Creative writing courses taught by native speakers have been demonstrated to produce outstanding effects on the development of writing and speaking proficiency for students of foreign languages. As an American teaching at Ostrava University in the Czech Republic from 1995-1997, I taught four creative writing courses conducted as workshops in which students openly critiqued their peers and discussed the work of published writers in English. This experiment sometimes proved problematic, as the methodology of the workshop demanded that students, against their will, each assume a position of authority. Benefits of the course were recognizable by all by the end of the first semester: some students were writing and, surprisingly, speaking in English with more confidence. Others produced work of such quality that it occasionally, and stunningly exceeded the caliber of my American students .
The first drafts of this essay were merely scatterings; journal entries; most of them contained in a small brown notebook that I carried everywhere during the two years I taught ESL in Frydek-Mistek, a town on the eastern fringe of the Czech Republic. I had gained the position through SOROS, a large non-profit organization in New York City, in 1995. At the time, the job seemed such an amazing stroke of good fortune that I genuinely feared SOROS had made a mistake. Nevertheless, in August of that year I found my way to the little town on the Czech/Polish border. I bought my notebook in a paper shop on the square in Frydek, soon busily jotting down my experiences.
By the end of the first month, I had nearly filled the book, thanks to a wonderful serendipity. The husband of my office-mate was a university professor in Ostrava, a nearby city. For a long time he had been looking for an instructor to teach creative writing (in English) to his students, and when he heard about me, he offered me the job. I was happy to oblige. We offered my ESL course in fiction writing that first semester at the newly refurbished university compound on Realni Street in downtown Ostrava.
My first students were in the midst of preparing for their state exams; they wanted a course that would, in their words, be more “active and fun” and less fact driven than some of their other classes. But immediately I sensed that the course would challenge me in ways I had not foreseen: as an American, educated at a large state-funded university, I knew little about the Czech system or its classroom dynamics. I knew no other way of conducting a course on creative writing than by workshop, a system in which students submit copies of their poems and stories to the entire group for open discussion. My students, a group of four women and three men, agreed half-heartedly to comply with the demands of the workshop. They were afraid that their work would be too amateurish, stiff, and embarrassing for a tolerable public display; further, they felt they would have very little of value to offer in the way of criticism regarding the work of their peers.
Considering these apprehensions, I devised a syllabus that was somewhat of a hybrid between freshman composition and a full-fledged creative writing course. The writers would learn creative expression and rhetoric, but they would be reading their papers aloud, accepting criticism, engaging in free-writing exercises and open discussions, as well as reading and critiquing the work of published fiction writers. The first half of the course (we found a way to fund two full semesters: creative writing I and II) would be dedicated to the mastery of language, organization, grammar and formal sentence structures, while the second half would involve a more sophisticated study of stylistic nuances, point of view, and the voices of great writers in the English language. Both classes demanded that the students openly discuss the ways in which certain sounds and turns of speech affect meaning.
I remember that class, still today, as one of the most dear and effective creative writing courses that I have ever had the opportunity to teach. The relationship the students shared with the English language—as a wonderful costume they could wear for the duration of the class—cultivated a sense of wonder and experimentation in the act of writing which we rarely see in American students, even at the graduate level. Admittedly, Czech students sometimes produced the clunky, bookish turn of phrase, relying too much on grammar books and thesauruses, but occasionally their creative writing allowed them a freedom that they could achieve nowhere else, forcing them to think as speakers of English without translating in their heads, for better or worse. These courses truly embodied the learning process endorsed by composition theorist Janet Emig, who acknowledges that “writing is often our representation of the world made visible…more readily a form and source of learning than talking” (1997, 10). The freedom my students enjoyed was only possible within the construct of the creative writing workshop: a course uniquely crafted to provide an opportunity to play with language without fear of reprimand.
My request that the students and I create together, as Joseph Harris has envisioned, “a public space where students can begin to form their own voices as writers and intellectuals” (1997, 116) evoked wonder and disbelief from both students and administrators. And not a little bit of criticism. The students hardly could guess what a workshop would be like, or worth, if most of it would be taken up with the sounds of their own voices. But the final product of these classes speaks for itself, I believe.
