Fiction Workshop Research Articles

‘Help!? My students created an evil AI’: on the irony of speculative methods and design fiction

ABSTRACT This article contributes to moving forward current discourses about speculative methods by explaining how they can become critical in practice. It explores how the collaborative construction of speculative technological solutions (in this case relating to AI in education) can reveal an implicit acceptance of restricting imaginaries. In three design fiction workshops, a total of 36 teacher students were given the task to create an AI-powered technical solution to a self-identified and urgent problem in education. These design workshops revealed several interesting ‘ironies’ relevant to both actual technical development as well as speculative methods about technological futures. The ironies include an ‘ironic imitation’ of the discourses and norms that are perceived as surrounding contemporary technology. These workshops further reveal and question discourses about desirable learning, and as such these ironies are productive in illuminating power asymmetries, thereby creating space for important failures, resistances, and disruptions.

Towards a Conceptual Model of Users’ Expectations of an Autonomous In-Vehicle Multimodal Experience

People are expected to have more opportunities to spend their free time inside the vehicle with advanced vehicle automation in the near future. This will enable people to turn their attention to desirable activities other than driving and to have varied in-vehicle interactions through multimodal ways of conveying and receiving information. Previous studies on in-vehicle multimodal interactions primarily have focused on making users evaluate the impacts of particular multimodal integrations on them, which do not fully provide an overall understanding of user expectations of the multimodal experience in autonomous vehicles. The research was thus designed to fill the research gap by posing the key question “What are the critical aspects that differentiate and characterise in-vehicle multimodal experiences?” To answer this question, five sessions of design fiction workshops were separately conducted with 17 people to understand the users’ expectations of the multimodal experience in autonomous vehicles. Twenty-two subthemes of users’ expected tasks of multimodal experience were extracted through thematic analysis. The research found that two dimensions, attention and duration, are critical aspects that impact in-vehicle multimodal interactions. With this knowledge, a conceptual model of the users’ in-vehicle multimodal experience was proposed with a two-dimensional spectrum, which populates four different layers: sustained, distinct, concurrent, and coherent. The proposed conceptual model could help designers understand and approach users’ expectations more clearly, allowing them to make more informed decisions from the initial stages of the design process.

Future Mobility Scenarios with Design Fiction: Autonomous Vehicles as Social Agents

This article aims to envisage a future world with Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) from a speculative perspective and uses design fiction as a method. Even though there are future studies about how AVs are going to be operators in the traffic by taking the role of the driver, this article suggests that AVs are going to be referred not only as transportation vehicles but also, they will become a part of social life through their increased agencies. We argue that this might be a significant concern for the areas that are in relation with the design of AVs considering socio-technical transitions towards future. Two design fiction workshops with designers were organised to develop future scenarios including AVs. As a result, the scenarios created by designers were analysed and characteristics of the scenarios were identified considering the social and contextual aspects of the storyworlds. Finally, the study discusses design considerations for AVs based on the future contexts and lifestyles as well as the social role that AVs can fill by changing the meaning of journey in the future scenarios.

When Design Fiction Meets Geospatial Sciences to Create a More Inclusive Smart City

Smart cities are especially suited for improving urban inclusion by combining digital transition and social innovation. To be smart, a city has to provide every citizen with urban spaces, public services, and common goods that are effectively affordable, whatever the citizen’s gender, culture, origin, race, or impairment. Based on two design workshops, the “Vibropod” and the “Pointe-aux-Lièvres”, this paper aims at highlighting the contributions of design fiction to the improvement of the spatial capability of hearing impaired people. This research draws its originality from both its conceptual framework, built on an interdisciplinary and intersectoral composition of arts and sciences, and its operational approach, based on the use of the DeafSpace markers and the TRIZ theory (Russian acronym for Inventive Problem Solving Theory) principles. The two design fiction workshops demonstrate that considering the singularity of the human being as an actual acoustic material constitutes an innovative opportunity to improve the role of universal design in a smart city project. By reversing the classic posture, and defining disability by looking at characteristics of the environment rather than as limits of the people themselves (their bodies or their senses), this research proposes an innovative way of addressing smart city inclusivity issues. This paper shows how increasing spatial enablement and having better control of spatial skills can offer deaf people new skills to improve the use of technology in support of urban mobility, as well as give them tools for feeling safer in urban environments.

