I tried to work within good institutions. I tried to provide continuity and lasting end-products and to make links between different groups that might become self-sustaining. I tried to bring work to light that might help people see the marginalised as human and might help them press for better care and altered priorities. But in the end I did go away. And in many cases I wasn’t replaced. I like to think that I did more good than harm, but I wonder if I could have made the work undertaken more lasting. I think we do have to be vigilant in this area. We have to keep the people we work with safe and make sure the gifts we can reveal for them have no price.
And, while I’m being depressing, I’d like to address the other side of imagination, the dark. Human beings imagined Talha’s confinement before it began. They chose not to imagine the suffering of someone detained without trial, or rather to imagine him as being unimportant in his suffering. Human beings thought of adapting a truck’s exhaust, so it could gas children. Human beings imagined the benefits of possessing a nuclear bomb before they made it. (Although some of the scientists who invented it then had time to imagine the consequences of its use and protested against it ever being deployed.) Right now, human beings on every continent are imagining the refinement of tortures, the imposition of fear, the subordination and destruction of people they cannot accept as being people. Human beings are creating the fictions which make their crimes seem justified, acts of self-defence. You know the kind of thing, you’ve heard them before, the lies that rehearse extinction, that seek to justify: all aboriginals are animals, rapists and drunks; Chile is under threat from a mass, Left-Wing conspiracy; all Negroes are lazy and ignorant degenerates; women are essentially immoral and worthless, they cannot be educated, seen in public, or allowed to work; the cockroaches must be exterminated before they exterminate us: the civilised world is being bled dry by a secret Jewish cabal; all immigrants are criminals and freeloaders who contribute nothing to the countries which receive them; all Muslim philosophy is essentially violent, all Christian philosophy is essentially violent; and on and on and on . . . Imagination is a power, it can be used in many ways. It isn’t inherently good. All the more reason then to exercise it loudly and often in good ways when we can.
But we may be confronted by that other puzzle: How can it be that bad people who do bad things are also artists, have an interest in the arts? Hitler painted dull watercolours, Eichmann played the violin. Radovan Karadzic, responsible for thousands of deaths in Omarska, Keraterm, Susica, Prijedor, Srebrenica, and on and on and on, described himself as a poet. He likened the shelling of Sarajevo to poetry. Issie Sagawa, student of literature, shot Renée Hartevelt while she was reading aloud from Schiller and then ate parts of her body raw. In at least one later interview he took pains to mention that he hadn’t done this simply in order to write a book about it later. He did write a book about it later. Several.
But think of it another way. If a sociopath isn’t cured by art, should we be surprised by that? Would listening to Wagner have cured Hitler’s dental problems? No. And we wouldn’t have expected it to. Showing someone a painting won’t heal their broken leg. But it may sustain them. We know that all manner of dictators were and are very happy to be sustained by music, art, theatre and, indeed, they often appropriate it with enthusiasm. This is because dictators are also human. They are terrible, they are monsters, but also human – art is uncomfortable when it reminds us of this, we would prefer to be more savage than they are to destroy their savagery. And humans can derive joy from art. There are many illnesses and disorders it won’t cure, can’t cure, but naturally the powerful and wicked can steal art to enjoy. And they can choose to deny its joys to others. They understand art’s power enough to limit access. Which is a clue – the inhumane who want us to join them in their inhumanity know they should keep arts from us, know they should separate us from our own and others’ dignity. As previously established.
I find it odd that we can view the arts as being weak when every massive, heavily armed dictatorship has always taken care to battle poems, plays, paintings. It’s interesting to note that a rather bland tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica in the UN building was covered with a tasteful blue cloth while Colin Powell and others talked us into invading Iraq. Public pronouncements were usually made with the tapestry as a backdrop. But not this time. A watered-down version of a dead man’s painting, a highly abstract image of civilian casualties – it was making everyone uncomfortable. Just a picture.
The arts have power. They can do almost immeasurable good if we let them and keep them healthy, and they don’t have to cost a lot. Through lower drug costs, more active lives, better mental health, better physical health, employment opportunities, saleable artefacts – they can in many ways be said to earn their keep.
And let’s return to the question of awareness, increased awareness in hard times. Yes, awareness is not always a welcome gift. But if the opposite is numbness, a reduced livingness, a death in life, then I think we can still choose it. And I think, as artists and people who work with new artists and with arts in the community, we can consider the work of Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, someone who specialised in the prevention of suicide. He believed that the key to feeling that life had purpose lay in finding its meaning, embracing even the worst in order to meet it with the strength, the fact, of your continued living. At one point he was on a work party in Auschwitz. He was in darkness, fear, hunger and cold and he was thinking of his wife. The dawn was coming and he was imagining the reality of his wife, from whom he had of course been separated and who had been, of course, murdered by people for whom she was not human.
