This summer, Art of Writing held a writing workshop for rising high school seniors from local underserved communities. We partnered with UC Berkeley Destination College Advising Corps and Early Academic Outreach Program to present this program. Ryan Lackey, a PhD candidate in English and a 2023 alumnus of the Art of Writing Summer Writing Institute, garnered rave reviews for teaching the workshop — he reflects upon the experience here.
When I teach reading and composition courses, I spend a great deal of time encouraging the undergraduates to get outside the expectations and rhythms of writing — especially “academic” or “argumentative” writing — as they’ve practiced and come to think of it.
For a bunch of reasons beyond the students’ control — the funding crisis of secondary education, the curricular emphasis on standardization and demonstrable “skills,” the overwhelming material precariousness that demands students imagine themselves in terms of job-market viability — for all these reasons and more, writing becomes box-ticking, an instrumentalized exercise in playing it safe. Writing as paint-by-numbers, writing that always looks the same: the five-paragraph essay, the inverted-triangle introduction, the three-part thesis.
In June, I taught an Art of Writing workshop designed to introduce high school seniors, over a brisk two hours, to “college writing.” I hoped that the significance of the term — not just writing, now, but college writing — would serve as a kind of pivot point, a catalyst for the reconceptualization of writing as processual, no longer posterior to thinking, not merely the plastic packaging-up of thinking’s manufactured object. I wasn’t sure, however, how to capture all that in a pithy title.
At the last possible moment, I titled the workshop “Writing as Thinking.” Despite its corporate-seminar ring, “writing as thinking,” as a title and a workshop, meant a change to the way students thought about how and when writing happens, an effort to help them understand that writing is always particular. (What is this object? Who is this audience? What effect do I want to realize in the world?). Doing so, I believe, turns writers slowly into slightly better writers; it also — and here my sentimentality slips through — makes richer aesthetic experiences possible, and rich aesthetic experiences are some of the last good things in this world.
I believe writing is thinking, but it’s less than totally clear what exactly writing and thinking are. In “Why I Write,” Joan Didion, for example, almost totally separates writing from ideas:
“During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. In short I tried to think. I failed.”
At first we might be nonplussed, even slightly offended, by Didion’s suggestion that she has failed to think, that she cannot write in the realm of ideas. I’ll admit that I am. If the writer of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album cannot think, what hope remains for us?
But, Didion being ever Didion, she has a narrower point to make, that writing as she sees and practices it begins not in ideas, but instead in the details of the material world:
“I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words [one] summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus.”
Didion calls these details a kind of “picture.” Didion’s pictures are sensible objects unlimited by the single sense of sight. They are tactile and gustatory and auditory — always, always physical. Her famous example is the Bevatron, the particle accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Didion stresses with what to my ear is real urgency, a terror at being misunderstood, that the Bevatron in her mind and on her page is not “a political symbol” for “the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community,” but instead only a set of “lights . . . [a] physical fact.”
It’s clear that Didion does believe writing is thinking. But thinking, for Didion, does not mean lingering with ideas above and apart from the material world; writing is not, as some students assume at first, the tactile end-product of the thinking that happens elsewhere, up in the rarefied atmosphere of ideas. Thinking begins with looking, begins with your body in space. Thinking is almost always happening — and writing is, too.
(Ideas take on objects; objects are laden with ideas. Didion likens the realm of ideas to a country’s border she passes precariously: “During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas.” Borders themselves are both object and idea, abstract and physical, and the political reality attached to Didion’s metaphor is that borders partition the resources necessary for writing and thinking; we might ask who, to recall her image of the illuminated Bevatron, gets to linger with the lights.)
Didion shows us that, minimally, writing includes more than the act of composition, whether by keyboard or pen. Talking, sitting, walking, and (most importantly) reading all constitute writing, which is why I like to read texts together in class. The workshop was no exception: we read our shared text, George Saunders’s micro-story “Sticks,” three times together. Once aloud, one reader per sentence; once aloud, as I read and they listened; and once silently, each to ourselves. During each reading we took notes; we covered the two pages of Saunders’s story with marginalia. This is the most obvious way reading is writing, but of course it is not the only way.
