Bait and Switch
You’d think an article subtitled Should Creative Writing Be Taught? would offer some useful assessment of this question. But Louis Menand’s article in The New Yorker’s summer fiction issue doesn’t. After evaluating Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard, 2009) about the effect of creative-writing programs on American fiction, Menand leaves his article’s subhead entirely unanswered.
After dancing around the question of instructor styles and personalities and some of the twentieth century’s most honored writers, both from creative writing programs and not, Menand reverts to a not particularly relevant digression to his personal experience in a creative writing program to dodge the question. Turns out, Menand really liked being in a creative writing program. And despite never publishing a poem and never again writing poems after grad school, “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Sheesh. That’s helpful.
This article, and the book reviewed, aren’t the sources you need to review if you’re considering whether a creative writing program might benefit you as a writer. I don’t know what those resources are, but you won’t find them here. And that’s a disappointment, especially since The New Yorker seems to be the pinnacle market for the workshop-generated short story.
If Menand was going to pose such a provocative question, he owed his readers at least an honest attempt at a credible answer.