Writing Workshop Research Articles

An Interview with Cristina García

An Interview with Cristina García Conducted by Ylce Irizarry Click for larger view Cristina García [End Page iv] Cristina García's debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), was not only pivotal in the career of its author but also a watershed moment for Latina/o literature. Nominated for the National Book Award, Dreaming in Cuban has been included on university and high school reading lists nationwide, and portions of it have been anthologized. Beyond simply propelling its author's renown, the book increased the visibility and acceptance of Latina/o writing within the mainstream American literary canon. The novel's treatment of Cuban exiles' acculturation to the United States is compelling and the focus of much of the scholarship on the book. Yet its exploration of Cuban citizens' acculturation to Castro's Cuba—presented through Cuba's intricate political and cultural history—is equally provocative. This acculturation is the basis for García's subsequent novels, The Agüero Sisters (1997) and Monkey Hunting (2003). Cristina García was born in Havana in 1958. Her parents chose to live in exile when Castro assumed power. Because she was two years old when they left, she has no memories of Cuba; this lack has shaped her academic interests and pervades her writing, where memory is a constant motif. García grew up in New York City and attended Barnard College. After completing a master's degree in international relations at Johns Hopkins University, García began a decade-long period of work in journalism, ultimately attaining the position of bureau chief for Time magazine in Miami. Beginning in 1990, she devoted herself full-time to writing fiction. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University [End Page 175] and received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1996. She has been a visiting writer in residence at UCLA and at Mills College. Last summer, she was a workshop leader for the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Summer Writing Workshop for Writers of Color, VOICES. The Agüero Sisters and Monkey Hunting depart significantly from Dreaming in Cuban in that they examine the cultural and political legacies of Cuba's colonial past rather than its more recent, communist history. Appearing within years of the one hundredth anniversary of the Spanish American War, these novels traverse time and place in a rich engagement of Cuba's histories—cultural, racial, and natural. Both novels continue the provocative experimentation with narrative voices and story lines that García began in Dreaming in Cuban. The Agüero Sisters, for example, features a first-person male narrative voice, in a shift from a matriarchal to a patriarchal point of view. The novel offers a nuanced treatment of the kaleidoscope of race, sexuality, and class in pre-Castro Cuba. Monkey Hunting presents another version of Cuban cultural history in its depiction of the experiences of Chinese immigrant laborers in nineteenth-century Cuba. The novel moves from China to Cuba to America and back to China in a narrative flow that is a hallmark of García's writing, as she intertwines the lives of her characters across geographies and between eras. While all three novels stand as individual narratives, they share common threads in García's quest to uncover the history of Cuba and its people. In addition to her novels, García has published short stories and essays; edited anthologies of Cuban literature and Mexican and Mexican American literature; and written an introduction to a bilingual edition of the poems of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Her fourth novel, A Handbook to Luck, was published in April 2007 and showcases García's belief that a writer should continually experiment and defy artificial reader expectations: it explores the lives of displaced characters not only from Cuba, but also from Iran and El Salvador. This interview took place by telephone in February and July 2006. García had recently completed A Handbook to Luck and had...

Strategic codeswitching, interliteracy, and other phenomena of emergent bilingual writing: Lessons from first grade dual language classrooms

This qualitative study investigated the writing processes of eight emergent bilingual children as they composed stories in two languages in a Writing Workshop (WW) context. The research was situated in two grade 1 classrooms in a Spanish/English Two-Way Bilingual Education program in the north-eastern USA. For six months, researchers observed students in Spanish and English WWs, interviewed students about their writing behaviors and understandings, and collected samples from all stages of the writing process. Cross-case analyses of individual bilingual writing profiles revealed similarities and differences in students’ cross-linguistic skills, as well as patterns of transfer. Patterns of bilingual writing related to strategic codeswitching, positive literacy transfer, and interliteracy led to the development of a preliminary model of bilingual writing development for English-dominant and Spanish-dominant bilingual learners.This model presents phenomena unique to bilingual writers, relates these to bilingualism and biliteracy, and proposes anticipated expression of the phenomena for developing Spanish-dominant and English-dominant bilingual writers.

“THE DIASPORA OF POETS”

Philip Nikolayev lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the poet Katia Kapovich, and their daughter Sophia. His poetry books include Dusk Raga (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1998) and Monk...