Guru of Words and Loss

Guru of Words and Loss Erin H. Davis (bio) Underground Women Jesse Lee Kercheval University of Wisconsin Press www.uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5859.htm 158 Pages; Print, $16.95 The undergraduate fiction workshop, peculiar in its own unwavering conformity, preaches the necessity of the essential, the overwhelming need for writers to consider the world in three prime colors. Simplicity is emphasized, sentences are chopped and modified to express the roots of our learning—noun, verb, direct object. A powerful practice, especially in the wake of Raymond Carver, of William Keepers Maxwell Jr., "echoes of Hemingway" in each line. Word count looms. And although "being misunderstood" is the personality en vogue, authors walk the line to do quite the opposite. It is the job of the fashionable writer to look forward, to avoid the reader's desperate mining into purple prose. All must be "genre-less" (although realism is the word in which they look for), a mantra quoted to mundanity. And at the beginning of each year, students witness some sort of surrealist or quasi-fantastical text thrown back at an undergrad for its sheer inability to mock modern prose. A rite of passage to witness this, and more so to be on the receiving end. Jesse Lee Kercheval experienced this firsthand when she turned in "A Clean House" and "Tertiary Care," stories which both appear in her latest short-story collection, Underground Women. "I left the classroom," she states, "not knowing if I could trust my ability to choose and over but. My husband said I shook my head in my sleep, muttering, No, no." Rather than give in to the popularity of realism, the practice of taking the mundane and calling out its own mundanity, she creates in the wake of authors such as George Saunders. Yet it would be unfair to mark her as a writer of science fiction. Nor would it be quite right to compare her to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose characters creep into delusion. Kercheval writes on the half-line, allowing the reader into the mind of the characters she nurtures, acknowledging the truth behind what they say despite the unconventional way in which they say it. Surreal, possibly. Mimicking the human experience, undoubtedly. Eleven stories, all tragically similar in their beauty, Kercheval gracefully signing away the physicality and mentality of her darlings with tragedies so commonplace, so hauntingly beautiful. A poet, a novelist, a memoirist, a translator, an editor—a storyteller. She is the author of thirteen books, winning countless prizes such as the Alex Award from the American Library Association, the Dorset Prize, and the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction. That is only a small sliver of her accomplishments, of how she can fit a lifetime into a single story. And the stories, themselves, are important. Kercheval demands that her plot arcs arrive at sudden turns, her dramatic climaxes beginning from page one, or wrapping up in a single paragraph. Her characters are just as surprising despite their seeming ordinariness. All this achieved by her ability to transform a single word into an object of relish. All is lyric. Ordinary moments, like drinking on the Sabbath, turn pivotal. It was touching and sincere and very different than my lukewarm Methodist upbringing had led me to expect from the Sunday choice between piety and sin. Half listening to the abbot and Karl, I caught in their malts and hops and bitters and strongs the shading and nuances of a sort of theology. Punctuation be damned. Life, unlike the period, is not categorized into clear-cut cubby holes. It goes on in spirals that take left turns at random. In reading, her stories become a sort of magical realism, even historic fiction although they do not aim to be so. It is as if her stories merely fall into certain categories. Dipping their toes, more like. Yet, after all, the best stories are "genre-less," are they not? Historically, many of her stories are ambiguous, once again bolstering the idea that a story's setting is not the crux of the text. The best historic tales are, after all, not based around the history itself. In fact, "A Story...

AS SUTILEZAS DA VEROSSIMILHANÇA E AS VARIAÇÕES DA REALIDADE

Relembrando algumas lições de Victor Giudice, ministradas durante uma oficina de ficção, a autora faz uma reflexão acerca do papel da verossimilhança na elaboração do discurso realista nos diferentes contextos das principais manifestações da literatura realista, desde o romance do século xix até as narrativas hiper-realistas da pós-modernidade. O ensaio tem por objetivo analisar o conto “O Museu Darbot” como exemplo de arte contemporânea hiper-realista, no sentido que Hal Foster confere a esta denominação, isto é, como arte que adota um modelo de representação que é, concomitantemente, referencial e simulacral.

