Criminalizing the creative
BY JIM PAPA - Jim Papa, a poet and essayist, teaches creative writing at York College of The City University of New York. - Newsday.com.
The Virginia Tech shooter's life is being combed up and down for clues, however small, that might help explain the massacre he carried out nearly two weeks ago. This even includes Seung-Hui Cho's creative writing assignments, which are filled with violent scenes.
Nobody wants to see another school shooting or any young person become a killer, so in hindsight studying these stories and plays as portals to a killer's psyche may seem perfectly reasonable. But if we do so expecting creative writing teachers to identify future killers in our midst, we seriously undermine the teaching of the arts across the country.
Supposing that a student's creative writing - or any kind of artwork - is a key to his emotional state is problematic. While the homicide detective's search back for motives is analytical, the creative writer's way forward is usually not. Imaginative works depend upon leaps and revelations that writers often can't explain. Directives often come unbidden in the creative process from places we do not know.
In 17 years of teaching creative writing to students at several colleges on Long Island and at CUNY's York College, I have read some incredibly violent and perverse material, including fiction about murdering two-timing lovers (with poisoning the most common approach) and poems about strange sexual escapades. Most times the writers are just trying to shock the reader.
Still, the content occasionally makes me wonder. And when it does, I remind myself, as I remind students, not to make personal assumptions about writers based simply on their creative works, which may be wholly imagined or drawn from knowledge of the world outside of the writer's life. To take a famous example of this, Stephen Crane's Civil War novel, "The Red Badge of Courage," is considered one the finest war novels ever written, yet he was born decades after the war and was never a soldier himself.
Reading Cho's short play "Richard McBeef" online, which is about a 13-year-old boy who provokes his stepfather into striking him with "a deadly blow," my first impression is that by itself the work isn't necessarily alarming. It is filled with references to contemporary news and pop culture, including Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, tabloid papers, chain-saw murders, conspiracy theories, pedophilic priests, wicked stepparents, McDonald's and pro football.
But beginning writers often rely on this kind of sensationalism. Knowing this, I prohibit students in my introductory creative writing classes from killing off any characters violently. Instead, I challenge them to imagine some small but powerful scene from ordinary life and develop the dramatic potential present there. Usually the students look at me in disbelief: What? We can't use murder, rape, patricide, fratricide, infanticide, a nuclear holocaust, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, addiction? What else is there to write about?
Taking their models from Hollywood and TV, and from some of the more violent plots of great dramatists like Shakespeare and Sophocles, neophyte writers often think, to twist a phrase from the investment banker character Gordon Gecko in "Wall Street," that gore is good, and more gore is even better (for Gecko it was greed).
It's not that violence and rage have no place in literature. A quick perusal of the canon proves otherwise. "The Black Cat," a popular story by Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, makes graphic use of violence against humans and animals to show the extent to which the narrator is driven mad by what appear to him supernatural forces. But it's the nuanced portrayal of the narrator's psychology, and not Poe's use of gore, that makes this a great piece of literature.
Apart from Cho's horrendous actions, his one-act play wouldn't necessarily stand as proof of a deranged or murderous mind. Writers have never felt much shame lifting characters, scenes and whole plots from the world around them. Elements of Cho's play could have been taken from the pages of Newsday, where in a recent case a young man convicted of murdering his stepfather with a Samurai sword put forth an initial defense based on allegations of sexual abuse. And there is Martin Tankleff, convicted as a teen of killing both of his parents for allegedly making him drive a "crummy old Lincoln" to high school.
With the media full of such tales, it's hardly unusual that a young writer might mine them for dramatic ore. But we cannot assume that the same writer has a burning desire to actually kill someone.
Creative writing assignments are not Rorschach tests. Though a 1985 study of writers at the University of Iowa showed that, according to The New York Times, "67 percent suffered from an emotional disorder, while only 13 percent of the control group did," this doesn't mean that professors of creative writing, usually writers themselves, should start scrutinizing students' work for signs of mental illness. Even if writers are more emotionally quirky than most, hardly any of them ever kill anyone.
Cho certainly needed help, and there were enough signs outside of his writing to suggest that he got less than he needed. Evidence of his disorder was either dismissed, overlooked or considered less troubling than it proved. The horrific result was 33 needless deaths.
