Periodically, I’ll be posting short discussions with writers and teachers of creative nonfiction whom I admire. The first of these discussions is with Maureen P. Stanton, who happens to have been my dissertation director at the University of Missouri-Columbia and whose book Killer Stuff and Tons of Money—now available in paperback—was called “a treasure-trove of a book” by Kirkus Reviews.
William Bradley: What would you say is the most challenging thing about teaching creative nonfiction?
Maureen Stanton: I’d say that the most challenging aspect of teaching CNF is to help students write works that readers will care about, and to understand that it’s not enough to just relate a story—after all, everyone has a story but why should readers choose to read this piece of writing among all the options available? This is not something that I emphasize too much with undergraduates, who are just trying their hands at the genre and gaining practical writing skills, and who generally aren’t ambitious about publishing their work or even thinking about publishing. But with graduate students, it’s difficult to raise this subject because mentioning the “Why should I or anyone care?” question feels like a personal criticism, or at least is sounds harsh. I should add that I don’t express this thought in those blunt terms exactly —“Why should I care what happened to you?”—because that is destructive and difficult criticism to hear about one’s own work. But it is the central question of creative nonfiction, especially memoir, and sometimes it is the only question left to ask in an otherwise accomplished piece of writing. The good news is that there are many ways to make any individual essay or memoir reach beyond being a well-written conveyance of an experience, even though dealing with the “who cares” aspect may also be the most difficult thing to learn as well as to teach.
William Bradley: That idea of asking students to think about why their readers should care about the events and ideas they write about calls to mind Natalia Rachel Singer’s essay “Nonfiction in First Person, Without Apology,” where she says that the question facing the nonfiction writer isn’t “Who cares?” but “Why do you care?” I’ve cribbed that line in class, “Why do you care about this? I can’t care until you show me why it matters so much.” I think sometimes students enter the nonfiction workshop thinking that their personal stories will be compelling simply because they matter so much to them.
Which leads me to my next question: People have accused young people today of being more narcissistic than previous generations, using social media to record the minutia of their daily lives as if they’re being followed as closely as Kanye or Rihanna. I don’t know if I think my students are more narcissistic than I was at 19, but I definitely think that our current students have grown up with this technology that sort of promotes the idea of revealing the self—or some aspect of the self—in a public forum. Do you think that the type of “exhibitionism” encouraged by social media might have impact on student work written for a creative nonfiction class?
Maureen Stanton: That’s a really interesting question, about which I think the jury is still out. But I can see it going both ways. Creative nonfiction is a genre that draws from the individual’s experiences, thoughts, musings, imaginations, emotions, etc. So the notion that the “self” as appropriate and rich for exploration, and to some extent, performance, would be perhaps more acceptable to this generation raised on self-exposure through social media.
As a creative nonfiction writer, at the beginning of my career I often felt a need to apologize for writing about myself or my life (and tried to suppressed that urge to apologize so as not to buy into any sense that such an endeavor is lesser, or suspect in any way; obviously it’s not but there has been that stigma). So a positive result of social media exhibitionism might be the removal of any stigma about seeking and/or using the self as a source for art. The negative result would stem from the fact that social media communication is so shallow, almost the antithesis of good memoir or essay writing, which requires going deep, waiting, mulling, meditating and discovering wisdom to share. I think the short answer is that the desire to share stories and exhibit your life is a useful and interesting impulse (like my mother talking across the laundry line, so to speak, with other neighborhood mothers), and can help build a sense of community and communion, but social media may be too expeditious, too self-conscious of performance and hierarchy (or other unrelated–to-art goals) to yield deeper meaning and connectedness in the way that great essays and memoirs can.
