TW: mention of child abuse (no details)
I had several creative writing workshops at university, and they were usually the courses where I bonded with people the most. It was almost inevitable. Sharing flawed creative attempts is one of the most vulnerable things you can do, even if they are not autobiographical. This vulnerability meant that much rested on the instructor’s ability to foster a culture of acceptance and safe risk-taking.
The most memorable example of this happened in a poetry workshop in my final year. The way these usually worked is there would be a weekly assignment, and each of us would produce something and print copies. At each meeting we would distribute copies of new work to be read at home, then take turns reading aloud our work that was distributed last time, and getting feedback from each other.
At one such meeting, one of the students whom I’ll call Sally, started reading her piece aloud. In this case it was autobiographical, an intense poem involving a memory of abuse by one of her parents. Sally got through about half of it before she stopped reading and started to cry, apologizing through her tears.
There were about twenty of us sitting around the table and I think we all found ourselves unequipped for this situation. There were some vaguely supportive noises. We all wanted to help, but we weren’t quite close enough to Sally to offer a hug or know what form of support might be best.
After a moment our instructor, an accomplished Canadian poet I’ll call Jeff, cleared his throat and began with equal awkwardness and gentleness, “Sally, uh, you know you’ve shared something quite profound with us today, and that makes me feel good — I mean, it makes me feel that you trust us. If we’re going to continue, we need your permission to enter into this memory. Do you want to continue?”
I actually can’t remember now what Sally decided, but this was enough to get her back on her feet, emotionally. I realize now that the reason the rest of us froze was probably that we wanted to help but didn’t know a way to be supportive that didn’t seem disempowering for Sally. My instinct was to be soft and comforting, but Jeff gave her none of that. It wasn’t what she really needed. All he did was lend her some of his dignity and put the power back in her hands about what to do next. The gesture also validated the idea that we can bring difficult emotions to the workshop if we choose.
This was about 2009, a few years before I began hearing the discourse of consent in regular conversations. I was wrapping up a university career that had begun very differently, with a single semester in the theatre program. I started to think I’d chosen the wrong path right around the third meeting of my acting class, when the instructor told another student to kiss me on the mouth during a practice scene, then showed irritation when we hesitated. The message I was getting at the time was that I was just not cut out for real acting, given that I was introverted, not comfortable kissing strangers, etc.
What if Jeff’s response to Sally’s distress had been different? What if he had simply said, “Let’s take a break, shall we?” Or worse, “This may be too raw to bring to the workshop, Sally.” Or even worse, “What are you waiting for? Keep reading.” The message sent would have been (respectively), “Share at your own risk”, or “You were foolish to take a risk”, or “Your feelings don’t matter.”
It’s a shame any time a given professional field is presumed to have a “type”. Acting is often seen as the exclusive domain of extraverts, and there are those who see poetry as the realm of stoic intellectuals. In my experience, these stereotypes are actually just the mechanism of passing trauma from one generation to the next, while depriving fields of the rich contributions that a greater diversity of people could have made. See also: should you love code
The memory of my 2009 workshop still sets the bar in my mind for how a senior artist can make room for a new one, without gatekeeping about what kind she ought to be.