Perhaps my own experience at that time made me especially well suited to teach a creative writing course in Ostrava. Indeed, I had first-hand knowledge of the identical pressures these students were under. At exactly the same time that I was teaching them how to write in English, I was learning how to speak in Czech, and I was teaching full time at a gymnasium in Frydek-Mistek. At the gymnasium, the common methodology for language instruction was simply to correct the student in a loud voice as they spoke before the class, making an exchange between the average middle school student and teacher sound something like this:
Student: He said to she [Professor: TO HER.] please go. To her, please go. And she goed [ Professor: SHE WENT: WENT IS PAST TENSE OF GO.]. Went.
Picking up on the students’ frustrations and embarrassment, many of the newly matriculated faculty had retaliated against this practice. But, after some eight years of study in Czech elementary and high schools, most students of foreign languages had already been indoctrinated by the methodology above; thus a great wave of fear would rise in the room whenever students were asked to speak in front of class. That fear, I discovered, carried over tangibly to their English classes at the university, despite the fact that many of the graduating seniors, having had the opportunity to travel, already spoke more eloquently than their professors. Even the brightest and most articulate students expressed hesitancy when asked to “free write” (to write continually on a given subject without stopping), not considering grammar or syntax. Just to write. They soon discovered, as Emig notes, that “writing can sponsor learning because it can match its pace” (1997, 12). Forgetting the embarrassment that usually accompanies language acquisition – as a child, unashamed, learns – the writer in the privacy of the blank page can allow the words themselves to lead the story. After some ten weeks together, I began to apprehend that not only had my students’ free writing improved by many measures, but they had also improved as speakers. I found myself witness to a process whereby they became more self-assured when speaking about their peers’ work and, finally, when accepting criticism of their own.
Surely some of their hesitancy to speak and offer criticism also stemmed from the political system in which these young people had come of age. My students, aged twenty-one in 1996, had learned mandatory Russian all the way up to and including their first years at gymnasium, where they suddenly were forced (along with many teachers of Russian) to begin learning English. Some had studied a very bookish English language from ancient British texts dating back to the 1960s, but these were few. Moreover, many of their professors taught English literature according to the “lecture” system, in which the teacher acts as final authority, dictating facts as students write them hurriedly down. In the course of one year with my first group of writers, I found the pure power of the professor’s position to be both dizzyingly satisfying and frightening at once. Every sentence I uttered was scratched into their notebooks, which they then kept and consulted. Such a position, I decided, if taken lightly, could have grave consequences for otherwise bright and eager students.
One of the most notable features of this student writing in my class was its lack of fear. As said, these students, without the pressure of being corrected sentence by sentence, allowed themselves to rise to the language in ways that had not been possible before. Just as it is for children, the language was a place for them to imitate the voices of their idols and toy with possibilities: the sounds of words, the assembled images, the point of view. Significantly, some of the students produced work of such an accomplished level that it later appeared in the student literary magazine, Night Music. They did not feel compelled to “wrap up” each story with a flourish, as many American students do. Unlike my experience with Americans, these students preferred the subtle and understated to the horrific and overblown. Moreover, they were mostly concerned with getting the words right, not necessarily with winning the Pulitzer Prize for their work. They strove to sound authentic. When asked to write two pages of description, they did not imbue the work with symbols and kill it with metaphors. They concentrated on the words. This very realist approach to the work further encouraged the subtlety of their designs. The following are the final passages of a small piece that one student produced early on in Creative Writing 2:
She sat on the brown soft armchair in the darkest corner of this room. Her eyes examined one thing in the room after another. She saw a small brown table with black legs, standing in the middle of the room. On the table, there were two cups with small blue flowers, ready to be filled with coffee, a black ashtray, and a blue plate with sweets and biscuits. There was a pair of armchairs, not too close and not too far from each other, so a couple sitting there was never too close or too far from each other.
Then she stood up, she switched on the light, and she started to walk across the room from one white wall to another. She stopped in front of the big window with red velvet hangings.
Significant to the above equation was the fact that I, their teacher, was a foreigner in a foreign culture. I must confess, the enthusiasm I felt for the work of my students was not a little bit influenced by my own longing for the sound of English. I was writing every day, if for nothing else than to express my frustration and wonder at the life I had chosen abroad. Still today, the poetry I wrote out of that place of wonder remains the work I am most proud of. Therefore, finding a native speaker to teach such a class, and, if possible, a writer, seems essential to its success, for many of our discussions were directed simply at the spectacle of language. Language is an expression of wonder. My primitive Czech, lacking decorous devices typically available to the native speaker, betrayed my child-like enthusiasm for the foreign culture I found myself in. Acknowledging my wonder and my vulnerable position, the students felt more comfortable to experiment in English. We wrote for the best reason: because we were amazed.
