Gonsalves and Vollmer: Something to Talk About

PEDAGOGY

“Give ‘em Something to Talk About”:

Love, Generosity, and Wonder in the
Portrait of the Artist Workshop

Florence Gonsalves Matthew Vollmer

Virginia Polytechnic Institute Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University and State University
[email protected] [email protected]

ABSTRACT
This article argues for the employment of an alternative approach to the traditional writing
workshop model called “Portrait of the Artist” (POTA). First, we acknowledge the historical
and theoretical underpinnings of the dominant Iowa model, and engage with scholars who
practice pedagogies that challenge the “gag-rule.” Second, we introduce POTA, which dis-
mantles and reimagines the foundations of a traditional creative writing workshop by em-
phasizing curiosity rather than suspicion, dialogue rather than imposed silence, process over
product, and person over piece. The outcomes lead us to conclude that POTA workshops are
necessary, especially for marginalized student-writers most harmed by antiquated practices of
silencing.

INTRODUCTION

Many a writer has sat in a creative writing workshop, feverishly taking notes while inhabiting the
dreaded and mythical “cone of silence” while their teacher leads their peers in a discussion of their
work. This imposed silence—inherited from the so-called “traditional,” Iowa-style workshop—has
been endorsed for nearly a hundred years and seems to have been replicated in writing programs
throughout the country. “What does [this] traditional workshop offer?” Matthew Salesses asks in
Craft in the Real World. “One common refrain is that writers learn most from hearing what they
haven’t yet realized about their own work. And this is an important aspect of workshop, just not one
that is actually best served by silence” (XXI). Salesses is one among many scholars and educators
who have challenged the traditional writing workshop model including Liz Lerman and Felicia Rose
Chavez, all of whom have introduced concepts and vocabulary crucial to what this paper advances.

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Lerman’s Critical Response Process suggests steps and roles that encourage dialogue and student
agency, such as statements of meaning and permissioned feedback, and Chavez’s anti-racist writing
workshop emphasizes a myriad of practices to honor creative inheritance and encourage artistic
allyship. However, such workshop-styles still tend to adhere to the prevailing and dominant model:
a student brings a single piece of writing to workshop and receives feedback from peers and the
instructor. Chavez provides a comprehensive overview of how this model—one that originated in
1936 with the founding of the Iowa Writers Workshop—became pervasive, and uses the terminol-
ogy “traditional writing workshop model” (or “TWWM”) to designate the dominant Iowa approach.
Chavez differentiates her vision for an anti-racist writing workshop, which she emphasizes as “a study
in love…[that] advances humility and empathy over control and domination” (7). Similarly, this paper
proposes an approach that is rooted in care.

In her 2020 piece “We’re All MFA’s Now!” Beejay Silcox–a Virginia Tech M.F.A. alum, Australian
literary critic, and Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival–depicts a common TWWM experience.

We sat around a table with copies of a classmate’s story in front of us and ‘workshopped’ it. We
talked about how it worked and didn’t work, as if the author of that story were not awkwardly
sitting among us, condemned to silence. On our best days, our conversations were vibrant and
warm-hearted. On our worst, they were conduits for personal animus. Mostly, they were a form
of pedagogically sanctioned vivisection – taking a work that was barely alive and slicing it up.
Taking ideas that were ungainly and edged and rounding them off, making them smoother,
safer to handle. (Silcox)

As an international student, Silcox came to the M.F.A from a tradition of rigorous inquiry,
where questioning ingrained university and cultural practices was encouraged. She felt alienated
during workshop, underrepresented in syllabi across her courses, and unstimulated by what America
had to offer the creative writing classroom. During her time at Virginia Tech, Silcox worked with
Matthew Vollmer (now Director of the VT MFA program) to conceptualize an alternate graduate
workshop experience, one where writers share more than a single story, poem, or essay that “needs
work.” Silcox and Vollmer considered the merits of having graduate students share other writing
and forms of art created by both the artist and other influential creators, thus providing members
in the classroom with an opportunity to, for example, read an Australian writer for the first time.
Silcox and Vollmer began to imagine a new, more robust and dynamic alternative to the “Let’s
Treat This Text Like a Sick Patient” model. They wanted vibrancy and life. They wanted dialogue.
They wanted to create something where the writer–the artist–could be seen and heard. Where the
artist was granted agency. They wanted whatever process they came up with to center on discovery.
“How can we meet a work on its own terms, if we haven’t even met the person?” Silcox asked. The
Portrait of the Artist Workshop was born.