To their credit, the faculty in Virginia Tech's English department saw something was wrong and tried to get Cho some help. They shouldn't second-guess themselves now. Not every young poet who writes obsessively of winter's emptiness should be hurried off to the psychiatric ward and put on a suicide watch. Nor should the young fiction writer's first-person monologues about shooting people dead necessarily be delivered to the district attorney.
Some years ago, a student in my poetry workshop asked whether I'd ever thought of ways to commit suicide. While the student showed no overt evidence of despair, her poetry sometimes had a melancholic edge. After she left, I alerted my chairperson, who quickly notified a dean, who immediately contacted the counseling center on campus, which promptly contacted the student.
Thinking it's better to be safe than sorry, I would do the same again. But it was the question she asked that made me take action, not her poetry, since the truth is that most good poetry is tinged with melancholy.
Creative writing teachers aren't psychiatrists. We don't keep copies of the diagnostic manual of mental disorders, which lists 297 psychological conditions, on our desks, and I'm not sure we should. It's hard enough for students to write good poetry and fiction without having to worry that a powerful but morbid poem might get them reported to the counseling center or that a story about the moral struggles of a terrorist might win them a visit from the FBI.
Wary of having their every sentence or comment in class surveyed for signs of psychological strain, students could find it impossible to write or comment honestly about each other's work. Other classes in the arts would hardly be immune to this kind of crippling censorship. What of an art student who paints disturbingly violent images? Or a photography student whose work seems overly macabre?
As anyone who's had to surrender shampoo and shoes at the airport knows, fear sometimes pushes the pendulum a bit too far. We may, like Poe's disturbed narrator in "The Black Cat," begin to interpret the innocuous as something far worse.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950, novelist William Faulkner said that the only thing that "can make good writing," the "only" thing "worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat," are "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." We all suffer these conflicts, and some are dark enough to drive us to our knees, or in rare cases even to kill.
To produce creative work about these feelings requires exploring parts of the psyche that most people keep hidden. Students who sign up for creative writing and other art classes are some of the bravest around. They willingly risk criticism, failure and the possibility that professors and peers might wonder where they get their inspiration.
The one thing they shouldn't have to bear is a fearful silence in the wake of Seung-Hui Cho.
The Virginia Tech shooter's life is being combed up and down for clues, however small, that might help explain the massacre he carried out nearly two weeks ago. This even includes Seung-Hui Cho's creative writing assignments, which are filled with violent scenes.
Nobody wants to see another school shooting or any young person become a killer, so in hindsight studying these stories and plays as portals to a killer's psyche may seem perfectly reasonable. But if we do so expecting creative writing teachers to identify future killers in our midst, we seriously undermine the teaching of the arts across the country.
Supposing that a student's creative writing - or any kind of artwork - is a key to his emotional state is problematic. While the homicide detective's search back for motives is analytical, the creative writer's way forward is usually not. Imaginative works depend upon leaps and revelations that writers often can't explain. Directives often come unbidden in the creative process from places we do not know.
In 17 years of teaching creative writing to students at several colleges on Long Island and at CUNY's York College, I have read some incredibly violent and perverse material, including fiction about murdering two-timing lovers (with poisoning the most common approach) and poems about strange sexual escapades. Most times the writers are just trying to shock the reader.
Still, the content occasionally makes me wonder. And when it does, I remind myself, as I remind students, not to make personal assumptions about writers based simply on their creative works, which may be wholly imagined or drawn from knowledge of the world outside of the writer's life. To take a famous example of this, Stephen Crane's Civil War novel, "The Red Badge of Courage," is considered one the finest war novels ever written, yet he was born decades after the war and was never a soldier himself.
Reading Cho's short play "Richard McBeef" online, which is about a 13-year-old boy who provokes his stepfather into striking him with "a deadly blow," my first impression is that by itself the work isn't necessarily alarming. It is filled with references to contemporary news and pop culture, including Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, tabloid papers, chain-saw murders, conspiracy theories, pedophilic priests, wicked stepparents, McDonald's and pro football.
But beginning writers often rely on this kind of sensationalism. Knowing this, I prohibit students in my introductory creative writing classes from killing off any characters violently. Instead, I challenge them to imagine some small but powerful scene from ordinary life and develop the dramatic potential present there. Usually the students look at me in disbelief: What? We can't use murder, rape, patricide, fratricide, infanticide, a nuclear holocaust, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, addiction? What else is there to write about?