The Gatekeeper

The Gatekeeper Steve Yates (bio) The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life Charles J. Shields University of Texas Press www.utpress.utexas.edu 320 pages; Cloth, $29.95 John Williams authored Augustus (1972), which shared the National Book Award for fiction, and Stoner (1965), which is now a globally admired American novel. Williams would demand that this review initiate a contract with the reader. He would strain to say that this review must declare its purpose and the rules of its universe and how that world will operate preferably in the first paragraph or at least by the end of the first page. I know this for certain because I was one of twelve graduate students in his last fiction workshop taught at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Williams would also insist that I eliminate “would” and all past subjunctive. “Have the character do something once, and we know it is always the case.” Charles J. Shields, author of The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life, does not mention this final workshop so near Williams’ death. In a teaching career that spanned forty-three years and multiple universities, that spring semester workshop in 1991 might only be notable for being his last, if it were notable at all. However, out of those twelve students, six I know of each went on to publish multiple books of fiction, nonfiction, and/or poetry with houses large and small. It is both traumatizing and enriching to read a good biography of a writer who taught so well and about whom we at that conference table knew so very little. None of us came to the creative writing program at Arkansas specifically to learn from him. Cajoled from retirement in the Ozarks, he agreed to fill in for faculty member William Harrison, who was begging to remain in Hollywood. We were more fortunate than we knew. And yet we should’ve known. Starting in 1988 University of Arkansas Press (a downhill stroll from that workshop table) reprinted Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing (1960), and then Nothing But the Night (1948), and finally in 1995, Augustus. Surely some Roman of Caesar Augustus’s day left us a couplet of counsel that our heroes were best never met. But then Shields points out Williams who, much like his best known character, assistant professor Stoner, was difficult to know and particularly hard to cast as heroic. I aim, then, in this review to do some of what a good biography, such as The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, does. With aid from comrades I intend to help us remember John Williams more clearly and more fully, and to let you know some of what you will get if you read this worthwhile biography. “He was sick, which was obvious to anyone, and he was tired, also obvious,” my classmate Brad Barkley, author of Money, Love (2000); Another Perfect Catastrophe (2004); Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual (2004); and many others, recalled. Williams suffered from COPD, and despite requiring oxygen, he continued smoking. He died of respiratory failure in 1994, less than three years after completing our workshop. “But what most impressed me was the love in his voice when he would read aloud—with barely the breath to do it—a favorite passage from, say, Madame Bovary. How his voice lingered over, savored each word. And I took away from that to always think of sentences that way. Each word counts. I wanted to write the kind of fiction that John Williams would read aloud with love in his voice.” Shields discovers and conveys the young life of Williams, a Texan from such hard circumstances that the family explained his biological father’s absence in what became the son’s elaborate first fiction. Born in 1922, Williams worked and studied his way through the Great Depression in cattle and oil country, but did so as an artistic type in a silk scarf and checked coat, like Ronald Colman in A Tale of Two Cities, a glorious detail Shields provides. Shields explores...

An Every Time Revelation

An Every Time Revelation Joseph Bates (bio) There's no other book of fiction I've reread as often as Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (1992). I first read it as a graduate student in Brock Clarke's fiction workshop at Clemson University, too many years ago, and I still own that copy, the small black HarperPerennial 1993 paperback which has taken on almost totemic status. The margins are marked up with my continual amazement at how much beauty could exist within a book about terrible people doing terrible things, which was a revelation to me. It's still a revelation, every time I read it. And there are many terrible things that happen in the book, linked stories narrated by a junkie given only the name "Fuckhead"—"It's a name that's going to stick," a character berates him—whose addiction has rewired those synapses that might've allowed him to live a functional life. Fuckhead hustles, steals welfare checks, strips copper wire from abandoned homes, and does far worse in search of a fix, and he surrounds himself with similarly lost and broken people, the kind who might seem like a brother one moment and beat you with a lead pipe the next. But the lurid or violent turns the book takes—we're witness to shootings, assaults, fatal overdoses, botched robberies, and more—aren't what I think of when I think of Jesus' Son. These aren't the moments I marked with astonishment, certainly, as there's nothing particularly surprising in watching bad people behave badly. That is, broadly, what we expect them to do. What we don't expect—and shame on us—is for an addict to be capable of the insight, awareness, and even open sentiment we find at the beginning of "Two Men." Fuckhead describes a thwarted holdup that's left one of his false friends abandoned to face the consequences: "We bailed him out later, and still later all the charges against him were dropped, but we'd torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that." Or the turnaround we get at the end of "Dundun," after Fuckhead spends paragraphs warning us of the title character's cruelty and violence, then begins the final paragraph by asking, "Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart?" We don't expect an addict to document the world with the rich perception of a poet, yet every page has lines and images that startle: Midwestern clouds that hang in the sky "like great gray brains," or sheetrock that pries from a wall "with a noise like old men coughing." Nor do we expect a story collection to read with the force and arc of a novel, or for an author to write about the profane in such a way that the sacred never feels far away, but this is Johnson's accomplishment in Jesus' Son. It's a book I always read with a pen in hand, no matter how many times I've read it before because it always hits me with the same sense of wonder as the first. Joseph Bates Joseph Bates is the author of Tomorrowland: Stories. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Copyright © 2018 American Book Review