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In order to honor students of diverse backgrounds, especially BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers
who have been traditionally silenced by antiquated, racist pedagogies that push traditional gag-rule
style workshops, creative writing educators have a responsibility to uproot, from its foundation, the
creative writing workshop, reimagining the space as an enlightened, democratic counterculture.
We argue for a novel workshop approach that emphasizes curiosity rather than suspicion, dialogue
rather than imposed silence, process over product, and person over piece, and in so doing cultivates
love, curiosity, and artistic allyship, through the investment of one’s writerly self and others in the
classroom and the greater creative writing community. Silcox and Vollmer decided to call this style
of holistic assessment “Portrait of the Artist,” not as a gesture towards the famous modernist James
Joyce but because of its emphasis on a more complete representation of a writer’s artistic vision.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST WORKSHOP

As creative writing instructors we have a duty to students to reinvent the classroom space, and
as Freire argues in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “The solution is not to ‘integrate’...into the structure
of oppression, but to transform that structure” (74). In a POTA workshop, the writer whose work
will be discussed assembles a collection of their own writing, as well as obsessions, personal pho-
tographs and literary and artistic influences. This can and often does include: YouTube and Spotify
playlists, lists of favorite works of literature, screenshots and beloved memes, video games, PDFs
of short stories or essays or poems or novel excerpts, favorite TikToks, visual art, photographs of
friends, family, and personal life. This approach dismantles and reimagines the foundations of a
traditional workshop by foregrounding curiosity, wonder, camaraderie and care rather than criti-
cism and critique. As such, the basic structure of a POTA workshop has three roles—the artist,
responders, and facilitator—and three steps. First, the artist who is “up for workshop” assembles
a Google folder with four sub-categories: “My Writing,” “Influences,” “Visuals,” and “Fascina-
tions and Obsessions.” The student then fills each sub-folder following the loose guidelines below.
Second, the artist creates a “POTA guide” which reflects on the assemblage of their folder, what
kinds of feedback the writer wants from their peers (responders), and how they want to conduct
class for the third step, the workshop itself. It’s important to note that these folders represent sug-
gested categories and that students may modify both the topics and the contents therein.

STEP ONE: FOLDER ASSEMBLY

A. “My Writing”

In this sub-folder, the writer chooses which pieces they want to share with the class. The sug-
gestion is to include one work that they have written that they enjoy re-reading, and a work they
have written that they are confused or confounded by, knows isn’t working, and/or needs help with.
They might also select works of theirs from different genres to show range, early pieces that convey

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development or artistic growth, and any published pieces they’re pleased with. This is where the
more traditional components of a creative writing workshop come into play, as we acknowledge that
there is space for and value to critique if it happens on the artist’s terms. Though students do have a
chance to hear how their work is experienced and interpreted, this isn’t the sole means of response.
Furthermore, the piece that needs attention or is unfinished isn’t discussed in isolation but rather as
an entity that is part of a constellation of interrelated work.

B. “Influences”

Here the writer first assembles their literary influences in any way they see fit. One suggestion
is to include a published work they admire and wish they had written, as well as a published work
that they do not admire (perhaps one that has been, to their dismay, summarily praised). Other ideas
to include within this folder are a list of top ten books or standalone stories, essays, poems or other
writing the student counts as particularly influential. Students are also encouraged to include influ-
ences outside the writing world, including any art, music, architecture, or pop-culture references
that have been pivotal in their writing. This step in particular emphasizes writing as a social and
process-based activity, one that is enmeshed with all aspects of the human condition. Furthermore,
other students as participants benefit from being exposed to a wider range of writers and artists than
is possible in a traditional workshop. They are also encouraged throughout the workshop to share
the names of artists and writers they think might match the writer’s style.

