Here's an essay I wrote in Winter Quarter of 1999 for Albert Rouze's Pedagogy and Technology Class
(copyright Thom Conroy)
Writing Possibilities: E-Mail and the Creative Writing Classroom by Thom Conroy At fist glance, there appears to be something drastically incongruous about creative writing and computers. Though many of us compose on word-processors and have been for years, creative writing instructors and professional writers alike share a lingering wariness when it comes to technological innovations. Fiction writer Richard Ford’s recent lament over the loss of "the now" in our technology-driven contemporary life captured what, for many creative writers at the close of the millennium, remains a poignant feeling (sec. 4: 9). Our "palpable fear," Ford writes, "is that in this high velocity atmosphere we’ll suffer vital qualities of our character to become obsolete: our capacity to deliberate, to be patient, to forgive, to remain, to observe, to empathize, to gauge cause and effect, to ignore death in respect for life; in sum, to recognize good in all its complicated, unexpected forms" (sec. 4: 9). Ford concluded the editorial with the confession of a technological heretic: "I don’t have E-mail. I’m not on the Internet. I don’t have cell-phone or call waiting or even a beeper" (sec. 4: 9). While most creative writer instructors—indeed, many successful authors—cannot afford the luxury of Ford’s ultra-Ludditism, many of us may identify with his disdain for the technology’s mounting intrusions into our lives.
If instructors of creative writing have been slow to embrace the pedagogical role of computers, their reluctance conforms to a long-standing trend among teachers in the humanities. The tendency to resist the introduction of computers in the classroom, however, grows out of an antiquated conception of the relationship between academia and society at large. "Teachers in the humanities," Fred Kemp maintains, "have all too often blithely assumed that what they have to teach is protected from societal pressures, relying perhaps on the medieval perception of scholarship as purely defensive, something to protect behind monastery walls" (147-48). As LeBlanc and others have argued, electronic illiteracy is no longer a permissible indulgence in the humanities (5).
In the face of the prevailing anxiety among instructors in the humanities, I want to suggest that the use of computers in the creative writing classroom is not only unavoidable, but theoretically and practically beneficial to creative writing students and teachers alike. As instructors of creative writing, we need to ask what can computers do for us that traditional classroom practice cannot? How can what we already do be improved by the introduction of computers? Let me say that I am the first to acknowledge that much of what we do in the creative writing classroom cannot be improved upon by computers without fundamentally altering the definition of what we do. There are theoretical and practical advantages, however, to be gained when we supplement traditional creative writing classroom activities with computers, particularly with e-mail and listservs.
As the least threatening, least time-consuming, least intrusive, and most inexpensive computer technology available, e-mail presents an accessible and pedagogically advantageous way for creative writing instructors to begin incorporating computers into their classrooms. Indeed, e-mail has become so prevalent in the lives of teachers and students that we often accept its presence as a given. As Gail E. Hawisher and Charles Moran have noted, "we seem to look through, rather than at, electronic mail, despite the fact that it is part of the fabric of our lives" (628). E-mail may be a particularly appropriate supplement to the traditional creative writing class for reasons extending beyond its accessibility. Some researchers have found a correlation between the use of e-mail and the creative process itself. Margaret Portillo and Gail Summerskill Cummins, for instance, studied the ways in which creativity was enhanced when they integrated e-mail into a cross-curriculum project in which members of a creative designs foundation class and a first-year composition class participated in five interactive assignments focusing on the creative process. "The project," they write, "concluded that raising to consciousness the creative process necessary to complete disciplinary work via e-mail is a pedagogy worth incorporating into every class" (171).
Rather than merely employing e-mail as an informal supplement to the creative writing classroom, I recommend initiating a class listerv and basing some percentage of student evaluation on participation in the listserv. A listserv, which may require sending a single message to a systems administrator, establishes an e-mail address to which students can send messages that the entire class will receive. In this way, a listserv creates a space of written discussion which imitates the space of oral discussion in creative writing workshops. With the establishment of a class listserv, however, a new domain of student-to-student and teacher-to-student interaction is opened. This new space provides a place to expand workshop discussion, conduct classroom business, exchange writing, encourage student-to-student interaction, and re-configure relationships of power in the classroom. As David Coogan has noted, "e-mail provides an alternative model [from common "academic rituals"] where writers can inhabit alternative writing spaces" (179).