Taking their models from Hollywood and TV, and from some of the more violent plots of great dramatists like Shakespeare and Sophocles, neophyte writers often think, to twist a phrase from the investment banker character Gordon Gecko in "Wall Street," that gore is good, and more gore is even better (for Gecko it was greed).
It's not that violence and rage have no place in literature. A quick perusal of the canon proves otherwise. "The Black Cat," a popular story by Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, makes graphic use of violence against humans and animals to show the extent to which the narrator is driven mad by what appear to him supernatural forces. But it's the nuanced portrayal of the narrator's psychology, and not Poe's use of gore, that makes this a great piece of literature.
Apart from Cho's horrendous actions, his one-act play wouldn't necessarily stand as proof of a deranged or murderous mind. Writers have never felt much shame lifting characters, scenes and whole plots from the world around them. Elements of Cho's play could have been taken from the pages of Newsday, where in a recent case a young man convicted of murdering his stepfather with a Samurai sword put forth an initial defense based on allegations of sexual abuse. And there is Martin Tankleff, convicted as a teen of killing both of his parents for allegedly making him drive a "crummy old Lincoln" to high school.
With the media full of such tales, it's hardly unusual that a young writer might mine them for dramatic ore. But we cannot assume that the same writer has a burning desire to actually kill someone.
Creative writing assignments are not Rorschach tests. Though a 1985 study of writers at the University of Iowa showed that, according to The New York Times, "67 percent suffered from an emotional disorder, while only 13 percent of the control group did," this doesn't mean that professors of creative writing, usually writers themselves, should start scrutinizing students' work for signs of mental illness. Even if writers are more emotionally quirky than most, hardly any of them ever kill anyone.
Cho certainly needed help, and there were enough signs outside of his writing to suggest that he got less than he needed. Evidence of his disorder was either dismissed, overlooked or considered less troubling than it proved. The horrific result was 33 needless deaths.
To their credit, the faculty in Virginia Tech's English department saw something was wrong and tried to get Cho some help. They shouldn't second-guess themselves now. Not every young poet who writes obsessively of winter's emptiness should be hurried off to the psychiatric ward and put on a suicide watch. Nor should the young fiction writer's first-person monologues about shooting people dead necessarily be delivered to the district attorney.
Some years ago, a student in my poetry workshop asked whether I'd ever thought of ways to commit suicide. While the student showed no overt evidence of despair, her poetry sometimes had a melancholic edge. After she left, I alerted my chairperson, who quickly notified a dean, who immediately contacted the counseling center on campus, which promptly contacted the student.
Thinking it's better to be safe than sorry, I would do the same again. But it was the question she asked that made me take action, not her poetry, since the truth is that most good poetry is tinged with melancholy.
Creative writing teachers aren't psychiatrists. We don't keep copies of the diagnostic manual of mental disorders, which lists 297 psychological conditions, on our desks, and I'm not sure we should. It's hard enough for students to write good poetry and fiction without having to worry that a powerful but morbid poem might get them reported to the counseling center or that a story about the moral struggles of a terrorist might win them a visit from the FBI.
Wary of having their every sentence or comment in class surveyed for signs of psychological strain, students could find it impossible to write or comment honestly about each other's work. Other classes in the arts would hardly be immune to this kind of crippling censorship. What of an art student who paints disturbingly violent images? Or a photography student whose work seems overly macabre?
As anyone who's had to surrender shampoo and shoes at the airport knows, fear sometimes pushes the pendulum a bit too far. We may, like Poe's disturbed narrator in "The Black Cat," begin to interpret the innocuous as something far worse.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950, novelist William Faulkner said that the only thing that "can make good writing," the "only" thing "worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat," are "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." We all suffer these conflicts, and some are dark enough to drive us to our knees, or in rare cases even to kill.
To produce creative work about these feelings requires exploring parts of the psyche that most people keep hidden. Students who sign up for creative writing and other art classes are some of the bravest around. They willingly risk criticism, failure and the possibility that professors and peers might wonder where they get their inspiration.
The one thing they shouldn't have to bear is a fearful silence in the wake of Seung-Hui Cho.