C. “Visuals”

In order to showcase and honor their histories as humans, students may elect to share photos of
friends, family, pets, and places where they’ve lived or visited that they deem memorable or signifi-
cant. In class, the facilitator may cycle through these pictures and invite the student to talk about
the reasons for each image’s inclusion in the POTA. The decisions regarding the particular photos
chosen by the student result in patterns of meaning that inevitably lead others in the classroom to
make inquiries and suggestions regarding the possible topics and concerns the workshopped student
might consider exploring in future writing. It also creates an atmosphere of care and love, as the
artist is represented not just by a single piece of work, but by a collection of artifacts that showcase
them as a holistic person composed of complexities and contradictions. This in turn creates an
investment in the writerly self, and the writerly selves that populate the classroom community.

D. “Fascinations and Obsessions”

Works of literature comprise only part of the ways in which student writers have been shaped by
the particular cultures in which they’ve been raised; thus, the featured writer in a POTA workshop
may decide to include a wide range of additional texts and ephemera to share with others in the

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class. These materials, meant to honor and emphasize the importance of creative inheritance and
the unique knowledge and experiences students bring to the classroom may include screenshots,
memes, visual art, YouTube videos, musical playlists, home movies, websites, notes, journal entries,
juvenilia, lists of favorite films or video games, PDFs, and other cultural artifacts that the artist has
identified as influential. Viewers of this sub-folder are encouraged to note any identifiable patterns
and preoccupations, as well as any associations or connections they might feel to these particular
artifacts. Discussions around this section of the POTA tend to inspire curiosity and wonder. Enthu-
siasm for particular subjects, ideas, and things tends to be contagious—or, at the very least, leads
other students to appreciate the ardor the artist has for the things they’ve singled out as significant.
Students may make specific inquiries regarding connections between the artifacts, ask the artist to
talk more about why they love x, y, or z, or share ideas for how the artist might attempt to engage
with or narrativize their connections to various subjects.

STEP TWO: POTA GUIDE

POTA workshops also include a guide or introduction to the material that the student has shared
with the class, one that foregrounds student agency and expertise. This guide might include direc-
tions concerning the manner in which the workshop should proceed, as well as the specific topics
or manner of critique, inquiries, or responses upon which the writer wishes to focus. Similar to
Lerman’s statements of meaning, the POTA guide is an opportunity for the student to consider the
most appropriate feedback in this stage of their development. As such, POTA guides tend towards
the idiosyncratic. For example: one student who wanted to represent a wide range of his interests
and influences, spanning from computer science to indie rock to physics to avant garde literature,
crammed his POTA folder with hundreds of pages’ worth of PDFs, videos, songs, etc., and acknowl-
edged that he had “overstuffed” his folder, but provided instructions for how to interact with the
materials: set a timer for one hour, follow your intuition, and interact with only the materials that
attract your attention. No matter how the student approaches constructing their POTAs, or how
they instruct other students to interact with the materials, or how they provide directions for the
ways in which they would like their workshops to unfold (or not), it’s important to note that the
entire process is student-focused and student-led. The student being workshopped retains control of
what gets shared and on what terms, which is especially important for students from marginalized
demographics. As Chavez says, “The anti-racist model empowers the author to moderate their own
workshop while participants rally in service of the author’s vision…. The anti-racist model distin-
guishes the workshop leader as artistic ally” (10).

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STEP THREE: THE WORKSHOP

A. ROLES

There are three roles in a POTA workshop, and which are borrowed from Liz Lerman’s ter-
minology during the critical response process: the artist, the responders, and the facilitator. The
artist assembles the folder then selects a workshop style1 that best fits their desired feedback. The
responders read through the artist’s folder beforehand, and based off of the POTA guide, come
prepared to discuss what they noticed–trends, recurring symbols, images, motifs, patterns, and
preoccupations–as well as provide any feedback on “My Writing” that the artist has asked for.

B. STUDENT-CHOICE STRUCTURE

During the workshop, the artist will act as an active participant, responding to questions about
the four main categories of the POTA. Fellow classmates act as responders, identifying resonances
and connections (or lack thereof) between the shared materials, and embarking upon conversations
about them—discussions that will absolutely involve, if not feature, the artist being workshopped.
In essence, the artist is granted complete creative control over the workshop: they can choose to
focus on what they deem important, whether it’s to examine the connections between their influ-
ences and uploaded writing, or spending more time describing the photos of friends and family that
are important to the writer; moreover, they can surrender control, if they wish, placing the weight
of decision-making upon the instructor or their classmates, and allowing the whims, passions, and
interests of their peers to dictate the shape and direction of the resultant conversation.

