Since I retired from college teaching six years ago, I have been tutoring a number of community classes. These “Lifelong Learning” classes draw adults, sometimes in early retirement, who seek out new ventures, like creative writing. Compared with our M.A. courses, the Lifelong Learning ones are by their nature more relaxed in tone and don’t call for formal assessment.
Assuming that most of my students clearly wanted a reasonably demanding course, I have always, in the opening hour of each session when we look fairly closely at examples of published work, ranged from translations of Chekov and Maupassant, taking in O. Henry along the way, through to writers like Mansfield, Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas, Capote, and the many fine contemporary fiction writers.
Only after a while did it dawn on me that this different setting gave me the chance to develop a rather different system of assignment-setting and “marking” (in fact, of course, the “writing of comments”). My assignments at Trinity College had always (and probably rightly) been based on technique and craft (occasionally leaving me with a dilemma over what to do when a script went off at a tangent yet had real quality—and another which adhered closely to the task yet lacked sparkle). Now, since my aim is simply to stimulate the best piece of writing, I can set tasks which are purely subject-based: “a story about painting or a painter,” for example, or “a story about sibling rivalry.” And if a student goes off in a really oblique direction, it matters not. The stimulating of the story is all.
But the real liberation I have found is that I am now able to re-think entirely my criteria for assessment. I realized that for years I had been close to thinking of a kind of template, in other words, of thinking that the requirements of a “good short story” were thus and thus, and then assessing students’ work in that light.
At this point my mind kept crossing to Gerard Manley Hopkins, an exceptionally original voice writing in complete isolation from the whole world of editors—and, surely, of tutors—and to Emily Dickinson, also a little separate from literary affairs. Is there a real risk that the effect of too much editing and tutoring can be to draw a student/writer towards the middle of the road, towards the age’s orthodoxy?
So now I always, with new students in particular, start by asking, “What is distinctive here? What is this work‘s special flavour?” I then resist totally the temptation to suggest it might be better if it were other. How often, for example, have we seen work whose main quality is a meticulous build-up and been tempted to rush in and say, “You should snap into events more rapidly” (that presumably being the “accepted” style). In time, small modifications make sense sometimes, to me and the student. But overall, I’m determined to accept the truth of this writer’s craft—and urge them to take pride in and develop it.
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Robert Nisbet is a Welsh tutor, short story writer, and poet, who was an associate lecturer at Trinity College, Carmarthen, for many years before working now on community classes in Pembrokeshire.