In the first couple of months, before even the Czech sound system can be learned, one has to rely on the unspoken sympathy of shop assistants, bank tellers, postal workers, and of course food servers in order to go about one’s daily business. The feeling of arrival soon faded in the well of details I had to contend with, first and foremost language. Truly, to live in a community and speak none of its words was a turning point for my work as a poet, and it was the closest to fearlessness I have ever come. Every day was akin to walking about blindly, but with intensified hearing. At first, I heard no words, which initially sounded like nothing but strings of unintelligible syllables. I heard sounds, tone, the rising and falling in the human voice, the little upturned squeak that means “I’m asking you something,” the monotone rattle that means “Get out of my way,” the loud, patronizing drawl that means “Understand?” The flip-flop tone that means “Is the answer yes or no?” One begins to recognize sounds before words, words before lines and phrases, and lines before ideas.
To approach the act of writing from this perspective seems exactly right to me. I don’t know if I would have been able to teach the class as well as I did, had I not been going through my own encounter with language. The fact of Czech language was a miracle to me, a mystery. Rather than perceive it as a horrible punishment or a barrier, I found the best way to survive in my new home was to play in the language. The students could learn from me, a writer learning language, by example.
Lastly, the course encouraged them to study and imitate established writers working within our new language. The poetry and fiction of English speaking countries, I have come to believe, is indelibly linked to the sound of English, its particular quality of rising and falling. Our art is also linked, of course, to the cultures out of which it has arisen. So it is not enough to ask students simply to write in English. Essentially, we are asking them to put on a very heavy garment soaked with years of history, chock full of its personal tics. If the writer approaches this nearly impossible request with playfulness, as a visitor wearing a costume, the experience can be one of great delight and also quite educational. For these reasons, I found that, when teaching my students poetry and fiction from America, they most benefited from strict imitations of our most recognizable writers, including Hemingway, Joyce, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. These writers impose upon students to creatively pass through the fire of their voices. The students answered with many rich texts in which their own voices began to develop. As one who wears a Halloween costume finds personal expression facilitated by the anonymity of the mask, the students took wonderful risks that paid off.
I want to call this aspect of the course a lesson in history, because voice and subject are intimately linked. Poetry is history. Within the great poetry of any era is locked both its compromises and its revolutionary thought. In their strict imitations, students are forced to apprehend the fact of America in 1855, how the overwhelming expansion and development of the frontier influenced who we were and are as writers. Learning about expansion is not enough. Thinking like Whitman, with his big-hearted gestures and optimism and long lines, gives them a greater sense of the magnitude of his work and what it means to us: “I resist anything better than my own diversity,/And breathe the air and leave plenty after me,/And am not stuck up, and am in my place.” (1977, 49).
On a final note, my students became quite fortunate to actually meet an American poet in the spring of 1996. We received word early in the semester that “an American Indian poet” would be coming to Ostrava to read his work. Jim Barnes, our literary visitor from the West, was received with overwhelming enthusiasm. Having Barnes present to read his work was to the students an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. “Nothing remains the same in this long land,” he writes in “After the Great Plains” (1992, 45). After the reading, one student remarked that the poem seemed to be doing rhythmically what it was saying. With staccato accents within the long, rangy lines, the poem urges readers to accept uncertainty. Later, we read the poem in class, and another student made the very fine remark that, having traveled through the Midwest, she felt the Great Plains never changed, that they went on and on, seemingly forever. Though the poem affirms change, “It longs for sameness,” she said. Underneath Barnes’ poem lies the mythological horror we—Native Americans or not—suffer at the loss of certainty in our lives. For students having lived first hand through a revolution, the clarity of her statement was felt keenly throughout the room.
Barnes, Jim. The Sawdust War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1992.
Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode of Learning.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers in English, 1997. 7 –15.
Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Studies in Writing and Culture, 1997.
Whitman, Walt. The Portable Walt Whitman. ED. Mark Van Doren. New York: Penguin. 1977.
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