Callaloo and the Creative Writing Workshop

Callaloo and the Creative Writing Workshop* A.H. Jerriod Avant (bio), Gregory Pardlo (bio), Vievee Francis (bio), Ravi Howard (bio), Helen Elaine Lee (bio), Desiree Bailey (bio), Jeremy M. Clark (bio), Ama Codjoe (bio), and Jonterri Gadson (bio) AVANT: Offering workshops across the Black Diaspora, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop is held at Brown University in Providence, RI, University of West Indies in Cave Hill, and the University of Oxford in England. It’s a transformative workshop like no other I have witnessed. Today we have Helen Elaine Lee, Vievee Francis, Ravi Howard, and Gregory Pardlo to speak on the workshops as the poetry and fiction workshop leaders. I suggest that each of these speakers will offer insight into their own pedagogy and role as workshop leaders, and testify to the importance of the workshop to the growing mission of Callaloo as a journal, the workshop as a life changing entry point for many new writers at any age into the field of literature, and the outstanding mentorship that often times develops as a result of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. We will give each speaker ten or so minutes, give or take, however long or short you feel like speaking, and after the speakers, we will exchange seats with our four respondents. So whoever wants to go kick this off. PARDLO: There are a number Callaloo alum here who will testify, so I feel like I am being redundant a bit, but there is nothing like, and this is not grandstanding, there is nothing like the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop anywhere, anywhere. Not undergraduate level, not at a summer workshop level. What makes Callaloo’s so unique is—there’s a phrase that came up, I’m pretty sure it was mine, that we practice to describe it—it’s radical individualism. So we’ve had many years of the collective, the importance of the collective, very productive years where the notion was our work should serve some collective social goal or agenda. And we aren’t dispensing with that at all, but we’re moving the question more towards, we are empowering the individual to interpret that question. So I think a lot of times in many of the workshops that I have been in, and the expectation I find that people have coming into the workshop, is that the poem is out there, and we will just tinker with the poem, we’ll shift the line break here, we’ll play with the diction there. When the question we should be asking and the question that we do ask at Callaloo is: why are you writing this poem? Why does this poem need to exist? What is this poem contributing to the world that we don’t already have? If the poem is confirming things that we already [End Page 38] believe about society, about each other, about how humans operate, then how do you justify the poem? So we will go through the poem and there will be an errant line in the poem that stands out for whatever reason. I often call it the sore thumb moment. And in a typical workshop, the workshop leader would say, “Well you need to get rid of this. This doesn’t fit. This isn’t working.” And I think our philosophy is rather: there is something unique going on here where you clearly let your guard down and this is the place where we need to investigate. What happened here? How did this thing intrude upon the poem? So rather than—again, this is more towards this notion of individualism—rather than smooth the poem out, we ask the hard questions. Though I don’t think people can ask at a university workshop, because they’re personal. They’re probing. They’re revealing. And so we demand a level of trust, and I’m absolutely confident in saying we earn a level of trust in the workshops where there is no guard. Do not. Don’t bring your guard in. Knowing looks from . . . The guard is the thing that prevents us, that keeps us, that separates...