C. DIALOGUE, PROCESS, AND MODERATION

1. During workshop, a member of the class—the professor, or another member of the class, if miti-
gating teacher-student power dynamics seems appropriate—acts as facilitator and records key
aspects of the conversation between the artist and responders on a whiteboard, noting observa-
tions about identifiable patterns and similarities between texts, artifacts and influences, as well
as the artist’s own preoccupations, obsessions, and avoidances. The facilitator also documents
notable inquiries and perceptions that the artist’s POTA folder has raised.
2. Considering the folder as a whole, the facilitator takes note of trends students as responders have
noticed in the featured artist’s work. POTA workshops may begin with a facilitator asking the
artist to describe the experience of assembling their folders or expanding on their POTA guide;
once this origin story has been shared, the discussion might pivot by inviting the rest of the
class to describe specifics about what they noticed, or to identify main themes and “takeaways.”

1 It’s important to note that it is beyond the scope of this paper to enumerate the various permutations of possible
workshop styles.

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Utilizing the whiteboard helps emphasize connections, themes, repeating images, and “vibes,”
highlighting unseen connections the student might not be privy to, but that may be apparent to
students who are encountering their work with fresh eyes.
3. The documentation of the particular observations made by the workshop may also include the
creation of generative prompts and ideas for further writing, as well as reading lists of other
writers and makers whose artistic visions might prove challenging or complementary.
4. At the end of the workshop, the facilitator may choose to take photos of the whiteboard(s) and
share them with the artist, providing a brief summary of the conversation and an invitation to
discuss the results further. In the end, each writer featured in a POTA workshop doesn’t just
take home a piece that needs to be “fixed” in revision—although they certainly may, if that’s
the permissioned feedback they chose—but instead leaves the class with a treasury of exciting
new possibilities. Rather than culminating mostly in a diagnostic proposition to fix what isn’t
“working,” a POTA workshop ends on a chord of potentialities: lists of artists or influences
fellow peers think the artist could learn from, prompts based on which of their obsessions or
interests could be fleshed out more, and even suggestions for developing new pieces. One-on-
one conferences post-workshop are also highly encouraged between student and professor to
discuss the impact of the workshop, as well as the entire POTA process.

POTA WORKSHOP IN PRACTICE: MARY’S EXAMPLE

Each Portrait of the Artist workshop begins a week before the class meets. Let’s say that this
particular class period—ideally at least 75-minutes in length—is dedicated to workshopping the
work and vision of a student named Mary. Mary has chosen to share four folders with the class—
“My Writing,” “Influences,” “Visuals,” “Fascinations & Obsessions”—that contain digital repre-
sentations of her own personal vision and artistic influences and which include (but are not limited
to): a song by Lana Del Rey; a clip of Nightmare on Elm Street; photos of her boyfriend and her
mom; a Twin Peaks meme of the Black Lodge and the caption “I WANT TO HOT BOX THIS
ROOM”; the poem “Toast” by Leonard Michaels; a still from The Shining of a distraught Shelley
Duvall gripping a baseball bat; a still from Rebel without a Cause featuring James Dean; a pho-
tograph of red and green traffic lights in a snowy intersection; “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper;
Lydia Davis’s paragraph-long story “Happiest Moment”; a still from It’s a Wonderful Life bearing
the subtitles “What do you want? You–You want the moon?”

Mary decides to spend the entirety of workshop the “normal” way, which is to say, by asking
the rest of the class to identify patterns and preoccupations they observed in her POTA folder; to
provide brief thoughts and general feedback on the short stories Mary uploaded, as per her POTA
guide; to generate potential and individuated writing prompts, and to identify other artists that her

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work might be in conversation with. Members of the class note that Mary seems drawn to Ameri-
cana, moons, liminal dreamlike spaces, and snowy Midwestern tableaus that feature cozy houses.
As the dialogue unfolds, themes emerge. White space. Quietness. Romance. Violence. Abundance.
Decadence. Voyeurism. One student notes that, in Mary’s work, characters tend to “do romance
wrong, but it’s right,” and that both the writer and her influences seem to be taking comfort in
representations of the bizarre.

