Electricity in the Writing Workshop

The writing workshop is ostensibly a container for the democratic discussion of a piece of original writing in the hope that this will aid the writer in their development. But there is little consensus on how this works in reality.

Freud said that there were three impossible professions: psychoanalysis, teaching, and government. They bear some similarities to one another in that in each case the role is exceeded by the desires projected onto it.

Individual desires run into mass psychic currents and the necessary limitations of our innate humanness.

In the writing workshop, there is more free association than we admit, and there is more impossibility than the form officially allows.

Most creative writing teachers, myself included, have little formal training in pedagogy, and less in psychology. Our own years of practice and of acquiring technical skills, are what we pass on to others in the room.

But this is primarily energetic, not technical, work.

When done right, the workshop becomes electric. the facilitator becomes a container for the dangerous feelings that emerge into the space. They conduct and ground. They allow the currents to flow as safely as possible. They help to bring a writer one step closer to their vision.

The workshop is alive with feelings. They are provoked in the writers and in the tutor (and the writer-in-the-tutor who never quite leaves the room). There is hate and there is love. There is desire and envy and adoration and loathing.

Writing isn’t safe. The workshop amplifies this. No two workshops will ever be the same. Put a group of people in a room and you will provoke wild feelings.

I can no longer conduct energy at this pitch and intensity. I enjoy occasional teaching, where I can do this work with space around it.

And yet, every September I feel that pull, that tingle, that sense of a new year beginning and the opportunity to do intensive work in a sustained way; to make something new.

But I was blacking out too often, and, in the end, I could no longer ground myself.

In this phase of my life, I am microdosing that intensity. A taste is enough for now.

To everyone teaching. To everyone learning. However you can dose your impossibility. I see you. I love you. I envy you.

I desire what you have and more than anything I want you to have it.