In addition to responding to significant theoretical issues in the creative writing classroom—which I will consider below—the use of an e-mail listserv solves many of the practical difficulties intrinsic to the creative writing classroom. Anyone who has participated in a creative writing workshop is certain to identify with a certain feeling of vertigo stemming from the swift pace of discussion and the breakneck exchange of ideas. The small allocation of time given to each student’s creative texts and the speed at which the texts are discussed remains an unfortunate necessity in most classes. With a large group of student texts to discuss in a short amount of time, there are only so many minutes a class can devote to each text. Moreover, the rapid-fire pace of workshop discussions is often a positive indication of the quality and quantity of ideas being explored: sometimes the conversation pace itself generates effective suggestions and insightful critique. Therefore, while slowing down the pace of discussion may allow for individual writers to absorb more details, it may also impair the usefulness of the discussion.
E-mail addresses the brevity and swiftness of in-class discussions by providing a alternative discussion space in which insights and ideas can be read, re-read, printed, stored, and referred to a later time. Moreover, since students and teachers can interact without the time restraints of the traditional classroom, ideas can be explored at length, integrated into other discussions with ease, and considered at a leisurely pace.
Additionally, supplementing the creative writing workshop with an e-mail listserv addresses the practical concern of making expensive and time-consuming copies of student texts. With a listserv, students can by-pass the copy store altogether and mail electronic copies of their texts to everyone with a few clicks of the mouse. Moreover, e-mail offers the convenience of sending last-minute revisions and commentary that the traditional classroom does not offer. In the traditional classroom, students are either in class or not. With e-mail, students are in class whenever they need to be. Finally, a listserv provides a forum for creative writing instructors to conduct the scheduling of workshops and accomplish the usual logistical necessities of any classroom.
The dynamics of e-mail communication are also ideally suited to more theoretical pedagogical concerns specific to the creative writing class itself. One of the most significant pedagogical issues that e-mail addresses is the "de-centered" creative writing environment. Writing from a social epistemic viewpoint, Patrick Bizzaro has argued that creative writers are best served when teachers "become authorities on how to disperse authority rather than authorities on how to read individual texts" (241). Authority in the classroom, however, cannot be "dispersed" until the traditional master-apprentice relationship between teachers and students in the creative writing classroom is de-emphasized in favor of a more egalitarian mode of interaction. Bizzaro contends that a crucial element of the decentralization of an instructor’s authority occurs when "students are encouraged to explore other possible identities in the classroom" (240). Bizzaro proposes, with Robert E. Brooke, that nothing less that a shift in classroom identity is necessary for creative writers to move beyond the confines of the master-apprentice relationship. "Students," Brooke has argued, "need to experience a shift in how teacher and student interact, a change in the nature of student roles, if they are not to become fixed in the roles their past schooling leads them to expect" (qtd. in Bizzaro 241). 241.) The question with which creative writing theory must contend, Bizzaro concludes, is "how a class might be constructed by a teacher to enable students to play non-traditional roles and thereby assume identities as writers" (241).
The dynamics of communication specific to the discourse of e-mail suggest that e-mail may be provide an effective response to the call for dispersed authority in the creative writing classroom. One of the most significant pedagogical benefits of communicating through e-mail is its capacity to engage students and teachers in a discourse which straddles the tones of formal and informal discourse. Hawisher and Moran have pointed out that "e-mail seems now to employ language that is somewhere on the continuum between spoken and written language" (630). The mediated tone of e-mail, then, situates it as discourse which challenges the strict authority of teacherly discourse without collapsing into mere chatting.
