;;;

I was just talking the other day about how I miss the deadlines and the structure of a writing workshop setting. This Rick Moody essay on writers and mentorship caught my attention.

"[John] Hawkes played favorites, which was bad; and he loved women a lot more than men, which was bad, too; and he allowed us to drink wine in class, which in my case was an incredibly bad idea, since I was developing a drinking problem. All these things were inadvisable, but what was not was the idea of emotional commitment to the process, a strong relationship between student and professor. These worked for me despite the difficulties."

...

"Now, once an audience begins to experience itself as a community with power, it begins to ask certain questions about stories. I'm sure that analogous questions are asked about poems and essays in workshops every day, but I have less expereince with those forms. Pardon me, then, if I confine myself to the kinds of questions that are a commonplace of the contemporary fiction workshop.

1. Does the story begin effectively?
2. Does the story end effectively?
3. Does the story have a conflict?
4. Does the story move from beginning to end?
5. Are the characters believable?
6. Are the characters likeable?
7. Is the story dramatic? Does drama help the story to move?
8. Who is narrating the story?
9. Is the language of the narrator effective?
10. Is the language in the way?
11. Does the story contain extraneous elements that can be removed?
12. If the story is told in the third person, should it be in the first, or vice versa?
13. Does the story have a theme?
14. Does it move effectively toward its theme?
15. Does the character experience an epiphany?
16. Are you moved?

This is just off the top of my head. Many other such questions can be imagined. To the extent that a student comes to expect these questions, or to the extent that he or she writes in expectation of them, the likely produce will be stories (or poems or essays) that reduce the chances of innovation, that ratify the workshop as a system, and that ratify the idea of the university but do little for the development of the form or for our language as a whole.

If I had to do it myself, I might instead ask questions like these:

1. Has the writer attempted to eliminate all adverbs?
2. Does this story prefer Anglo-Saxon words to Green and Latinate alternatives?
3. What's wrong with using a few more semicolons?
4. Does this story contain any sentences that you want to remember to your grave?
5. Would Samuel Beckett like this story? Would Gertrude Stein? Would Virginia Woolf?
6. How would this writer put paint on a canvas?
7. Is this writer using his or her eyes, or has he or she tried to use all the other senses--for example, the all-important literary sense of audition?
8. What would happen if you rearranged the sections of this piece at random?
9. Does this story like music?
10. Does this story answer the question "Why bother to write"?
11. Can this story save any lives?"

-Rick Moody, "Writers and Mentors" from the Atlantic Fiction Issue 2005

In other news,

Limeflower Pressé

Made by using fragrant English Limeflowers (from the Linden Tree) and pressed whole limes. The use of fresh limes provides a depth of flavor seldom found in a beverage. Blended with pure Canadian spring water and lightly carbonated, Limeflower Pressé provides a refreshing alternative beverage.



I want to bathe in a vat of this stuff.