This essay is from the anthology “MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,” edited by Chad Harbach, which will be published later this month.
Todd Solondz’s Storytelling famously features an encounter between a writing instructor and a college student. He has just eviscerated both her and her boyfriend’s work, calling the boyfriend’s story “a piece of shit.” When she sees him at a bar, she claims that she agrees with him, she’s “really happy with the class,” and she’s “a great admirer of [his] work.” He says almost nothing. So she asks, “Do you think I have potential as a writer?” “No,” he says.
In the next scene she follows him, with obvious terror, to his apartment. In the bathroom she finds an envelope that contains nude photos of the student he says has talent. He tells her to take off her clothes and, in the one note of complexity that enters the story, is able to dominate her partly by exploiting her fear that she may be latently racist. (She’s white and he’s black.) His other tool of domination is the workshop dynamic. Despite having told her she’s hopeless as a writer, here he’s willing to be prescriptive.
Predictably (the script itself is self-consciously modeled on a “workshop story,” with carefully articulated motivations and a neatly turned ending) she reads aloud in class a fictional account of what she describes as rape. The student whose photos she found says the story is dishonest. “Jane pretends to be horrified by the sexuality she in fact fetishizes.” The instructor agrees. “Jane wants more, but isn’t honest enough to admit it.” Still, he says, this story is better than her last one. “There’s now at least a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Solondz has written a workshop story in more than one respect. The first rule of writing about workshop is that there should be some sex. One student should be sleeping with another or with an instructor or ideally both. How could a story get by with characters who only want to write fiction? Some other desire has to intervene to make it interesting.
Theresa Rebeck’s play Seminar revolves around a famous instructor who, for a substantial price, agrees to lead a workshop for four young writers. The instructor, Leonard, is charismatic, demanding, and not only seduces one of the women but incessantly talks to all of them, men and women, about sex. As soon as the play appeared, in New York in 2011, critics made the connection between the Leonard character and the highly influential, erotically fixated longtime writing teacher Gordon Lish. Like Lish, Leonard evaluates his students’ writing after having heard a single sentence, and does so almost entirely in terms of its capacity to seduce. The one story he praises, written by the young woman he goes to bed with, has “a lightness, a touch, a sexual edge to the language which is I got to say, it got me on board. Va voom.”
Rebeck doesn’t appear to have taken one of Lish’s classes (if she had, she could probably recall a more articulate response than “va voom”), but basically she knows the score. Lish—who taught and edited young writers from the 1970s through the ’90s, editing fiction at Esquire and Knopf and teaching at universities and private apartments—asked students to write to seduce him, and when female students succeeded he often took them to bed. Once he became an editor at Knopf he often bought his students’ work as well, sometimes midsemester and sometimes, or so it seemed, midclass. So in two ways his workshop extended beyond the established boundaries of the classroom: if he really liked what you were doing, he might sleep with you, or he might publish your book.
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Lish figured out how he wanted to run his workshop when he started teaching undergraduates at Yale in the early 1970s. He had just turned forty and had earned a reputation as a dynamic young fiction editor. One afternoon a week, he came from the Manhattan Esquire office full of a sense of power. He asked each student to read from her work but stopped her as soon as he lost interest; usually this was before she finished the first sentence. Then he took advantage of the silence to describe, in intensely eloquent monologues that could last hours, how to write work he would want to hear read aloud. “Remember, in reaching through your writing to a reader, you are engaged in nothing so much as an act of seduction,” former student Tetman Callis recalls him saying. “Seduce the whole fucking world for all time.”
Lish’s willingness to be bored and show it was one of his strengths as an instructor. He created a situation in which each student had to approach him, like a stranger at a party or a bar, to see if she could catch his attention. Lish shot down these nervous suitors one by one, not even bothering to hear out the pickup lines they fretted over. Then he shifted in an instant to a masculine role: talking endlessly, enacting his charisma, awing his listeners into submission.