E-mail also challenges the traditional demarcation of the master-apprentice relationship by providing a space for students and teachers to become personally engaged with each other and each other’s texts. In her study of e-mail use in a graduate composition seminar, for instance, Sibylle Gruber noticed that "the virtual discussion group became interesting because the benefits were now seen in connection with personal involvement" (65-66). In addition to cementing the connection between academic and personal writing, a listserv contributes to the dispersal of instructor authority by re-situating discourse in a social and personal space. In their study of asynchronous conferencing, an electronic technology similar to e-mail, Theresa Henley Doerfler and Robert Davis found that online interaction between students developed a sense of support that extended into areas beyond "schooling and literacy" to personal and support (184.). As any instructor of creative writing knows, the personal support of a student’s peers is crucial in an environment where students are often conditioned to view each other solely as competition.
E-mail can also play an important role in dispersing the instructor’s authority by re-orienting students’s conceptions of their own authority. In their study of asynchronous computer conferencing among undergraduate and graduate students, Marilyn M Cooper and Cynthia L. Self observed the tendency of electronic discourse to encourage "intellectual resistance" over "intellectual accommodation" (847). Cooper and Selfe connect the frequency of intellectual resistance in student responses with a shift in their perception of online identity. "Students writing in computer-conferences," they write,
resist by introducing their perspectives and concerns and by taking on more authoritative roles than those offered in traditional forums of academic discourse. Creating these alternative subjectivities allows students to become active in their own learning process, to become speakers in a dynamic context rather than being the subjects of a predetermined discourse. (851)
Believing that "the lack of traditional turn-taking rules allows discussions in computer-conferences to be more free-wheeling," Cooper and Self argue that electronic discourse generates a more open and less linear structure of discussion in which the strength of a student’s arguments is tied to discursive ability more closely than to his or her status as student (853). If, with Bizzaro, we accept that the creative writing classroom is in need of a reconfiguration in which the students are enable to play "non-traditional roles and thereby assume identities as writers," then e-mail seems to provide a potent medium in which authority can be re-distributed.
While e-mail can serve as an effective means of dispersing authority in the creative writing classroom, it does not do so "automatically" or comprehensively. Creative writing instructors need to be aware that their approach to the listserv and its discussion will influence their students’ perceptions of their relationship to the instructor and other students. Denis A. Lynch’s research on the use of e-mail in a cross-curriculum project involving Humanities 101and Biology 101 indicated that e-mail can result in replicating—even compounding—the authority of the instructor in the traditional classroom. In Lynch’s project, for instance, the students felt threatened by the habit of the instructors to "lurk" in online discussion. Lurking, the practice of observing a discussion without participating in it, made the students in Lynch’s study feel "the instructors presence(s) everywhere and nowhere," resulting in a strikingly Foucaultian configuration of teacher-student power (166). Even a decision as simple as whether or not to participate in the listserv discussion, then, affects e-mail’s potential to disperse or coalesce an instructor’s authority. Using e-mail does not liberate instructors from their own ideology. Like any pedagogical choice, the decision to employ e-mail as a authority-dispersing supplement to the traditional classroom must be made in conjunction with a conscious recognition of the ways we, as instructors, wield, concede, ignore, or problemitize power in teacher-student relationships.
The use of e-mail in the creative writing classroom is also theoretically significant in its capacity to address the call for creative writers to write, interact, and receive evaluation outside of the traditional space of creative composition. Following James Moffet and Gordon Rohman, Joseph M. Moxely suggests that creative writers learn to meditate on their writing through dialogue with other writers and non-creative writing activities. Writing beyond the scope of what has been traditionally considered "creative," Moxely maintains, will "intrude on student’s usual methods [of composition] and encourage new behaviors" (32.) Moxely recommends that creative writing instructors supplement short stories and poems with in-class writing, journal reports, in-the-field notes or research, and student-to-student interviews. As Jack Selzer has recommended, students can interview each other, in an effort "to discover more about their composing processes" (Moxely 32). Student interviews are significant ways to enhance the dialogue between students which begins in the creative writing classroom. Ruth Mirtz maintains that the "constant direct dialogue in a writing class" is directly tied to a student’s capacity to understand the roles of "writer, reader, friend, authority" or "whatever else is needed" that a competent writer must be prepared to enact (172).