Mom Dad Buddy and Sis Stories: A Drama and Fiction Writing Workshop

Mom Dad Buddy and Sis Stories: A Drama and Fiction Writing Workshop

Mom Dad Buddy and Sis Stories: A Drama and Fiction Writing Workshop

Mom Dad Buddy and Sis Stories: A Drama and Fiction Writing Workshop

Writer's Workshop

Writer's Workshop

Who is My Patient? Use of a Brief Writing Exercise to Enhance Residents' Understanding of Physician-Patient Issues

Writing workshops and narrative experiences for medical trainees can be a useful way to approach certain issues in their education. This article describes a brief writing exercise that can be used for physicians in training to help them recognize issues of countertransference in the doctor-patient relationship. While these issues are generally covered as part of residents’ behavioral science curriculum, this exercise allows trainees to use a creative method in order to uncover them. To date, this exercise has been used in two residency programs with residents informally expressing improved understanding of their own experience with patients.

Fiction from the 2005 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop

Fiction from the 2005 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop

佐々木賢太郎の「生命を守る体育」について

Kentaro Sasaki (1923-1994) was a teacher who established a new method of physical education using essay writing in the postwar period when new methods of physical education had been sought for. He is also known as a teacher who advocated “physical education for defending our lives”. The purpose of this research is to clarify the meaning of his slogan “defend our lives” and the process and his intention in advocating this approach. Sasaki began to advocate his ideas in the autumn of 1953. Based on materials written by him and the members of his kinan sakubun kyoiku kenkyukai (“Kinan Essay Writing Workshop”), I analyzed the following points: (1) the trend of study of the kinan sakubun kyoiku kenkyukai, (2) Sasaki's writing concerning “life”, and (3) his “physical education theory”. It was apparent that he used the term “defend our lives” in two ways: (1) in the sense of “building up our health”, and (2) in the sense of “making students more aware of factors that hinder health-building”. Moreover, I prove that his advocacy of “physical education for defending our lives” came not only from the fact that he was against “education for giving up our lives” (which had always been pointed out by many people), but also from his critisism of the fact that physical education and its teachers at that time did not defend the lives of children, in other words, from his criticism of the teaching method that he had been adopting.

The Romantic Ego in the Creative Writing Workshop

As in the broader picture, where many are hoping for fifteen minutes of fame, it could be fatal for all concerned to take emotional responsibility for the anxieties of the ‘romantic’ ego manifested in some students. But, in writing this paper, I hope I have shown that by being clear about what we are doing we can in turn be truly responsible for all our students, and hopefully, we can interrogate the brutal fearfulness of the contemporary romantic ego.

The Soup Kitchen Writing Workshop

The Soup Kitchen Writing Workshop

‘Irrigorous Uncertainties’: Writing, Politics and Pedagogy

For some time now, as a writer, I have thought, written and spoken of myself as coming from an Australian feminist experimental tradition, of writing as the substantive part of my political activity, and of all writing as political. I situate myself in an Australian feminist experimental tradition because my particular formation as a writer included the critical influence of the Sydney Women Writers Workshop, even though I was a member for only a relatively brief period, approximately two years between 1979 and 1981…

The Effect of Direct Instruction and Writer's Workshop on the Early Writing Skills of Children Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication

A single subject multiple probe across subjects research design was used to evaluate a writing instructional program for children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Specifically, the effect of instruction on the selection of initial letters of words by 3 children with developmental disabilities who used AAC was evaluated. The writing instructional program comprised direct instruction in letter-sound correspondence and selection of initial letters of words, and a writing workshop-type task to provide instruction in literacy activities. Two of the 3 children were successful in the acquisition of the target skill, maintained use of the skill at least 1 month following instruction, and demonstrated some generalization of the skill to less structured tasks. The third child required a simplified instructional program to accommodate transient episodes of hemiplegia and to increase his time on task. The results of the study suggest that an instructional program that combines a direct instruction approach and a writing workshop-type activity may facilitate the development and application of phonemic awareness skills with children who use AAC.