David Leavitt was one of the Yale undergraduates who took an early Lish workshop. Around that time Leavitt wrote his great story “Territory,” which appeared in The New Yorker and then in many anthologies, forever marking him as having been a precocious writer. Leavitt later wrote a novel, Martin Bauman, about this period of precocity. His descriptions of the Lish character, Flint, show how eros, writerly ambition, and the writing teacher get bound up together:> I suppose now that I was a little in love with Flint. And why shouldn’t I have been? He was a good-looking man, lean and surly, with hands like broken-in leather gloves. Nor did his reputation as a womanizer in any way detract from the effect he had on me. On the contrary, it served only to intensify my idea of him as an avatar of masculine virility. For what I wanted from Flint, I told myself, wasn’t so much sex as permission—to write, to think of myself as a writer. Today I recognize the degree to which this need for his approbation encoded a desire I had heretofore never admitted: the desire for men—and more specifically, for older, fatherly men who didn’t desire me.
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Lish, always a troublesome employee, was fired from Esquire in the late 1970s; the same thing happened at Yale in 1980. By then he had become an editor at Knopf, where within the next few years he would publish Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Barry Hannah’s Airships, and Mary Robison’s Days. He became the man who made experimental fiction (only later did it come to be called literary minimalism), and it no longer mattered what anyone thought of him.
After leaving Yale, Lish started teaching a class at Columbia for adult students. He taught in the continuing education program, which meant the class was open to anyone who was accepted and willing to pay for it. These students came to class knowing how he taught and how he wanted them to write, and they wanted to meet his expectations. In this environment, Lish became more than a demanding teacher—he made himself into a guru of fiction. His classes went from three hours, as had been the case at Yale, to five or more. He developed an eccentric outfit he wore to class, composed of a cowboy hat, khaki shirt and pants, and gleaming leather boots. The novelist Lily Tuck, who has written about being his student, thought he bore “more than a passing resemblance to Steve McQueen.”
His waxing power at Knopf added a new charge to the classroom. In early 1983, Anderson Ferrell, a former Broadway dancer, “read two paragraphs he had written about a tobacco farm in North Carolina, near the place where he was raised,” Lish’s longtime student Amy Hempel later wrote in an article for Vanity Fair. “Lish found the work so good as to be ‘disabling.’ The next morning Ferrell had a contract with Knopf.” Lish had never signed up a student, and as word spread he wrote to Hempel (who hadn’t been in class lately) to ask if she was hurt. She claimed not to be, but at that moment the rules of the workshop had changed.
Lish told his students to seduce the world, but in practice they wrote to seduce him, and he became adept at playing them off one another in order to maximize their interest. From one session to the next, he knocked down students he had praised, always in the strongest terms. Lish himself was an expert seducer: he worked hard to make his students want to please him, and to make their literary and erotic motivations impossible to extricate from each other. Here is how Callis recalled his “show, don’t tell” lecture:
We are not supposed to want to sleep with our instructors (or our students), but it happens in fiction and in fact, and very often the appearance of erotic desire makes us produce better work. A charismatic instructor suggests that students could seduce him with a great story, and a confident student plays up her own charisma, in class and on the page, to hold his attention. Neither may have any intention of breaking the rules, but the idea of breaking them is attractive, and to really write for someone you have to want to do more for him than turn in ten pages by the end of the day Friday.
So the best instructors learn to cultivate and deflect the interest of their students, and the most attentive students are able to play along, to everyone’s satisfaction. Both teachers and students create the possibility of seduction in the workshop, as a way of heightening its potential, but most often an understanding is maintained that nothing may happen between them. The workshop, like the psychoanalytic session, is meant to be a space where seduction is rehearsed but specifically not enacted. Actual sex is forbidden—but the most successful workshops often are the ones most charged with erotic potential.
Some straight male teachers can produce this kind of spark with male students, some gay male teachers with women, and so on, but most often we’re best at drawing others out when we feel real erotic potential: not in a situation of sexual solidarity but of sexual tension. A male teacher working with a young female student is the most familiar, most common, and not the least compelling situation. It combines the archetypally masculine narrative of striving to surpass a father figure with the more ambivalent feminine one of obtaining an older lover. The student may surpass her instructor as an artist, and as she does so she may bring him various kinds of pleasure. This makes for a complicated narrative in which coming into power is not necessarily an escape from domination; it can also be a deeper and more rewarding form of complicity with it.