Robbing The Headlines: Repurposing True Events in Fiction

Robbing The HeadlinesRepurposing True Events in Fiction Amanda Jo Runyon (bio) Early in the semester, my Appalachian literature students had the opportunity to have a Skype conversation with author Silas House. They had just finished reading his novel A Parchment of Leaves, and I hoped they would ask him meaningful and intelligent questions about the novel, questions that would lead to a deeper understanding of themes and characters [End Page 87] or good writing in general. Unsurprisingly, one of the first questions that came from the group was, where do you get your ideas? Many writers and instructors squirm at this question. It doesn’t necessarily indicate to the author that you have read and thought about their material, nor does it engage the particular craft decisions writers spend painstaking hours making. It could be considered a generic, blanket question. In the essay, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” Alice Mattison says readers ask this question of writers as if authors might respond, “I order them online” or “In the supermarket, near the pancake mix.”1 Admittedly, it is a common question, but it is also an important and valid question, particularly for the writer of fiction. Mattison agrees that the curiosity of readers is understandable. She says, “everything about writing is suspect; we may as well face that. Making up a story out of nothing is something like trafficking in the occult.”2 But no fiction story is ever made up “out of nothing.” Ideas for fiction come from life, from the experiences or observations of the author in the real world. The real question, then, is how do fiction writers decide how much of the real world to use in their invented stories? When I was a graduate student at Morehead State University, the instructor for my Advanced Fiction Workshop, Crystal Wilkinson, asked our class to think about what haunts us as writers. What images or themes do we find reoccurring on our pages? These things, she suggested, could be where we draw our ideas. Later, in a fiction workshop at the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, I heard Gwyn Hyman Rubio lecture on how to forage for ideas. Rubio suggested good writers are often thieves. We could rob from the cradle; that is, we could write stories about our own pasts, particularly, our childhoods. Rubio’s second suggestion was that writers could rob the grave for ideas, or write the stories of their ancestors. Finally, she [End Page 88] said, we could rob other authors, relying on a variation of a theme we’ve encountered in other books. In my own fiction, I have robbed ideas from the cradle, the grave, and the themes of other authors, but during Rubio’s lecture I found myself thinking back to Crystal Wilkinson’s workshop question, and realized that none of these things haunt my writing. I am haunted by the stories of true events that occur in the community around me. I spend a lot of time in the archives of my university, scouring old newspapers and photographs that give me insight to events that have shaped and influenced my hometown. I am fascinated by events that have such dramatic effect on a community that they are remembered and passed down, in some variation, for years. I have a tendency to, as Rubio might phrase it, rob the headlines. To understand how I might use true stories in my own work, I need to shift the focus from where I get ideas to how I use ideas. I write about actual events, not to recreate them, but to repurpose them. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to repurpose is to “change something so it can be used for a different purpose.” An image search of the verb will result in pictures of crib beds transformed into hallway benches, kitchen forks turned into windchimes, or other common, household items made into something new. Recently, a friend gave me a gift of a wreath made out of an old copy of The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow. The idea is that once an object has lived out its use in one form, it can be remade, not into the same object, but...

The Rhetoric of the Prose Fiction Workshop – an Analysis of Teaching Methods at the University of East Anglia

This essay examines the distinction between the rhetoric of literary criticism and the critique of creative prose fiction, as taught at the University of East Anglia (UEA) on its Masters in Creative Writing. It examines the methods and values applied in teaching and peer evaluation on the core course of the Prose Fiction workshop. Distinctions between analytical processes of evaluating literature are too rarely examined, and yet govern the process of the production of creative writing in prose fiction, not only at UEA but in many institutions.

The Place of Biographical Interpretation in Fiction Workshops

Recognising students' manifold vulnerabilities in fiction workshops, I argue that instructors have an obligation to read students' work with attention to possible warning signs of unwellness. At the same time, I contend that the fiction workshop is not an appropriate venue for the pursuit of therapeutic goals. In fact, students' vulnerabilities in the workshop constitute a strong justification for the workshop's conventional prohibition on biographical discussion of students' fiction. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for courses to prepare students in other ways for participation in a literary culture that often demands authorial self-disclosure. Observing that a ban on biographical discussion need not apply to fiction courses as a whole, I suggest that instructors should provide students with other opportunities to practise commenting publicly on personal aspects of their work.

