Readshare: A Forum for Readers in the Creative Writing Workshop
Readshare: A Forum for Readers in the Creative Writing Workshop
Joseph Holt
There’s a line in the Charles Portis novel The Dog of the South that pokes fun at the stubborn and self-absorbed nature of writers. Two men are driving through Mexico when their conversation turns to literature. The driver, a pedantic cuckold named Ray Midge, boasts of his military history collection—“sixty-six lineal feet of books,” he says—only for his passenger, the disgraced medical doctor Reo Symes, to dismiss it all outright. There is only one book worth reading, says Dr. Symes, compared to which everything else is “foul grunting.” He produces from his doctor’s grip a slim yellow volume with peeling covers titled With Wings as Eagles.
As it happens, With Wings as Eagles is little more than an instructional tract for salesmen. Its author is the enigmatic John Selmer Dix, M.A., who wrote the book while riding the express bus back and forth between Dallas and Los Angeles, his composition materials spread on a board across his lap. Yet upon Dix’s death, his luggage trunk allegedly went missing. And what did the trunk contain? It’s a great mystery. Not Dix’s clothes, says Dr. Symes, nor his correspondence. Then perhaps his books, says Midge. “No, no, no,” says Dr. Symes. “Dix never read anything but the daily papers. He wrote books, he didn’t have to read them.”
Well, it drives me bonkers when young writers state, almost as a point of pride, that they too don’t read. It’s a claim I’ve encountered more than a few times in my teaching. Maybe students wish to suggest that their overstuffed social lives preclude them from grappling with the labors of others, or maybe they wish to assert ownership over the entirety of their own genius, as though they are beyond influence. (Regardless, one assumes these students are getting all their narrative instruction from TV shows.) It rankles me only slightly less when young writers are asked about their favorite or most influential book, only to cite one they’d been forced to read as a school assignment.
Such students are rare, of course. More common are those who have read widely but secretly, for whom literature has long been a private indulgence. These students might feel sheltered or odd, their rich inner lives difficult to share with nonreaders. It’s in workshop that these students find their communities. You see it play out during full-class discussions, with all the name-dropping of authors and titles, or after dismissal, when bookish debates move into the hallway or the student union or a nearby bar. Workshops are thus empowering in two separate but similar ways: they ask students to generate their own work, and they allow students to declare their literary ambitions—as writers and readers—without fear of judgment.
I’ll state the obvious: writing is inseparable from reading. Add to that, young writers who hope to create valuable stories had better read some valuable stories themselves. “It rarely happens,” writes John Gardner in