“The images, both in her flash fiction and poetry, seem to be in conversation with the lonely,
evocative photographs in her influences folder,” one participant notes.

“It’s like, as a reader or watcher, you’re invited to dust for fingerprints,” another observes.

“Or like someone’s pulling the curtain back,” another adds, “and you’re allowed to witness
something surprising and intimate.”

Let’s say that Mary thinks all these observations are wonderful to hear, but her main problem–
as she sees it–is that she feels like she keeps writing flash fiction but what she really wants to do is
write a novel.

No problem. Her peers—and her professor—stimulated by this multimedia cascade of “Things

Mary Loves,” have ideas.

What if Mary made a list of everything she loved and held dear—ala Ursula K. LeGuin’s
“Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction?”—and wrote a novel with all of those glorious treasures inside?
What if she envisioned her unwritten novel as a kind of Advent Calendar–thus honoring her obses-
sion with windows, with wintertime, and outsiders looking in–and behind each window lived a
tiny story, the compilation of which contributed to a larger narrative? What if, instead of avoiding
writing about her home state of California, she forced herself to really “go there”? Oh! And had she
ever read Otessa Moshfegh’s novel Elieen? Was she familiar with the work of Gregory Crewdson,
who employed film crews to compose surrealistic portraits: a woman floating right-side up in a
living room, say, or a lone man in a suburban neighborhood gazing into a beam of light falling from
an unknown place in the sky?

At the end of class, Mary regards the whiteboard full of notes the facilitator has taken during
the workshop. She’s beaming. She expresses gratitude towards her peers for their time, care, and
attention. She’s pleased because she feels like she’s been seen and heard, having held workshop on
her own terms. Her voice mattered, as did her vision. Instead of a swarm of contradictory voices in
her head surrounding a single piece presumed to require critique to save it, she can now lay claim
to an abundance of observations and reflections on her body of work. She leaves with possibilities
and a clearer sense of her writerly self.

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POTA WORKSHOP OUTCOMES

To reiterate our earlier statement, by dismantling and reimagining the foundations of a tra-
ditional workshop along the lines of curiosity rather than suspicion, dialogue rather than silence,
process rather than product, and person rather than piece, the POTA workshop: (1) cultivates the
student’s “writerly self,” and honors creative inheritance, and (2) fosters artistic allyship, camara-
derie and classroom community through the acknowledgment of, and investment in, the writerly
selves of other students.

1. Cultivating the Writerly Self; Honoring Creative Inheritance

The traditional writing workshop model permits students to submit one story. One could argue
that this could be interpreted as a type of synecdoche: one piece “speaks” for and/or represents the
entirety of the writer’s talent and abilities, thus suggesting a kind of disembodiment or disconnect.
As Silcox suggested, workshoppers can’t meet a piece where it’s at if they haven’t met the person.
Creating a POTA folder, on the other hand, allows peers to view each writer holistically, as the sum
of their experiences, work, writing, and influences. No mindful writer would ever argue against
the importance of influences in the writing process, so why aren’t we centering them more in
our discussions during workshop? Why aren’t the particular texts and cultural artifacts that have
contributed to our own writing and the ways that we “go about in the world” more central to the con-
versations we have in class? The decentering or, in many cases, total disregard for influences can
have a profound effect on the student writer, especially in the cases of students from marginalized
demographics, whose literary lineages have historically been underrepresented in the traditional
canon. Educators, then, might serve their student communities better by inviting a range of student
perspectives and influences in order to create the kind of inclusive space suggested by Chavez: “A
twenty-first century anti-racist writing workshop frees participants to exercise their own authentic
voices….honors participants’ influences, imaginations, and intellectual curiosities. And it affirms
that every single one of them arrives at the classroom as experts in their own right, complete with a
unique storytelling tradition” (43). When creative influences go unacknowledged, in the traditional
writing workshop, entire cultures are at risk of being ignored and erased. As bell hooks claims:
“Some [students of color] express the feeling that they are less likely to suffer any kind of assault if
they simply do not assert their subjectivity. They have told me that many professors never showed
any interest in hearing their voices. Accepting the decentering of the West globally, embracing
multiculturalism, compels educators to focus attention on the issue of voice: Who speaks? Who
listens? And why?” (39-40).