In "Creativity and Classroom Practice," Linda Sarbo and Joseph M. Moxely explore the cognitive, personal, and social elements which foster creative behavior. In their discussion of Teresa Amabile’s Interactive Model of Creativity, Sarbo and Moxely recommend that creative writing instructors "ameliorate the evaluation process" by expanding the range of writing on which students are judged (140). Sarbo and Moxely argue that employing "supplemental basses for course grades," such as "journal writing, freewriting, written responses to outside readings, in-class writing activities, and all forms of student-sponsored writing," will nourish the development of creativity (140, 141).
E-mail provides a forum for broadening the writing space in which students can interact with teachers and with one another about their creative texts. When students are graded on their participation in this space it be used as an "amelioration of the evaluation process" that Sarbo and Moxely recommend. Moreover, the dynamics of communication particular to e-mail locate online dialogue in a unique position to engage students with the creative writing process itself. Discussion on a creative writing listserv, including that which expands or comments on class discussion, may be aptly positioned to accomplish Moxely’s goal of writing beyond the bounds of traditional "creative writing." Finally, the interactive nature of e-mail compels students to participate in the "constant direct dialogue" that Mirtz identifies with learning the role of the writer in the classroom.
As writers commenting on each other’s writing, the role of the creative writing participant on a class listserv is similar to the task of an online tutor in an on-line writing center. Borrowing from C. H. Knoblauch and L. Brannon, David Coogan has characterized the work of online tutoring as a form of "facilitative commentary" in which the tutor "engag[es] the writer in a conversation—to open writing, rather than to close it" (176). The ability to easily exchange revisions and commentary on texts via e-mail encourages an immersion in the process of composition itself. In his description of the "openness and flexibility" which characterizes exchanges in online tutoring, Coogan describes a process-oriented paradigm of discussion which might serve as a functional model for members of a listserv in a creative writing class. E-mail interactions in an online writing center, Coogan explains,
can transform the writing tutorial from a static discussion ‘over’ a paper to a kinetic movement through ideas. Instead of facilitating the writer’s textual self—that illusory third party in a face-to-face conference—e-mail tutorials place the paper in a continually changing context of communication: A writing tutorial becomes a discussion in writing. The student sends a paper, receives comments, writes a response, receives more comments, and so on. (175)
The ease with which the online tutorial transforms into "a discussion in writing" carries important implications for participants in a creative writing listserv. E-mail discussions lend themselves to the kinds of student interviewing that Sarbo and Moxely connect to the development of creativity. If, as Portillo, Summerskill Cummins, and Coogan contend, e-mail tends to encourage students to interrogate the creative process itself, then conducting student-to-student interviews on the listserv compounds the effectiveness of the discussion by inviting writers to write about the process of writing.
Research also indicates that the dynamics of electronic communication may broaden a writer’s engagement with the creative process by encouraging students to challenge the conventions of their own thinking to a greater extent than oral communication. In addition to allowing students more time to consider their replies and reflect on the critiques of other students, e-mail may engage students in the act of examining their own writing and thought by means of a collaborative process of discovery. In their study of synchronous and asynchronous electronic communication, Jennifer Jordon-Heneley and Barry M. Maid found that students revised their writing more frequently in online conversations about their writing. One student, who had described himself as "computer illiterate" before the project, wrote that "without it [electronic communication], I never would have made revision" (213). Other students in the study responded to the electronic communication in similarly positive ways, claiming that it "made them ‘think more thoroughly and quickly’ and gave them ‘more insight into reading’" (214).