Rites and Reasons

Rites and Reasons Ravi Howard (bio) Since the summer of 2012, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop has been hosted by Brown University’s Department of Africana Studies, and some of the sessions have taken place in the Rites and Reasons Theatre. The theater develops work using the “Research-to-Performance Method” (RPM), where teams of artists and scholars develop projects using “direct dialogue with the community through the development process.” The purpose and approach parallel what we strive to do in our fiction workshops: use layers of creation, dialogue, and revision to guide writers to a point of completion. As the Rites and Reasons collaborators plan and design, they also create their sets, the physical spaces of the storytelling. We build as well, developing the geography and architecture of imagined worlds. We build upon language and structure. How does the language create the color, dimensions, and feeling of the story and its moments? Such questions and their answers affect the minds and bodies of our characters. As the storytelling turns inward, we mine the unspoken and the remembered, letting the inward journey inform the choreography of the spatial story. We see the characters move, and we often understand the thinking that fuels their movements and words. Both stories, the interior and the exterior, follow the contours the writer creates. The blend of culture, history, ideas, and aesthetic is a mix of the writer’s choosing. The range of voices is key to showing the many layers, voices, and approaches within the African Diaspora. The RPM process applies to both the author and the characters. The “arc” is a common notion in story structure, but workshops often consider the arc of the writer’s life, assessing the path through each project and throughout a creative career. The workshop offers an important intersection for writers of color. The gathering provides access to a collective, but it also stresses the importance of an individualized storytelling approach. The collective moment is meant to resonate after the workshop sessions have ended. As the RPM model shows us, the cycle of creation, feedback, and development is the platform on which the author’s structures—the imagined worlds and the aesthetic approach—are built. [End Page 360] Click for larger view View full resolution Casey Rocheteau Jennifer Bartell © 2014 Click for larger view View full resolution Left to right: Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Jennifer Bartell, Ching-In Chen, Annette Majanja Leroy Cooper © 2014 [End Page 361] Click for larger view View full resolution Left to right: Lashon Daley, Aja Monet Bacquie, Jeremy Clark, LeRonn P. Brooks Ama Codjoe © 2014 Click for larger view View full resolution Left to Right: Jennifer Bartell, Irène Mathieu, Charan P. Morris, Dana Crum, Nadia Alexis, Isaac Ginsberg Miller, Ching-In Chen, Gregory Pardlo, Casey Rocheteau, Kimberly Collins, Aja Monet Bacquie, LeRonn P. Brooks, Jeremy Clark, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Vievee Francis, Ama Codjoe, Kimberly Reyes, Lashon Daley, Sheila Carter-Jones [End Page 362] Click for larger view View full resolution Desiree Bailey George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies Click for larger view View full resolution Racquel Goodison George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies [End Page 363] Click for larger view View full resolution Ravi Howard George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies Click for larger view View full resolution Vievee Francis & Gregory Pardlo George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies [End Page 364] Ravi Howard RAVI HOWARD, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, is author of two books of fiction, Like Trees Walking (2007) and Driving the King (2015). For his fiction and nonfiction prose, he has been honored by the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Hurston-Wright Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to being selected as a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Like Trees Walking, his first novel, won for him the coveted Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence (2008). For his work on HBO’s Inside the NFL he was awarded a 2004 Sports Emmy. His work on sports appeared on HBO, ESPN, Fox...

Big Joe's Passing

Jennifer Springsteen is a writer, editor, and educator in Portland, Oregon. She is a cofounder of PDX Writers and a certified facilitator in the Amherst Writers and Artists method. Her work has been published in various print and online venues, including National Public Radio's Three-Minute Fiction, Bloodroot, and The Wordstock Ten. She received a 2008 fellowship in fiction from Oregon Literary Arts, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Flash fiction is bare-bones storytelling; a piece typically runs less than 1,000 words and might only hint at some classic elements of story. About this piece, Springsteen writes, “I was facilitating a flash fiction workshop in an old church, and other groups were also using the church that day. A man with Alzheimer's had wandered away from his group, and as we wrote, we could hear people calling his name throughout the building. Thinking of having to care for someone long-term must have stayed on my mind when I offered the next prompt: ‘write about an anniversary.’” “Big Joe's Passing” © 2012 by Jennifer Springsteen. Contact author: [email protected]. Art of Nursing is coordinated by Sylvia Foley, senior editor: [email protected].