Giving students a voice doesn’t only mean allowing them to speak in a workshop; it also
means providing a space to celebrate, showcase, and document each student’s unique expertise,

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acknowledging that such influences have artistic merit no matter how much they deviate from
traditional norms. In a POTA workshop, the evidence of the fruits of a more inclusive workshop is
obvious: the multi-modal approach reveals the progress and evolution of the workshop as it unfolds
in real-time on the board in the front of the room. It’s satisfying to recognize, after class, that some-
thing valuable has happened: that the writer has received the gift of being seen and heard, and now
has a roadmap for future work, whether it be a list of what they might consider reading, what they
might try writing about, or which cultural artifacts they might interact with. The dialogue that
follows–since it tends to describe if not more than prescribe–is kinder, more generous and more
infused with wonder.

2. Fostering Artistic Allyship, Camaraderie and Classroom Community

In Teaching to Transgress, hooks says, “Making the classroom a democratic setting where
everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy” (39).
There’s a sense of being on the same team -- artistic allyship -- that is more prominent in a POTA
workshop than a TWWM. Each responder is an artist helping another artist find themes, patterns,
obsessions and avoidances to enrich the vision each individual has for their own work. When the
materials students bring to workshop are not treated as sick patients or bodies whose deaths a
coroner seeks to ascertain, and rather works that are connected to/in conversation with a constella-
tion of related and unrelated artifacts, genuine curiosity arises about connecting the dots. When a
participant in a conversation is enthusiastic about a painting or a song or a story – much less a whole
volume of like materials – enthusiasm tends to be contagious. Even if the other people in the room
didn’t particularly “like” or “understand” the kind of music/poetry/memes being discussed, they
can still recognize and appreciate patterns and preoccupations because they’re rooted in a human
being who is taking them seriously.

Concerning the importance of process in a creative writing classroom, Salesses says, “A product-
based mentality only exacerbates this suffering, due to its emphasis on a polished final outcome…
But real writing, the pursuit of authentic voice through process, not product, is a release of control.
Your workshop participants can reclaim their creativity, release control, and restore confidence in
their work by exercising generosity towards themselves” (63).

CONSIDERATIONS

Let us return to Salesses’s point about the merits of a traditional workshop: students benefit
from hearing what they might not have otherwise recognized in their own work. While POTA
de-emphasizes product, there’s still a space for feedback and critique. Ultimately, the way the artist
spends their class period is up to them, and indeed portions of POTA workshops do contain more
elements of a traditional workshop. Artists might ask responders in their POTA Guide for line

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edits or margin notes on printed copies or comments via Google drive, etc. Such an approach isn’t
without its merits; any and everything one writes can likely be “improved” and many artists benefit
from having other eyes on their work. The difference between critique in a traditional workshop
versus a POTA workshop is that the underlying assumption of the entire space isn’t that there is
something “wrong” with the writing. Instead, there is an understanding on behalf of the writers in
the room that writing is a social act, and there is much to be learned from dialoguing about one’s
work. The impetus behind critical feedback in a traditional and POTA workshop is a shared one, but
the practice is quite different. In a traditional workshop, some writers might choose their best piece
in order to “prove” themselves — i.e., mimic the dominant white “literary” writing style. Secondly,
as promising or effective as the writing within that particular piece might be, if students are pre-
programmed to put on their detective hats and begin searching for clues as to how and why the text
could be better, without permission or parameters, the outcome is tainted by the lens through which
the work was entered. Also, the constant diagnosing of a work’s illnesses can prove exhausting, as
it privileges critique over almost any other mode of engagement. However, if the artist is in control
of the workshop, and if dialogue is encouraged, there can be real merits to the writer receiving
permissioned critique.

