It was Nov. 9, the morning of the Writing Seminars spring semester pre-registration, and it was cold. I had schlepped to Gilman at 6:45 a.m. so that I could lock down spots in my first-choice classes, but, to my dismay, there were already more than 30 people lounging up and down the first floor hallway by the time I walked in. While waiting, a friend and I trolled the line, failing to solicit submissions for Zeniada, and we asked the guy at the front, a sophomore, how long he'd waited in order to be the first. "All night," he said.
I was surprised; I felt as though a threshold had been crossed. This student had waited all night just to get into Rudiments of Fiction or one of the few other workshop classes open to sophomores fresh out of the Introduction to Fiction and Poetry series. I give him props for his determination. However, his all-nighter represents what's wrong with the Writing Seminars department: there are too few writing workshops to go around.
Let's look at the numbers. There are 150 Writing Seminars majors, give or take, who are sophomores or above -- making it the second-largest major in the school. For next semester, there are 19 courses (and the two IFPs) offered -- not bad, at first glance. However, of these 19, only ten are true workshops: classes dedicated to the writing and peer critiquing of literature. The other nine are investigations of literary techniques, surveys of great authors' works, genre studies and other classes that may contain a creative component but are not workshop-based.
The ten remaining workshops offer a combined amount of 165 spots to undergraduates; again, a seeming cornucopia, unless someone felt like taking more than one workshop or someone from another department wanted in on the fun. However, a new rule instituted by the department, to take effect next term, limits a student to no more than one workshop class per semester. According to assistant registrar Betsy Ryan, this will ensure that all students have a spot in workshop.
I find this puzzling, because to me workshop represents the heart and soul of the Writing Seminars program. It is the forum where a student stands to answer for the art he's created, the place where objectivity is relative and personal opinion reigns. It has nothing to do with getting the A or topping the curve; in fact, workshop is completely antithetical to the culture of cutthroat academia that our school unfortunately tends to inculcate. A roundtable egalitarian assessment, a free flow of ideas and thoughts -- workshop, basically, is all about the writing.
The new one-workshop rule is more than just a bad attempt to mask the lack of available workshops: it is actually detrimental to the creative process. The more writing a student is producing, the better that writing will be overall. To take more than one workshop in a semester is to commit oneself to the creative process for that semester, and the quality of work produced under such circumstances is like day and night. Granted, a two-workshop semester is taxing, but so is this school. To intentionally reject the more hard-core approach required by some areas of study is to allow a student's creative muscles to atrophy when they ought to be exercised. Far from limiting them, I think students of writing ought to be encouraged to take more than one workshop per semester.
We shouldn't have to spend a night in Gilman just to get into a decent workshop (or two). What we need are more workshops -- especially for fiction, the most popular Writing Seminars curriculum -- and more teachers to lead them. There aren't enough spaces for the majors as is, let alone for those writers who happen not to be Writing Seminars majors.
--David Avruch is a senior Writing Seminars major from Brookline, Ma.