What’s particular about a writing workshop is that another kind of desire is omnipresent: the desire to become known, viable, famous, great. In other words, to publish. In most workshops, the expression of this desire is forbidden too: of course you’re supposed to want to have sex, and to publish your work, but you’re not supposed to weigh down the workshop with the messy specifics of either. In workshop, this second taboo often takes the form of a strict emphasis on “craft” and “art”: you are simply there to write, and the less pure world of publishing can be entered later, if at all.
Lish is now best known for the work he did in the late 1970s and early ’80s with Raymond Carver. For cutting most of Carver’s best-known stories to half their intended length, turning a deeply traditional writer into a groundbreaking minimalist, he is remembered as one of the most controlling editors on record. But the more characteristic story of Lish as an editor and teacher is not a battle of wills, as was his work with Carver. Rather, it’s an emotionally fraught collaboration with a most likely female student.
What was it like to begin his workshop? It was, for one thing, to enter an extreme imbalance of power. Each student came to the class willing to remain still and silent for hours on end, to read her work when called upon but be cut off without protest, and eventually in the private classes to pay thousands of dollars for twelve sessions. She agreed to this in return for the privilege of learning to please Lish and getting several chances to please him; because of his extraordinary combination of personal authority and editorial power, most students probably understood “please Lish” as having the same meaning as “produce literature.”
At the first class Lish established just how much he would demand of his students. He started at least one term at Columbia by asking them to tell their most shameful secret, “the ineffable, the despicable, the thing you will never live down,” as Hempel wrote in Vanity Fair. One student admitted to having run someone over; another may have for the first time come out of the closet. When the exercise was over, Lish smiled. “Did I say,” he asked, “that this secret doesn’t have to be true?”
Hempel said that this exercise set the stakes of the workshop: students would have to give everything they had to even attempt to please him. It also set the terms: Lish wanted students to approach him from a position of complete vulnerability. The effort to satisfy Lish would be about more than literature—it would be personal. Pleasing him would not only affirm their worth as writers but put them back on tolerable footing with him as human beings.
How did Lish tell his students to do this? By using their vulnerability to perform a feminine seduction. Like all writing instructors, Lish told his students they must have authority over their material, Lily Tuck wrote. But authority for a writer “is not just possessing what you speak but being possessed by it.” A writer maximized her authority by choosing a subject she knew intimately and that made her feel helpless. “The best writers are those who put themselves at risk—first destabilize yourself, then restore yourself,” Lish said. How did they restore themselves? By dramatizing their confessions in a way that commanded attention: that was tense, taut, and confident, that had the feeling of an emotional striptease about it. “Mystery is at the very center of what engages the fictional transaction,” Callis recalls Lish saying. “Writing is not about telling; it is about showing, and not showing everything.”
There was an archetypal student for whom this approach worked best. She was a woman, and most likely an attractive woman with some confidence, who intuitively understood the tactics Lish described, and was able to translate them from life to the page. She felt some uncertainty about the direction of her life but had real financial security—a young woman from a wealthy family, or a middle-aged one who regretted giving up work for her family—and this combination allowed her to commit totally to the workshop. Like most of us, she possessed a reserve of personal trauma, which she could have explored as easily in therapy as in workshop. But she was in workshop, which meant that she would dramatize her reckoning in tense and enticing sentences. Simply coming to terms with the more difficult facts of her life would not be enough; she would have to come to terms with them in a way that made her vulnerable, attractive, compelling. Within this framework, Lish became, in various combinations, teacher, analyst, correspondent, editor, lover, and publisher.
This method helped to produce any number of books, among them Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live (1985), Yannick Murphy’s Stories in Another Language (1987), Sheila Kohler’s The Perfect Place (1989), Diane Williams’s This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (1990), Noy Holland’s The Spectacle of the Body (1994), Dawn Raffel’s In the Year of Long Division (1995), and Christine Schutt’s Nightwork (1996). One difficulty with the method was that it only really worked once. Most of us have only so many secrets, and after a certain point we lose interest in telling them. The Lish workshops produced many good first stories, and many good first books, but they have been less successful at launching careers. Those who have persisted have made clear in the transformation of their work that they are drawing on different resources.