It should be noted, however, that POTA workshops still endure the pitfalls prevalent in tradi-
tional workshops and predominately white academic spaces. Although beyond the scope of this
paper to investigate or expound upon, the potential hazards of these conventional approaches range
from cultural competency to responder engagement. Inevitably some students won’t arrive fully
prepared. Others may not have read carefully or engaged fully with the artist’s materials and so
discussion may be dominated by those who have. Additional considerations include peer dynamics
and the accompanying challenges that students might face when sharing vulnerable work, includ-
ing feeling pressure to out-do one another or conform and mirror previous POTAs that have been
shared. While such concerns are valid, they lie beyond the scope of this paper.

One other area of note is that POTA workshops described in this paper have been conducted at
the graduate level. As such, the M.F.A students who partake - and find the workshop beneficial --
are likely already versed in traditional workshop, and thus have a foundation of critique from which
to build on and deviate. As intermediate or advanced writers, they also have many more materials
to add to their various subfolders, particularly “My Writing,” and have likely had experience getting
feedback about their writing in some capacity before. To tailor this to an introductory course, where
students have less experience and less confidence, and therefore need more scaffolding, simplifying
and specifying the folder assembly could be useful. For example, the parameters for “Influences”
might be to add only one story the beginner writer has read outside of class and liked, but then
also require a written response about why they like it, utilizing language introduced early on in

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the semester, rather than assuming that the student already has a vocabulary for authorial choices
and/or literary devices. Similarly, many beginning writers might not have much or any of their
own writing to source materials, so to fill “My Writing,” workshop should take place later on in
the semester, after introductory students have had a chance to be exposed to, and write in, various
mediums and styles. The guidelines for “My Writing” would also be more specific so that beginner
writers have more concrete directions for collecting their materials. For example, “My Writing”
might include one short story that the writer creates specifically for the POTA workshop, and also
one “Proud Piece” — a short writing assignment from class that they’re pleased with, along with a
statement about why. Finally, the “student choice” workshop structure might not be as effective for
amateur writers who are less familiar with traditional workshops. In this scenario we suggest pro-
viding students with specific workshop parameters — Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, for
example — so that they might better understand the format of and expectations for responding to
their peers. It’s highly encouraged to perform mock workshops in class beforehand, so that students
have a space to practice the kind of dialogues, responses, and processes they might experience in
actual workshops.

CONCLUSION

It’s worth repeating that the POTA workshop dismantles and reimagines the foundations of
a traditional creative writing workshop by emphasizing curiosity rather than suspicion, dialogue
rather than imposed silence, process over product, and person over piece. While traditional
workshop assumes the writer has the problems and the readers have the answers, thus narrowing
the possibilities for conversation considerably, POTA assumes that both parties must question and
converse together, not necessarily to arrive at solutions, but to get at the heart of a writer’s artistic
vision, and find ways of honoring and enlarging it. The emphasis on process, rather than product,
and on enthusiasm rather than critique, front-loads positivity and encouragement, while highlight-
ing the truly social components of writing and reading. It maps relations both material (between
things) and semiotic (between concepts), which makes for a rich dialogue that goes beyond “fixing”
to wondering. The focus of this workshop style, then, encourages intrigue rather than critique, and
its focus remains upon human creators and the conversations that emerge around the raw material
presented in POTA folders rather than only evaluating the quality of a finished product: a process
that can be crucial and nourishing for the growth of student-writers, especially for BIPOC and
LGBTQ+ students, and other members of marginalized communities. We hope this paper will serve
as a springboard for instructors to “un-gag” their creative writing classrooms, whether academic
or otherwise, and to foster spaces where student agency and expertise is acknowledged across
cultures, populations, and demographics—and where dialogue, care, curiosity, and camaraderie is
not only encouraged but prioritized.

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 Gonsalves and Vollmer: Something to Talk About

WORKS CITED
Chavez, Felicia-Rose. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Writing
Classroom. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2021.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. New York, Routledge, 2014.
Lerman, Liz. Critical Response Process. Website. https://lizlerman.com/wp-content/
uploads/2020/04/Critical-Response-Process-in-Brief_CRP-one-pager_updated-2020_03_24.
pdf. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.
Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. New
York, Catapult, 2021.
Silcox, BeeJay. “We’re All M.F.A’s Now!” Australian Book Review, August 2018, No 403.

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