In Man’s Search for Meaning he writes:
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
And I know that in my life the truth is that I have been allowed to do something that I love. Doing this allows me to love better and more, to know what makes me happy and to be alive in more and better ways. It also happens to be how I earn my living, and I was given all that possibility by the art of others and by the example of artists around me and of the human beings around me who chose and choose to live in a creative manner. I cannot do anything other than offer that to others whenever I can. I try to make art that people can like, that has a regard for human dignity at its heart, and if I have an opportunity like this I try to explain why that kind of thing is important. And sometimes I still get to work with others.
I would encourage you in every possible way to love what you do and to pass it on. We all meet our ends, happily or sadly and sooner or later, but in this way of helping each other, in this manifestation of joy and hope and kindness, we also have a kind of immortality. And we need never be entirely alone.
Does That Make Sense?
Approaches to the Creative Writing workshop
I AM IN a stuffy room in a poorly maintained building which is, like so many poorly maintained buildings, intended to be a community resource. I am sitting in a rectangle of shabby desks and seats with a group of visually impaired young people – they are making a video about being visually impaired. Their choice. The filming has been completed, we are at the end of another very long day, full of unexpected technical challenges and small triumphs – we are now all tired, hot and battering at the long prose poem which will make up our narration. Their choice. It isn’t quite right. It needs one more word, which – if we’re being technical – has to be an amphibrach. We aren’t being technical. We’re writing. We are spending a good deal of time saying du-DA-du – which feels ri
ght. It could be built out of one, or two, or three words, we don’t know and we wouldn’t mind which – the rhythm is the thing. The sense and the rhythm – we need them both. We have the rest of the sentence, the rest of the piece . . . we tap the rhythm. We repeat the rhythm. We think the rhythm. We sit. We continue to be tired and hot. And then, here comes the word. We can almost feel it – there is a sense, in fact, of it falling, beautifully and effectively, into the head of a dark-haired young man who, as it happens, hasn’t been too committed to the wordy side of the project. It then emerges, as we might say, wearing his voice. It is confident and his and itself and ours and the perfect word, the one that sits well in the sentence and in our spines. It is regardless.
Regardless opens and echoes and is impressive – as if it had walked out of paradise and spoken its name for the first time, only to us. It is operating at that level of significance. As I said, impressive. It is one word with a kick which increases our respect for a whole language and for ourselves. It is both important and – apologies in advance – fucking beautiful. We have just made something fucking beautiful – the writer who found it, the rest of the writers who found the rest of the words, all of us, we have made beauty. And soon we will give it to other people, this very fine thing which is of us, but not us, like some magnificent bird we have coaxed inside to fly on our behalf. We are silent for a while and then very over-excited.
When a workshop works, you remember. When a workshop works, you learn. When a workshop works, you leave it with faith in the efficacy of your craft and yourself as a practitioner, in its ability to transcend itself, in humanity’s ability to transcend itself. But how often do workshops really work?
I have spent the last thirty years giving writing workshops. That is to say, I have spent three decades trying to use a communal, public instrument to help people perfect what is an individual and private, sometimes very private, craft. I have studied the form, attended workshops, heard about others, read about still more. My own workshops have taken place in settings from the oppressively tranquil to the moderately unwise, with participants ranging from highly experienced authors to tentative newcomers. Participants have included university students, non-literate groups, people with special needs, people with degenerative illnesses, prison inmates, the visually impaired, children, residents in elderly care and psychiatric facilities, adults in community groups and passers-by at arts events. In short, I have worked with a relatively wide spectrum of those who, for whatever reason, have chosen to spend time examining their own and others’ voices, who have an interest – no matter how small – in something which develops their expressions of themselves and their worlds and helps them find new ways of seeing and being. I have worked with those who wish, or hope, or intend to be heard. I remain uneasy with the workshop as a tool. It can undoubtedly be useful, but in its most widely accepted form it is almost completely unfit for its stated purpose and in any form it can invite laziness, calcified thinking and emotional abuse. In a climate which makes the ‘teaching’ of creative writing a low-cost source of revenue for a variety of organisations and institutions I am increasingly concerned that bad workshop practice and bad workshops are becoming the cornerstone of an industry which takes aspiring writers’ money while rendering them less able to be writers, or to enjoy the benefits of what we might call a writer’s mentality.
If we are writers, workshops are expected of us – often by people who are not writers and who do not understand what we do and how we do it. Worse still, we may be set mildly or wildly inappropriate tasks by those who think they do understand what we do and who will never take the trouble to find out they are wrong. But we may also not understand how best to use workshops, perhaps because we are busy and/or tired and/or scared and/or fundamentally interested in our own work rather than that of others. Perhaps we may have stopped trying to explore and expand what we do, perhaps it may never have occurred to us that we should. We may simply be earning money by delivering something which is, after all, expected of us, which fills timetables and makes libraries and community centres look slightly dynamic, something which is believed to be useful so strongly that whether it serves much purpose at all, whether it is in actuality destructive, has become irrelevant. This situation seems less than ideal.