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What does it sound like when many writers are appealing to one person—and that person fundamentally understands writing as seduction? The results are more different than they are alike, but they sometimes have a goofy brazenness that feels like it’s aimed at a shared target.
Holland, “Absolution”:*
Williams, “My Highest Mental Achievement”:
Hempel, “Housewife”:
When I read Diane Williams’s best stories I feel, as she must have when she completed them, exuberant. One complicated aspect of learning to write to seduce is that for many women it was a form of empowerment. Williams was a suburban Chicago housewife, a former editor, and a dissatisfied amateur writer when she traveled to take one of his classes. She was looking for something to change her life, and this was it: within a few years she had moved to New York, where she became a professional writer and teacher and founded the literary magazine NOON.
In an interview with The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Williams said, “I studied with Gordon for two semesters in New York because I understood what he was offering—the special chance to become hugely conscious of how language can be manipulated to produce maximum effects.” For her, language became a source not only of literary but of real personal authority. “So often, in our naturally powerful speech, we only understand dimly how we are doing it, so that we are deprived of the good fortune of being in charge of it, rather than the other way around.”
By the mid-1980s Lish was completely engaged with cultivating new writers, to the point where the actual work of publishing books came to seem a distraction. So he threatened to quit unless he was, like editors at a few other publishing houses, given his own literary magazine to edit. Random House (of which Knopf is a division) assented, and so The Quarterly: The Magazine of New American Writing was founded. From the start, it served as the publishing arm of Lish’s fiction program, and his career rose and, before long, fell with it.
The first issue of The Quarterly opened with a new story by Hempel, “The Harvest,” which would become the standout story in her next collection. The rest was filed with the work of Lish students, among them Peter Christopher, Nancy Lemann, Yannick Murphy, and Janet Kauffman, all of whom would eventually publish books at Knopf. Only about half their contributions, however, were presented as finished, titled stories; the rest, usually shorter pieces, were always called “To Q.” These were mostly works in progress that a student had brought to class or simply sent to Lish. Lish, of course, was Q.
During this time, Lish was as powerful as he would ever be. Journalists wrote feature stories about New York’s most powerful and charismatic fiction editor. Esquire printed an elaborate chart of the publishing industry that placed its former editor at the “red hot center.” As soon as the great claims were made, however, the backlash started, and was compounded by Lish’s having produced compilations of his work in the form of The Quarterly. The patterns across his students’ work were easy to point out, and what made them seem contemporary when considered separately suddenly came across as a weakness. Critics began to speak about the School of Gordon Lish—meaning both the classes and the work itself—probably most perceptively Sven Birkerts, in his article of that title, which appeared in The New Republic soon before the founding of The Quarterly. After surveying the works of Ferrell, Hempel, and several others, Birkerts wrote,
Birkerts, as usual, was astute—and as usual, he channeled his critique through his preoccupation with technological change. But there’s another way to read this “common style” that’s less electronic than erotic. To call a piece of fiction “To Q” is to understand story as seduction, and fiction-writing as love letter to a particular person. Perhaps it is. Or perhaps this can be, at least, an extremely useful way of thinking. If fiction is about possibility, then the best workshop is the one in which anything seems possible, and the best teacher is the one who makes everything seem possible, sex and love and literary fame not excluded.
But to call a hundred stories “To Q” is something different. Instead of possibility, there is only Q—a kind of constant to be solved for. A teacher, an editor, even a lover isn’t supposed to become the world, but rather to point the writer toward it.
** Holland starred in what may have been the most remarkable Lish workshop. She brought to class an eighty-page novella, “Orbit,” that so entranced Lish he allowed her to read it from start to finish.*{: .small}
Carla Blumenkranz is an editor of n+1.
Photograph by Bill Hayward.
