books to his name, including The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes; In the City of Mystery (tales); The Green Grass of Flatbush (stories); and So Much to Do (poems), and publications in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Village Voice, among others, Ziegler proves that writers can support their students’ work while laboring fruitfully on their own. In fact, he argues below, the two jobs can actually feed each other.
Ziegler is currently Professor and Director of Pedagogy and Teacher Training at Columbia University's creative writing program. We corresponded via email in January 2008, shortly before the publication of The Writing Workshop Note Book.
About.com: I really appreciated the fact that your book promotes a supportive, open workshop environment. When you're teaching, what do you do to establish that atmosphere from the very beginning?
Alan Ziegler: Setting the proper atmosphere early on is crucial. I often start workshops -- in any genre -- by getting reactions to Ron Padgett’s “Post-Publication Blues,” perhaps prefacing the poem with Dylan’s line “there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”
POST-PUBLICATION BLUESPadgett’s persona appears to be reveling in self-loathing, but he may just be inoculating himself against criticism (the poem is too good to be written by a bad poet): “You can’t be harsher on me than I am on myself.” Others practically dare responders to find fault with their wonderful work.My first book of poems
has just been published. It is over there on the table
lying there on the table, where
it is lying. It has
a beautiful cover and design.
The publishers spent a lot of money
on it and devoted many
man- and woman-hours to it.
The bookstores are ordering copies.
Unfortunately I am a very bad poet and
the book is not good.
Most writers walk an emotional tightrope while their work is discussed; the job of the workshop is to help them maintain equilibrium so they can keep moving the work forward. Padgett’s poem opens up a discussion of the many ways writers react to criticism, including self-criticism. If a lot of students find the poem somehow funny, I know we’re off to a good start. By the time we’re finished talking about the poem (and all the tangents it has taken us on), there’ll be a feeling that we’re all in this together.
I do a quick, in-class exercise on the first day, then have them introduce themselves and read out loud (with no comments). Otherwise, it could take three or four weeks before everyone has had their voice out there with something they wrote. It’s also a good way to start learning names. I don’t call on anyone -- I tell them that someone will read, then someone else, until everyone has gone. This gets them to start looking at each other -- reading each other’s faces, not just mine. It starts giving them a sense of ownership of the class.
AC: You focus pretty evenly on craft and creativity in your book. Was that something you had to work at achieving as a teacher? How much do you adjust the focus -- on craft or creativity -- for individual classes?
AZ: When I started teaching, I tended to emphasize creativity more than craft. I wanted students to astonish themselves with what they could do. I wanted electricity as we were doing critiques, and to avoid getting bogged down on line-editing type suggestions. I didn’t want the workshop to spend too much time on ridding a piece of “mistakes” and not enough time looking for where a story could open up. This was all good, but not enough.
Attention to craft is a vital part of a writer’s training: selecting the optimal point of view, knowing how to deal with tense shifts, finding just the right balance of exposition and narrative. I love it when a class gets into an exhilarating discussion about punctuation. A good workshop adopts the tack most appropriate for the piece on the table -- the balance can change from piece to piece -- but the overall workshop experience should leave students in awe of creativity while remaining devoutly respectful of craft.
AC: What are the top three things you try to get across to your students when teaching your Writer as Teacher seminar?
AZ: I try to get across three things:
1) Teaching is about people in a room. An MFA class is quite different from an undergraduate Introduction to Creative Writing group. And the people in either of these extremes can vary greatly from room to room. You have to get to know the people in this room at this time—their writing experience, how much they’ve read, how they respond to feedback.
2) Framing. You can take almost any approach (and shift approaches), but the students should know what you’re doing. If you go on a tangent about character development during a critique, you might say, “Let’s put the story aside for a moment and talk about character development.” If you think of a way that a story could be radically recast, let the students know that you’re brainstorming possibilities, not prescribing revisions.
3) Think about next term. Keep a file of handout originals (and always make extra copies). Write notes after each class, so you remember those wonderful things you surprised yourself by saying and those things you wish you had said.
