THE RISE OF CREATIVE WRITING AND THE NEW VALUE OF CREATIVITY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY STEPHEN PETER HEALEY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THOMAS AUGST, CO-ADVISER; MARIA DAMON, CO-ADVISER JUNE 2009 Copyright, Stephen Peter Healey, June 2009 Acknowledgements “Movement 1.0 Thinking Outside Creative Writing” published as “The Rise of Creative Writing and the New Value of Creativity” in The Writer’s Chronicle , February 2009 (Volume 41, Number 4). i Table of Contents Prelude 0.0 The Most Beautiful Box of Cereal……………………………………………1 Movement 1.0 Thinking Outside Creative Writing…………………………………2 Interlude 1.1 Minus Sign……………………………………………………………………26 Movement 1.1 What Is Creative Literacy?..............................................................28 Interlude 2.0 A Genealogy of My Desire as a Creative Writing Student……………..44 Movement 2.0 A Genealogy of the Workshop……………………………………..58 Interlude 2.1 Among the Most Well-Educated Motherfuckers………………………….82 Movement 2.1 Workshop War Stories……………………………………………..83 Interlude 3.0 The Laws of Raining ………………………………………………….133 Movement 3.0 Creativity on the Inside: A Prison Pedagogy…………………….134 Interlude 4.0 The Corrected Text…………………………………………………………186 Movement 4.0 From Workshop to Collaborative Practice……………………….188 Interlude 5.0 Creative Consultant………………………………………………………..213 Movement 5.0 Advertising, Poetry, and American Contradiction……………….223 Interlude 5.1 The Ghost of My Candy……………………………………………………233 Movement 5.1 Towards a New Politics of Poetics………………………………..234 Interlude 5.2 Against Violence……………………………………………………………252 Movement 5.2 A Spectral Poetics………………………………………………....254 Postlude 6.0 Superfluous Hands…………………………………………………………..297 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………298 ii Prelude 0.0 The Most Beautiful Box of Cereal Someone should write a dissertation about how one face is more attractive than another, because it’s hard to explain how one face represents a more attractive idea, more desirable or useful, the way its eyes, the way its mouth just lies there like a small pretty sleeping animal. It’s like how after a movie the first thing I have to talk about is whether or not I liked it. Because it was really sad and funny at the same time. Did you like it less than the other movie, the one that was sexy and funny? Have you noticed that you can see the movie playing on the faces in the audience if you turn around in the movie theater? Something funny happens on the screen—everyone is running after an animal—and you can see it on all the faces. Someone should write a dissertation about that. From the Latin dissertare , “continue to discuss,” as if a discussion wanted to go on forever, words leading only to…more words. I notice that some discussions are about something and some are not. For example, there’s a discussion about the physical and spiritual benefits of ginger in my cereal. For example, there’s Peace Cereal Raspberry Ginger Crisp and there’s Nature’s Path Organic Optimum Zen Cranberry & Ginger (For Inner Harmony). I’m holding both boxes and I have to choose one. Both have ginger coupled with a tasty red berry, but only one has Peace and only one has Zen. Have you noticed that cereal comes in a bag that is itself inside a box? When you think of a cereal, you think of the box, and when you finish eating the cereal, the box is still there. It’s like the face of the cereal, and it’s so attractive that even when you put the box in the bin to be recycled, it’s still there. It’s even in your sleep, like a face that you sleep with. 1 Movement 1.0 Thinking Outside Creative Writing 2 The Trouble with Institutional Success Why so much anxiety about Creative Writing? Those who position themselves outside this academic field often attack it with polemical venom; those willing to admit they're insiders often seem defensive or embarrassed. Perhaps the anxiety would be less noticeable if the field weren't growing so robustly. Particularly in the last several decades, it has flourished into a stable institutional entity. Like pioneer towns that have filled up a once-empty map with dots, Creative Writing programs have been established at most reputable colleges and universities across the U.S. Academia is not only willing to give Creative Writing a prominent place in the humanities, it's expected by now to have already done so. According to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), the total number of degree programs in Creative Writing, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, has increased from 80 in 1975, to 790 in 2008 (Fenza, “A Brief History”). The rate of growth is fairly evenly distributed across this three decade span, so there's no sign of the growth subsiding. The only limit on this field’s expansion, it appears, is the finite number of existing institutions where Creative Writing programs can set up shop. Anxiety about the field often focuses on one perplexing, contentious question: why has this boom been