Guest Post - on Creative Writing Workshops

Do you have a resolution to get to a workshop? A class? A masterclass? An academy? A course?

Last month many will have signed up for creative writing classes. With every year that passes, more and more soldiers join what Patrick Kavanagh called the ‘standing army’ of Irish poets, and more legions are also added to the ranks of fiction writers, as judges of writing competitions and editors of literary journals will testify. Having attended several of these classes myself over the last fifteen years, and having experienced significant benefit from most of them, I speak as a fan. There are plenty of them on offer, from night classes in the local VEC to national organisations such as the Irish Writers’ Centre, and there seems to be no shortage of new teachers and workshops setting up shop, even during this current recession. Irish literary ambition, it would seem, is in constant supply.

As a student in classes over the last fifteen years, I have found that sharing my work with, and getting feedback from, experienced teachers and motivated peers to be very helpful, especially once you get over the beginner’s hump of taking comments on your poem/story personally. I’ve also had the privilege of leading workshops in haiku poetry for the last dozen years to students aged 8 to 80. It’s very gratifying as a teacher to see someone’s writing form - and confidence - improve and develop with encouragement and guidance.

But when is a creative writing class not a creative writing class? The solution to this koan, in contrast to Shakespeare’s rose, does lie in the name. Based on my own experience and the anecdotal evidence of other ‘emerging’ writers, the titles of certain courses or workshops smell sweeter to some prospective punters than to others. For instance, if you call a creative writing class a class, a course or a workshop, it will usually be attended by a majority of women. However, if you call it a Masterclass or an Academy, there is more likely to be a gender balance. It appears that male wannabe published writers are more drawn towards classes with prestigious titles, as are some of their female counterparts.

A parallel development takes place in creative writing groups or workshops, the more democratic - and less expensive – fora, where writers gather to share and critique works of fiction and/or poetry. These also tend to be populated more by women, with one major exception: groups (or events) which have a strong focus on performance. The prospect of a microphone tends to lure male poets and writers out of their garrets where the humble workshop fails.

The complex equation of inputs and outputs is crucial in the development of any writer, whether published or unpublished. It is interesting to note that the preferences for these seem to be largely influenced by gender, in this country at least.

Maeve O’Sullivan’s poetry and haiku have been widely published, and her first collection of haiku, ‘Initial Response’, is forthcoming from Alba Publishing in April. She is a member of Haiku Ireland, the Poetry Divas and the Hibernian Poetry Workshop. She and Kim Richardson will lead their annual residential workshop in ‘Creating from Within, Haiku and Mindfulness’, at the Anam Cara retreat in West Cork in August You can also find her on Twitter @maeveos.