Students in Cooper and Selfe’s study of asynchronous conferencing also associated the dynamics of electronic discourse with challenges to their own thinking. In one posting, a student made an explicit connection between the electronic medium and an altered capacity to solve problems. "The dailog about technical communication," the student writes, "has been a real thought provoker for me. It’s a good example of how useful this forum can be; I wouldn’t normally air such thoughts in a classroom setting because I would feel too vunerable voicing such insecurities . . . the conference lets us drop all our guards; to whine a bit; but then to WORK THROUGH the issue . . ." (856). This student’s use of capitols indicates a felt connection between the electronic forum and the way in which students engage in an on-going collaboration over meaning and revisions.
Kemp also found that online discussions encourage students to examine the production of meaning as it is created. "Student writers," he explains,
often value the reactions of their peers over those of a professional reader—their teacher—and show more concern for their own text when writing for an audience they understand well. Effective writing, therefore, is not a ‘knowledge,’ in the sense of mathematics, that can be incrementalized and transmitted from knower to unknower as a hierarchy of principles or formulas, but rather a complex set of behaviors and highly individual comprehensions generated from intensive rhetorical activity. (136)
More so than free-writing, journal writing, research, or even face-to-face student interviewing, online discussions appear to keep students engaged in a dialogue which focuses on the process of dialogic meaning itself. In a creative writing classroom, this focus on the construction of meaning may encourage students to challenge the assumptions they hold about their own texts, the texts of others, and the creative process itself.
While there is evidence to indicate that e-mail provides a writing space in which creative writing can challenge conventions and expand awareness of the creative process through dialogue, the alternative space does not preclude discussion from replicating many of the limitations of the oral conversation. While many researchers have found a correlation between resistant writing and electronic writing environments, others have found that online dialogue reproduces the conventions of teacher-student interaction and cultural prejudice in oral discussion. As Susan Romano found in her use of synchronous conferencing, "new technology cannot entirely dismantle old habits" (21). In Romano’s networked class discussions, for instance, she found "an inevitable instructor complicity with institutional hegemonies, because instructors, however committed to the unpacking of a system of privilege, are not free from a reliance upon the system that forms and informs them" (21). Moreover, Romano was disturbed to discover that the electronic forum did not necessarily serve to challenge notions of student identity. One Mexican-American student, for instance, wrote that, "it’s worth losing your ‘hispanic identity ‘ to society" provided that you "just remember, you’ll never lose it within you" (5).
Moreover, e-mail may promote some kinds of dialogue which are inappropriate or counter-productive to a discussion in a creative writing classroom. In her study of the use of e-mail in an international classroom debate, for instance, Linda K. Shamoon found that students tended to respond "rudely and insultingly to their peers’ arguments" (152). The inclination to engage in a spontaneous outburst of hostility in e-mail, known as "flaming," occurs in electronic discourse more frequently than in face-to-face discussion. Hawisher and Moran explain that often e-mail provokes writers to "lose the constraints and inhibitions that the imagined audience provides" (631). Estranged from physical presence and disassociated from the formal boundaries of an academic paper, electronic writers commonly engage in highly emotional and controversial writing. "What would be censored in a face-to-face confrontation or in a paper-mail letter," Hawisher and Moran note, "may not be censored on e-mail" (631). While this kind of spontaneous overflow of emotion may have beneficial results in engaging students with new ideas and dismantling traditional boundaries of discussion, it should handled with caution in a creative writing class. Creative writing environments are commonly characterized by intense and often personally-directed competition. Allowing this competition to become exacerbated in a listserv discussion may supercharge rivalry in the classroom to unproductive and unmanageable levels.
The anxiety underlining the relationship between many creative writer instructors and technology is not founded on any essential truth about the incompatibility of creativity and technology. In fact, the technology of pens, paper, and printing-presses enabled creative writing to flourish to a degree that was unthinkable when writers were limited to the scroll or papyrus. As teachers dedicated to helping our students explore the possibilities of creativity, we cannot overlook our obligation to explore new possibilities ourselves. In the case of computers, the new possibilities appear to offer significant opportunities for improving what we do in the traditional classroom. In addressing both practical and theoretical concerns particular to the creative writing classroom, e-mail stands out as an appealing point of entry into a technology which is being integrated into our society more and more every day.
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