William Bradley: I was thinking about the idea of persona in an essay, or developing one’s voice, and how some of the students I’ve become “friends” with on Facebook or who I follow on Twitter seem to unconsciously (I think) develop their own online identities—I had a student who was always very shy and retiring in all of my interactions with him, but to see his Twitter account, you’d think he was James Bond or John Shaft, what with all the talk of his own sexual prowess. How much do you focus on developing the student’s voice and persona in a creative nonfiction class? Do you have any strategies or assignments that are useful for this purpose? Does your approach differ in an undergraduate vs. graduate workshop?
Maureen Stanton: That’s a really interesting observation about the performance of the self on social media, with the protection of impersonal communication, or messages tailored to a particular audience—your hip friends. Since I’m not “friends” on Facebook with too many of my undergraduates, I haven’t experienced anyone demonstrating a split personality that way. As far as helping students develop voice or persona, I don’t set out to teach students this skill, per se, at least I haven’t yet. (This is making me think I should develop some “voice” exercises.) With undergraduates, the focus is still on the mechanics, the basics of the genre, so something as subtle and potentially tricky to master as “voice” hasn’t been my focus. I think that my comments on their essays probably alert them to sections where the writing has successfully created a distinct voice or a mood or tone (which can suggest a persona or voice). Or the opposite: they are trying too hard to establish a voice and it’s clearly not their own; they are imitating Kerouac or Agee or David Foster Wallace, or trying too hard to be funny or cute or revealing, but it’s obvious that it’s not authentic. I applaud the effort to try out someone else’s voice, as you can learn through mimesis and experimentation, as long as you discover, recognize, develop or return to your own voice or persona.
Graduate students seem to have it under control; they know who they are, and they have distinct voices that I can see and hear in their writing.
William Bradley: You’ve been teaching for a few years now—if I’m not mistaken, you started teaching at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the fall of 2005 (I remember, because I was on the search committee that interviewed you at MLA less than two weeks before my wedding). If you had advice to give to someone just starting her career teaching creative nonfiction—maybe even the Maureen Stanton of seven years ago—what would it be?
Maureen Stanton: Yes, I began teaching in 2005 at University of Missouri, and I’ve learned a lot through mistakes, mostly issues particular to the odd task of “critiquing someone’s life.” Perhaps my mistakes will be helpful to new teachers. For teaching undergraduates, I’d say that it is important to talk to students about what is appropriate to present to workshop right at the beginning of the course, when reviewing the syllabus. I hadn’t really made this clear enough, but then I had a student who wrote about her attempted suicide that was still too fresh. (She withdrew from the university later that term due to depression.) Prior to that, I had thought that any subject was fine to write about. I didn’t want to be too restrictive or controlling, but after that, I realized that while it might have been therapeutic for her to write about her experience, it was not a great idea to share it in the workshop. The subject was too tender and awkward for the group. They handled it really well, but nobody felt like they could actually provide literary criticism of this piece, so why bring it to a workshop? In future classes, I was very clear about what is appropriate and useful to bring to workshop. That single experience with the student who was suffering from depression was a moment when I truly felt I’d let the class down, and that student, too, by putting everyone in an awkward position.
For teaching graduate students, I sort of caved in a bit to what they wanted to do in the course (not much reading, no exercises), because I remember that I wanted that sort of studio approach to a workshop. I knew my topic and my project and I just wanted to be left alone to work on it and then get comments. So I became sensitive to this criticism in the evaluations at the end of the term. But in hindsight, I think it is useful and appropriate to have rigorous reading and exercises in a graduate workshop. Graduate students can be too comfortable in a groove with their writing (especially if they’ve had some publishing success) and be less willing to break out of that comfort/competence zone. I do recall hating exercises in workshops in my M.F.A. program, but I have to admit that all the exercises I did turned into published essays, gave me new techniques, and generated new material. At the time, I didn’t appreciate this connection. And what is sometimes hard to grasp is that in graduate school, you have time to read rich, difficult, challenging books. Once you get a job with a full teaching load, I think it becomes much more difficult to find the time for self-selected reading beyond reading the books on your syllabi.