Inscriptive Restorations: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey. Photo by Brett Gadsden. [End Page 1022] This interview was conducted on May 28, 2004, at Texas A&M University in College Station, where Natasha Trethewey was teaching poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, whose faculty also included Forrest Hamer (poetry), Helen Elaine Lee (fiction), and Percival Everett (fiction). ROWELL: When I read your poetry, the first word that comes to my mind is restoration. Your project seems to be the restoration of what is not seen or is forgotten as a result of erasure from local and national memory. You tend to use poetry as a corrective; you interrogate and critique events and figures, past and present, and then inscribe them in our psyches via the U.S. American literary canon. It is this impulse, along with your close attention to artistry, which first enlists you among such poets as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa—poets who deliberately directed African-American poetry away from the prescriptive pronouncements of the Black Arts Movement. For me, your poetry is, in part, inscriptive restoration. TRETHEWEY: Yes, I think I've been concerned with what I have noticed to be the erasures of history for a very long time. Those stories often left to silence or oblivion, the gaps within the stories that we are told, both in the larger public historical records and in our family histories as well, the stories within families that people don't talk about, the things that are kept hushed. And so I've always been interested in those contentions between public and cultural memory, larger history and private or family memory and stories. And so I do seek to restore or to recover those subjugated narratives. ROWELL: Are these efforts reflected in "Gesture of a Woman-in-Process," the opening poem in Domestic Work, your first collection of poems? TRETHEWEY: Yes, I think it relates to "Gesture of a Woman-in-Process" in some ways. Let me tell you how that poem got made. I was standing in a gallery at the University of Massachusetts, where I did my graduate work, my MFA, and there was an exhibit on African Americans during the great migration, and, also, African Americans who settled in and around Amherst and other parts of New England. I was with a professor of mine, poet Margaret Gibson, and we were looking at these photographs of people who looked very familiar to me, the kind of people who were [End Page 1023] members of my own family or the community in my hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi. And what I noticed about this particular woman in the poem, and in the photograph, "Gesture of a Woman-in-Process," was that it was a very domestic kind of photograph: a couple of women standing out in a swept dirt yard with the kind of accoutrements of a domestic life—laundry they were doing, peas they were shelling, and it's a scene in which you imagine the photographer, Clifton Johnson, coming upon them and asking if them he might take their photograph. And so he does. And yet one of the women refuses actually to stand still for some reason, because, of course, you had to stand very still for photography in 1902. So, instead, she must have made some gesture with her hands that moves her apron, and thus you see her apron as if it's a swirl of white in the center of the photograph. It suggested to me something about the way people will not simply be confined to the frames into which we might put them, historically or in memory, and that, indeed, her gesture of continual movement enables her to resist being trapped in that particular historical framework; her gesture keeps moving on into our contemporary days, and suggests something to us about the continual process of her life, of history, and of the creation and revision of cultural memory. So, I wanted to begin Domestic Work with a poem that suggested...

Positioning in a Primary Writing Workshop: Joint Action in the Discursive Production of Writing Subjects

Drawn from a year-long study in a combined first- and second-grade classroom, this article presents an interpretive portrait of two young students engaged in spontaneous talk while writing. We analyze their conversations to explore the subject positions these student writers assumed, those they assigned each other, and the related functions they assigned the texts they composed. Through our close reading of their conversations, we develop an analytic protocol for positional microanalysis of everyday conversations that honors the intertwined social and emotional dimensions of peer interactions. Countering those who would cast literacy development as the sequential attainment of discrete cognitive skills, we consider the ways that these social and emotional dimensions may interlace with intellectual growth as young children struggle to become students, writers, and people.

Writer's Workshop

Writer's Workshop

Crossing Troublesome: 25 Years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop (review)

Crossing Troublesome: 25 Years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop (review)

Writer's Workshop

Writer's Workshop

Writer's Workshop

Writer's Workshop

'Como te ven, te tratan': The Projection of the Subaltern Character in Three Contemporary Mexican Novels

During the last few years an increasing number of academics have drawn their attention to the field of Subaltern Studies in the context of literary theroy. This essay considers the subaltern subjects in three contemporary novels: Hasta no verte Jesus mioby Elena Poniatowska and those of two of her former protegees, Asencion Tunby Silvia Molina, and Novia que te vea by Rosa Nissan. Even though they have worked together in the same writer's workshop there are important differences between each author. Each author considers different types of Mexican subalterns and every novel considered in this study projects the subaltern character(s) in diverse ways. The present article discusses some of those differences and offers possible reasons as to why they exist.