Like Didion’s essay, Saunders’s story is also, upon first glance, concerned with objects rather than ideas. The narrator of “Sticks,” never named, recounts their father’s relationship with a metal pole, which begins as a typically symbolic marker of holidays and events (“On Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veterans Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost”) and ends up a bizarrely symbolic marker of otherwise inexpressible emotional complexity. The story ends:
“He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the string letters of apology, admissions of error, pleas for understanding, all written in a frantic hand on index cards. He painted a sign saying LOVE and hung it from the pole and another that said FORGIVE? and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and left it by the road on garbage day.”
Littered with multiply significant details, like the pole’s resemblance to a “crucifix,” Sticks” is entertaining to read closely, but the story is also about exactly the blurry, floaty space between ideas and objects we’ve been thinking (writing?) about. The pole is an object that gathers more objects, and the gathering of ideas, too, accelerates towards complexity. (I think “accelerate” is exactly the right word; Saunders has an essay on a Donald Barthelme story, “The School,” all about the narrative structure of acceleration.)
But there’s a danger to a notion like “writing as thinking” I haven’t mentioned. However well-intentioned, writing-as-thinking can be turned back into the instrumentalized “set of skills,” the prefabricated forms, it’s meant to replace — like the way a spiritual tradition might be bowdlerized and made profitable as an app or self-help book. The popularity of “creativity” and “thinking outside the box” as marketing terms demonstrates as much.
To be sure, there’s a component of necessity to the teaching of writing: after all, students need to pass their classes in order to graduate, and regardless of their majors or careers they will be asked to write for audiences who do not much care about form, to write in rigid genres that admit little in the way of experimentation or expression. At the same time, if there’s any truth in the ostensible mission of higher education, students also need to find their way into writing as a whole orientation towards texts, art, life. If the former case is necessity, this latter is something like freedom.
In a similar way, the workshop students were doubly encouraging. When I asked them in twos and threes to draft arguments about the story, thesis statements that broke with the typical styles and structures of thesis statements, they produced genuinely interesting readings: the pole as the “weakness of language,” holidays and death as divergent ways of marking time’s passage. Beginning with an object, the story, they generated a set of ideas about the object — and then produced from those ideas new objects, new instances of writing.
Afterwards, as I was packing up to leave, there appeared a little gathering of students who wanted to talk. Not about how best to structure a thesis statement, or how writing would be useful for a future computer-science major, but about how to keep a journal, what they ought to read this summer, what being a writer looked like after college, whether I wrote fiction (which was to say, really, whether the asker could write fiction). And these questions, I believe, proceeded from the same energy, the same turning dynamo, that activates the springing towards detail Didion describes and the narrator of “Sticks” performs — a surplus, a sense of the possible.
Given all this, the workshop made me think about the rhetorical game teachers of writing and literature play all the time: justifying our work to bottom-line administrators or skeptical journalists in terms of legible neoliberal values (“better writers are better workers!” and “the humanities can deliver robust and flexible returns-on-investment!”), even as we hope our work cuts across those values and moves towards something else.
The fact that both exist at once, the cynical and the utopian, compromise and refusal, is not mere juxtaposition or tension; it’s a contradiction that exists because our world is arranged in a certain way. In fact, the contradiction looks a bit like the split between ideas and objects we’ve been talking about. Ideas and objects are mutually constitutive, wrapped up in each other — like writing and thinking, too, it turns out.
Writing as thinking, then, means living under arrangements of contradiction. It means, furthermore, living under those arrangements while being aware of them. Writing, thinking, teaching: figuring out what you can do given the situation at hand. Finding and recognizing what Guy Davenport calls the “stutter of recognition” when something (a moment of beauty, a political problem) appears, and you find yourself compelled to figure out the form of the thing, and the form of your response.
The hope here is that forms never stay exactly the same, and so wherever and whenever we experience those stutters of recognition, whether in the classroom or in the world, we return to the fact of change, of possibility and the future, where writing and thinking — all things — begin.