"The Fall into Institutionality": Literary Culture in the Program Era

We like to imagine the literary “field” as a pastoral space that precedes cultural institutions and commercial markets. Yet the sense that authentic authorship has come under pressure both from above (professionalizing elites) and below (meretricious consumers) has characterized middle-class perceptions since the eighteenth-century print-market revolution (“the inventions of paper and the press,” Geoffrey Crayon complained in 1819, “have made every one a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print” [Irving 118]). In the twentieth century, the felt dissociation of literary sensibilities has often been attributed to the academicization of literature and literary studies. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) describes how the image of the academic fiction workshop has been shaped by a deep distrust of institutions: accused of narcissistic experimentalism on the one hand and formulaic “assembly-line fiction” (Aldridge) on the other, the creative writing program has been said to combine the worst tendencies of the “incorporated” university: ivory-towerism and philistinism. McGurl revises these claims by putting them in a wider socioinstitutional perspective. His project in fact pursues three related aims, each ambitious enough to merit a book of its own: it traces the institutional history and shifting literary tastes of the creative writing program, explores how structural changes in third-level education affected the landscape of postwar fiction, and attempts a sociologically musical account of contemporary literary culture that questions the “optical illusion of encroaching mediocrity” (410).

Harryette Mullen, "The Queen of Hip Hyperbole": An Interview

On September 20-24, 1999, the poet, essayist, and short story writer Harryette Mullen was Writer-in-Residence at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, along with novelists John Edgar Wideman and Percival Everett. The program which brought the authors to the campus is known as the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Series and operates under the auspices of Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, based at the University of Virginia. One day prior to the Series' official opening, Mullen read from her 1995 poetry collection Muse & Drudge at the Two Friends Bookstore, located in the West End Mall near the campus of Morehouse College, to an audience of college students, faculty, and community members. A lively discussion followed. During the week, Mullen conducted daily poetry workshops and met with students individually for one-on-one critiques of their writing. On Wednesday evening, September 22, 1999, students from the poetry workshops and those in the fiction workshop (conducted by novelist Percival Everett) read from their works created and/or refined in the workshops. A compelling and hypnotic poetic voice that exposes layers of societal concerns by accessing the everyday sights and sounds of life, Mullen is the author of four books of poetry: Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse, 1995), S*PeRM**K*T (Singing Horse, 1992), Trimmings (Tender Buttons, 1991), and Tree Tall Woman (Energy Earth, 1981). Her forthcoming collection of prose poems Sleeping With the Dictionary will be published in 2000. Mullen's work has been included in several anthologies, including Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry, edited by Jerry Ward (Penguin, 1997), and African-American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology, edited by Al Young and Ishmael Reed (HarperCollins, 1996). Mullen is the 1994-95 recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, and she currently teaches African American literature and creative writing at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). I managed to sit down with Harryette Mullen on Friday, September 24, 1999, before the Public Reading by Mullen, Wideman, and Everett which culminated the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Series. In a two-hour interview, she and I discussed the development of her writing career, her influences and inspirations, her writing techniques, and her advice to young writers. Williams: Let me start by asking where were you born, and is this the same place, as a child, that you first claimed as home? Mullen: I was born in Florence, Alabama, but I left there when I was about three years old, so I only have some very vague memories of that. I have supplemented those memories by visits to my grandparents later in life. I actually grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. I've lived in several different places in Texas, and I lived briefly in New Mexico. I've also lived in New York--upstate, in Ithaca. I'm now living in Los Angeles. I also spent time in Santa Cruz, California, as a graduate student. Williams: How has your home base (or bases) influenced your writing--the poetry, short fiction, and scholarly essays? Mullen: I believe that my work is probably influenced by geography even though I don't think that geography is a major theme or topic in what I'm writing. But I do believe that I have a Southern or Southwestern emphasis in my work. In many of my works I have sprinkled Spanish words that relate to my growing up in Texas and living in northern and southern California. Spanish is always in the background; it's that other language that cohabits with English. I studied Spanish in school even though I am not fluent in it. Williams: Can you recall your first writing experience, the one that made you say, Yes, I am a writer? Mullen: Well, there were different stages. I've loved to write from childhood. I wrote to entertain my family, my friends, and myself. …

The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop

he dominant form of the fiction workshop in creative writing programs of contemporary American literature departments is founded upon a set of assumptions that have all been put in question by postmodern critical theory. These assumptions include the idea of the free subject, the integrity of experience, the sharp separation of reading from writing, the individual voice, the authority of the author, uniqueness of style, the obedience of the reader, originality, and intuition. In her essay, 'Homeward Ho!': Silicon Valley Pushkin, Marjorie Perloff concludes that the batte now under way between contemporary creative writing practices and postmodern critical theory in the American academy is specifically being fought between the Creative Writing Workshop and the Graduate Seminar in Theory.' The A Team, she says, accuses the B Team of