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Looking at Lineage
Lineage-study is a method of tracing influences. In this case, I’m looking at teaching methods. Mine comes, in part, from Dangerous Writers, and Tom’s method, at least in part, from Gordon Lish. I could go and find Lish’s influences, but let’s just start here for the sake of efficiency.
Gordon Lish:
Gordon Lish taught at New York University, Yale, Columbia, and at the Center for Fiction in Manhattan and was an editor for Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf. The following interview excerpt sums up his legacy:
It’s the custom for editors to keep a low profile and to underplay any changes they may make to an author’s manuscript. Gordon Lish is a different animal. Not since Maxwell Perkins has an editor been so famous—or notorious—as a sculptor of other people’s prose. As fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977, then as an editor at Knopf and of The Quarterly until 1995, Lish worked closely with many of the most daring writers of the past fifty years, including Harold Brodkey, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, and Joy Williams. In an interview with this magazine in 2004, Hannah said, “Gordon Lish was a genius editor. A deep friend and mentor. He taught me how to write short stories. He would cross out everything so there’d be like three lines left, and he would be right.”
More than a dozen books have appeared under Lish’s own name—including the novels Dear Mr. Capote (1983), Peru (1986), and Zimzum (1993). These have won Lish a small but passionate cult following as a writer of recursive and often very funny prose. For decades he taught legendary classes in fiction, both at institutions such as Yale and Columbia and in private sessions in New York and across America. Though he titled one of his books Arcade, or, How to Write a Novel (1999), he, like Socrates, never put his teachings on paper. They survive in his students, many of whom are now prominent writers and teachers of fiction, among them Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz, and Ben Marcus.
~ Christian Lorentzen, The Paris Review
While Lish didn’t write his teachings down, I was lucky enough to find The Consecution of Gordon Lish: An Essay on Form and Influence by Jason Lucarelli which is a helpful analysis of several Lish techniques to include consecution (pulling from what came before to determine what to write next), staying present to images, “riffing,” and writing “attack sentences.”
The Method of Tom Spanbauer:
From Hawthorne Literary Arts promo copy: Tom Spanbauer received his BA in English literature from Idaho State, served two years in the Peace Corps in Kenya, and then moved to the east coast (to New Hampshire, Vermont, and Key West, Florida) before landing in New York City where he received his MFA in fiction from Columbia. In 1991, Tom settled in Portland, Oregon and taught Dangerous Writing in the basement of his house. Of his own teaching method, Tom wrote this:
If you asked my mother how she made pie crust, she never said a word. Instead, she just lifted her hand and rubbed her fingers against her thumb. That's the way it is for me and teaching. It has a feel. I'm not someone who knows and the student is someone who does not know. Each person who is a student of writing is a student of life. I too am a student. Good writers know that about themselves. My job as a teacher is to first create a safe environment. It is a terrifying thing to bring your inner life out of the closet and read it aloud to a group. Secondly, I must listen for the heartbreak, the rage, the shame, the fear that is hidden within the words. Then I must respect where each individual student is in relation to his or her broken heart and act accordingly. Most of all, at the beginning, as a teacher, I must give the permission to do it wrong. In the wrongness there is a treasure. If a wrong note is played long enough, the dissonance can become the speech of angels. And last, I think, and most important, but important because it is last, when my relationship with the student is solid, and when the student has a strong foothold in his or her writing, I bring out my jungle red fingernails, play the devil's advocate, be the bad cop, the irreverent fool--whatever it takes to teach perseverance, self-trust, and discipline. Because I encourage excellence, and each of us has our own excellent, and excellence only comes with not being afraid of who you are. To learn to speak your truth honestly with a clear voice takes lots of practice, and every trick in the book to keep you going down the arduous, cruel, lonely, glorious path of a writer.
~ Tom Spanbauer, Tom Spanbauer.com
In my time at Tom’s table writers were of one genre; fiction. If you were a memoir writer, you were considered a fiction writer. Writers created in first person present tense.
The jargon used for workshop included terms like:
Get Closer.
Beat.
Slow Down.
Bump.
Unpack.
On The Body.
Verticality.
I did not receive a hand out of these terms though Tom certainly defined them and provided examples in workshop pages. But all these years later I cannot say with precision what he meant. I do use them in my own classes, though, and so later in the post I’ll provide definitions that might be of use to you.
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