What follows will mainly consist of questions which I hope will help us examine ourselves, our craft and the workshop as a medium in a constructive manner. I believe that if I have as clear a grasp as possible of my relationship with writing and myself as a writer and if I understand my aims and as much as I can about my workshop participants, then I have a chance of giving workshops that work. I believe a process of long-term interrogation can help us be better writers and give better workshops.
I will not be suggesting exercises. Exercises in general, games, snappy mnemonics, PowerPoint presentations, flipchart-bothering and the whole battery of workshop and masterclass strategies and gimmicks will only ever be as effective as the intentions and intelligence behind them. I would rather spend this time looking at what’s behind them. I believe this will represent the best use of our time. This is no more than my opinion – but for what it’s worth, it is very firmly held.
What do you believe writing is?
I know, this is a ludicrously huge question, but we can’t avoid answering it – even our ignoring it will be a kind of answer. Regularly asking this question means that, in the preparation of any workshop, we can learn more about our relationship with our craft, how our emphases are altering, if we really know as much as we think, and enough to allow us to distil our knowledge in ways that others can grasp. Do we seek to disguise our ignor-ance and bluff our way, to coast along with what we know already, or to push our understanding? I would suggest the last.
I currently believe that writing is a way of life, that it is a massively demanding discipline, that it is an almost irresistible source of enrichment, expression and change. I think it is possible and useful to use the workshop to show how writing can inform all other activities – including the workshop – and how all other activities can feed the writing. This means that I will often tend to deconstruct the workshop process as it progresses.
I believe writing is personal – personal to you and personal to me. This belief, like all my beliefs, affects how I run workshops: they can’t just be about an end product, or simply examining the utility and qualities of voices, tenses, constructions. My understanding would be that writing touches writers – professional and amateur – so deeply that, for example, issues of safety and intimacy need to be addressed from the outset, for the sake of the workshop and as a note for future writing. I think it’s legitimate and sensible to discuss workshop practice within the workshop, to ask people to be aware of whether they feel unsettled, manipulated, confused. I hope to allow participants to be both comfortable and happy to report anything that seems amiss, to warn them of bad practice they may encounter in the future – either from their own poor self-employment or from others, including myself. I feel that creating a place of safety from which to write is hugely useful for any writer. This means that I will discuss issues of confidence, doubt, fear, and means that the workshop must be manifestly safe. Threats and negative intrusions can’t come from me or from others, or must be swiftly dealt with if they do.
To choose a small example, I make a point of asking, ‘Does that make sense?’, when I have explained something to a group and I need to know if they have understood it. This seems to be the least threatening way of checking if we can all go forward. The wording of every question and comment directed to the group is important. I have witnessed more than enough encounters during which care assistants gatecrash sessions to bellow at participants, ‘What’s your address?’ For some group members, this is a humiliating question and something easy to get wrong. It is also irrelevant. Writing is usually and most interestingly about the questions only the writer can answer, our privileged knowledge, the certainty and creativity of ourselves. Writing isn’t about those questio
ns with which others bully you, although it may sometimes be a response to them. I have bitten my lip while tutors have fired off, ‘Do you understand?’ at students so often and so violently that their communal IQ has withered and the session has simply clotted into an exercise in self-defence. Just as ungenerous writing tends to be less effective, ungenerous workshops tend to communicate information poorly.
Any workshop leader can only bring groups to levels of intim-acy with which they are comfortable, but I have certainly run and observed workshops where participants have wept, where depths of experience have been shared – just as much as rooms have become helpless with laughter, or have pottered amicably. If emotional release is necessary, then I feel a tutor has to find a way of welcoming it, rather than locking it down – always with the emphasis on safety. This takes a degree of watchfulness, confidence and concentration, but is worthwhile.
What kind of person are you?
Without plunging off into chasms of self-analysis, I would hope I can assume that – if you are a writer – you have some level of personal awareness.
(If you are not a writer, I would rather you didn’t give writing workshops. Then again, if you fully commit yourself to the process of your workshops, you may become a writer . . . Allow me to assume that you are.)
As a writer, like any person behaving creatively, you will draw upon yourself to produce work. Again, it’s realistic to acknowledge this in others when we offer workshops. The fact that our work comes from ourselves (whether it is in any way autobiographical or not) is part of why revealing it to others can be so nerve-racking and why it is so deeply pleasant and positive if we can build something beautiful and realise it is appreciated beyond ourselves. We have to bear this in mind when we construct our workshops and help participants to engage without feeling over-exposed. Safe opportunities for sharing work, safe opportunities for creating work in real time and succeeding are to be maximised.
On Writing Page 25