occurring? If it's true that students want to take classes and earn degrees in Creative Writing, and that administrators are giving the students what they want, what produces this popularity and legitimacy? Why has the experience of writing creatively acquired such a high value in the academic world? It's now commonplace to bash the field’s success, in particular to 3 accuse it of killing literature by building an ivy-covered wall between literature and a public who no longer reads it, or just by producing too much bad writing. My purpose here is not to join this chorus of naysayers; in fact, I applaud AWP executive director David Fenza, the field’s most notable defender, for responding to these critiques and demonstrating how flimsy they can be. I think Creative Writing classes and degree programs should not only exist, they should thrive. They provide excellent educational and professional opportunities, and I myself have benefited enormously from them as both student and teacher. I also think there's plenty of compelling literary writing being made these days, even if it does have a tiny audience. What has been missing from the impressive success story of Creative Writing is an equally strong attention to its pedagogy and theory; in other words, the field has tended to avoid thinking about how it teaches and what assumptions it has about language and literature. This lack, I argue, is tied to a larger confusion about Creative Writing’s situation in American society—particularly about why this academic field is growing while literary reading, according to a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts study, is in "dramatic decline” (United States). The answer, simply put, is that the kind of creative skills practiced in Creative Writing are valued because they're increasingly used as a productive force in the post-industrial knowledge economy. Books of poetry and fiction may not sell well, but creativity and "thinking outside the box" have become primary tools for production in the American theater of the global economy. This doesn't mean that the field is an insidious agent of capitalism and that its students and teachers are controlled by this system. It means that Creative Writing has much more social and economic relevance than is commonly perceived, and that the field has remarkable opportunities to shape the conditions not only of literary production, but more broadly, the production of everyday language. 4 Thinking Outside Creative Writing Those who have an opinion about this academic field often talk about it as if it were a kind of inexplicable enclave, separate from the major social dynamics of recent decades. The defenders often argue that it thrives as a humanistic alternative to a cliché-saturated consumer culture and to a specialized jargon-ridden liberal arts curriculum. Those who critique it often argue that Creative Writing diminishes the power and public relevance of literature: while traditionalists accuse the field of failing to encourage public appreciation of a selective literary canon, critics associated with the avant-garde accuse Creative Writing of failing to fight against oppressive institutional or corporate forces. Both kinds of censure suggest that higher education prevents average people from accessing the real benefits of literary activity. These critiques also tend to condemn Creative Writing for fostering an opportunistic careerism, a bloated bureaucracy throwing scraps of meat to wanna-be writers who've built the most impressive CVs. But even these arguments about the field's frenzied professionalization frame it as a subsidized industry artificially protected by the academy. John Barr, president of the enormously well-endowed Poetry Foundation, for example, recently bemoaned the expansion of MFA programs, arguing that the awful effect is too much poetry with too little variety, "a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor—and I stress this quality—entertaining; a poetry that both starves and flourishes on academic subsidies.” There's a pervasive assumption, I think, that the growth of this field is a kind of paradox, an institutional anomaly whereby higher education mysteriously provides a safe haven to literary writers seeking refuge from the decline of literature's value in the marketplace, as if these institutions were devoted to conserving endangered disciplines rather than rewarding those disciplines that are popular among students. It's true, of course, that readership for traditional categories of literature, especially poetry, is remarkably small despite the growth of Creative Writing programs. But this becomes a less perplexing enigma if we consider that being skilled at using language creatively has become 5 a valuable asset for a wide range of jobs. In fact, a number of recent books that analyze the global economy—some of them bestsellers—provide abundant evidence that creativity is becoming a crucial means of production as well as a product for consumption.