On Felicia Rose Chavez's "The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop"
Because I'm teaching a workshop in March!
Hello, friends!
This month, I spent a lot of time prepping for a six-week fiction workshop that I’ll be teaching in March and April, through the MetroWest Writers’ Guild.
I’m really excited! I’ve taught semester-long creative writing workshops to undergraduates, as well as shorter, one-hour workshops to adults and teens, and I’m looking forward to teaching in a format that lets me merge both modes. In my opinion, there’s a dearth of rigorous, academic-style workshops offered for adults outside of the degree-granting context. One of my primary goals is to close that gap a bit.
The workshop will run from March 20 through April 24, from 7:30pm to 9:00pm EST on Wednesdays, on Zoom. Tuition is $175. Check it out on the workshop’s registration page – registration closes on March 15, so definitely take a look before then if you’re interested!
As part of my preparation, I reread Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, which is what I want to talk about today.
Also upcoming:
News
My short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” will be published in Diabolical Plots in 2024.
My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in 2024.
My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in late 2024 or early 2025.
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Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop
I had read The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop about a year ago, but I wanted to revisit it while updating my syllabus.
The book is a response to the thesis statement that “silencing writers is central to the traditional writing workshop model,” which is true. You can read more about the history of the standard workshop model in this excellent Tor.com article by S. L. Huang. (Here I want to interject that for better or worse, I do have have a bit of a soft spot for the traditional model 😬. I’ve been sitting in workshops of that sort since I was eighteen! But the model also has some pretty obvious weaknesses, and besides, anything that hasn’t been updated since the early 1900s is at least worth looking hard at.)
In order to undo this paradigm, Chavez constructs her own workshop model from the ground up. Her workshop attempts to create a “safe space for creative concentration,” wherein “safe” is defined as “a student’s right to retain their own authority, integrity, and personal artistic preferences throughout the creative writing process.” The book is her explanation of how to teach such a workshop yourself.
It kicks off with a bit of biography (not unlike the otherwise very different On Writing, lol) and then outlines methods for: decolonizing student recruitment and retention; creating a reading practice and reading lists; teaching the language of craft; teaching students how to provide critique; conferencing; and promoting camaraderie. It’s a robust, well-researched book, describing a method that Chavez has herself put into practice for years. It contains a lot of amazing ideas for anyone who’s ever felt constrained by the standard writing workshop, which does indeed involve the writer sitting quietly while a bunch of strangers lob opinions about their work around the table.
I think the book benefits a lot from Chavez’s directive to “[a]pply the lot or pick and choose, individualizing a model that best serves your vision.” So, here are the nuggets that best serve my teaching vision. I’m eager to incorporate these into my syllabus, and to try them out myself:
A mentality shift from product to process. Chavez writes:
A product-based mentality supports academic experts as independent egos, gendered masculine, hard, and powerful.... This [part of the book] trains workshop leaders in… a practice that honors process: Who writes, and why, and where, and when, and how? This, so different from what we write, but nonetheless important. Passivity is not an option. Writers must actively address the physical mental, emotional, and cultural barriers that prevent their full creative realization.
I love this. And I love the idea of acknowledging, and cultivating in my students an active awareness of, the importance of taking care of ourselves – because it’s important, and because that’s the best way to get the best writing done.
There’s a great exercise in the third chapter of this book around making time and space for inspiration in one’s day-to-day life. It’s a quick exercise, and I think beneficial for any student, or accomplished writer, or, frankly, human being who feels like they just have too much damn stuff to do.
There’s another a great exercise where Chavez has her students freewrite for 10 minutes and then revise what they’ve written for 10 minutes. I love this equal weighting of writing and revision – and I love keeping it to twenty minutes, which fits neatly into a classroom space or a daily schedule.
Full disclosure, I don’t plan to incorporate this next one into the March workshop, but I love the idea of having students contribute the readings to the syllabus.
Finally, I love the idea of teaching students how to critique. So often, people show up to their first workshop and they don’t really know how to read critically and then articulate that criticism in a useful way, and no one tells them how. (I think it took me several workshops to get the hang of this.) Chavez uses Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. I like Mary Robinette Kowal’s worksheet on manuscript critiques.
Overall, so much of teaching creative writing – or teaching anything – or just being alive – is about listening and being open, instead of purely aiming to instill. It’s about coming, as a teacher, from a place of vulnerability rather than ego. It’s about recognizing that the student already knows, on a conscious or subconscious level, what it is that they want to do, and you and the workshop space are just helping them get there.
Anyway, I’m excited to do more of that in March!!!!