Camoin, Francois. "The Workshop and Its Discontents." Colors of a Different Horse.

Camoin verbalizes something I've often said in jest of my literature-studying friends: " 'We'll write the stuff,' we say. 'Let the others (those across the hall, the critics) talk about it' " (3). I have to say that, even although I usually enjoy the reading in my literature courses, I often failed to get much out of the ensuing converstaions about it; I felt literature students were being overanalytical of a work that might have been meant to just be entertaining, not a commentary on the times or something equally lofty. I've had many people read tons into my own writing that I didn't intend to be there; I just think it's great they're getting something out of my writing and can identify with it in some way, but I'm certainly not as heady as all that some of my stories have been made out to be.

Camoin believes that the workshop is a "scandal" to the English department: "Imagine a class in which the teacher is, for the most part, silent. Imagine texts which deny their own authority. (For it is the Law of the Workshop, as pwoerful as the law of incest is in the culture at large, that the author must not speak. This fundamental Law shapes the workshop, makes it what it is.) Imagine a place in which fictions are not studied, but written. It denies everything, this place. Most of all it contradicts the metaphysics of literary study, which asserts that there is a place outside of texts where the scholar, the critic, can stand, and, like Aristotle's God, comment without being commented upon. In the workshop there is no outside; we speak and everything changes. We suggest a new narrative sequence, the collapsing of two characters into one, the elimination of a third, a new ending. Everything is different now; the text under study is no longer the text under study. We are always inside the text, working feverishly to make it different, to make it more complex, to change it. Nothing in the worksho is less sacred than the text" (4). In other words, writers realize that texts are never set in stone -- published authros change their works all the time, even after they are into second and third editions. John Updike once said that he rewrote his Rabbit books, just for himself, even after they'd been published a billionth time. This is no doubt unsettling for a literary scholar, who comments upon a text as a finished work, a commentary on something bigger, rather than something fluid.

"If the workshop is different from the literature class, it is nevertheless a place where texts are in question, and we must speak, without authority perhaps, but still speak. It's not a question of teaching without theory -- we can be goats and monkeys in the halls and at department parties, but in workshops the students want more from us than 'Be like me. Write" (which is not very useful advice, finally)" (5). So Camois is no longer allowing the creative writing teacher to be the silent sage (I don't see many of these, anymore, frankly, but I admit that I'm frustrated when I'm stuck with one of these creative writing teachers who are obviously not prepared with any words of advice.)