One aim of therapy is liberating self-knowledge through contact with unconscious desire. You speak in order to hear yourself, to know who you are. The therapist helps you see what you are doing unconsciously. In writing, however, it often feels better to work in the dark. It is only later, in reflection after the act, that you will see what you have done, or begin to understand what you were really trying to say. But why, even then, would you want such knowledge?
Adrienne Rich: ‘Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simpler way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experience I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it.’
For me the workshop aims neither to produce significant work nor to ‘cure’ anyone of anything. (There’s nothing wrong with them.) There’s no anxiety of success, only the desire to work around the subject of writing. There is probably some benefit in this but I wouldn’t want to know what it is in advance.
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Sometimes it feels wrong to try to work out what a dream is ‘about’. It seems like a reduction rather than an illumination. What you need to do is wander through its atmospheres, feeling what’s there. Occasionally, in the class, when I’m listening to someone read, rather than considering the work as a literary construction, I let myself absorb it like a dream, encouraging my mind to move amongst the images and words, in order to see what they conjure up, returning some of this to the writer in the hope they can make something of it. Occasionally, rather than offering criticism or encouragement, I invite the group to free associate around a piece of writing, offering lists of words, other dreams or any thoughts inspired in them, as if the writing, and the response, is one continuous piece.
I knew I liked Wallace Stevens’s poetry but for a long time found him impossible to read, particularly as I’ve never read much poetry. He always made me think: how should I read this? I couldn’t understand him. When I realised that ‘understanding’ him, as opposed to liking bits of what he did, or scanning through it until I found something which held my attention for reasons I could only discover, was not the best thing I could do with him, I found another way into his work.
In the end, it’s the artist who is necessary. When you want sustenance, or pleasure, you’re more likely to go to a poem by Eliot or Lawrence than you are to a piece of criticism by Leavis. Criticism erases the pleasure of reading, replacing it by understanding, which is a different sort of thing.
Occasionally I will ask the student to tell me what they were trying to say in their writing, in order to force clarity or focus. Mostly, thought, it hardly matters what you say about someone’s writing. It is the act of sitting there, of being present at all, which is of value. After having spoken and been heard, people’s minds move on of their own accord.
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Certainly writing is of benefit in the wider, political sense, particularly where there is a tendency for only the most acceptable or publicised voices to be attended to. The most impressive and influential writers of my youth were dissenters like Baldwin, Genet, Salinger, Fanon and De Beauvoir. It is the voices of argument, of dispute and disagreement, which can teach us the most about the position of excluded individuals and groups. Of course the young always feel like outsiders and this would appeal to them. The political effort of my era has been that of formerly suppressed voices, those of women, blacks, gays, the bullied and abused, the mentally ill and the addicted, to speak their history and to have it recognised. This is the struggle to uncover what was formerly hidden. There is also the struggle within each individual writer to believe that their voice is worth attending to. Confession, rather than irony, has become the modern mode. If party politics is banal, formulaic and uninteresting, and most of the media the same, it might be to something as old-fashioned as writing that we will turn to express and share our deepest concerns.
Since the arguments for equality of the 1960s and 1970s, these days the voices most neglected — probably because they are the most unsettling — are those of children. If the latest position for children is their use to adults as consumers — the exploitation of children’s desire — writing freely can be an important implement for them, both in and out of school, enabling them to repossess their own thoughts. This can be particularly valuable for children in authoritarian systems, and most children live, to a certain extent, in authoritarian systems, called families.
There is also the sense in which writing, or anything creative, is ‘counter-consumerist’ in itself. When making something original from one’s own life and feeling, we are not merely objects with wallets, but active and free subjects, the authors or artists of our own lives. Most of us know that when we are creative an authentic connection, or something particularly satisfying and original, has been achieved.
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As a young man I didn’t attend writing workshops. I didn’t know of any, and would probably have been sceptical of them. I’d have wanted to impress everyone so much I wouldn’t be able to get through the door. I’d have been standing outside, leaning against a wall with the collar of my jacket turned up, sneering, confused. I hated to learn from others. I think I was looking for something I could do on my own, or only with my father. I’m probably a better teacher than I am pupil.
As a child, and before I thought of becoming a writer, I envied talented children at school; I admired their ability and composure, envied the praise they received and, I guess, envied the envy I had of them. My mother had been to art school. Her portraits and abstracts were around the house. Sometimes she sketched. Mostly she didn’t, though we liked her to. She preferred to demonstrate how much life you had to give up in favour of your children. At the same time my father was a published, part-time journalist.
Around the age of twelve I wanted to draw. Some of my friends at school were good at drawing, too, and would, eventually, go to work at one of the many advertising agencies which were opening in the 1960s. But the act of drawing itself wasn’t enough for me. I was searching for a project, for some direction or meaning. I decided to become a painter, an artist. I did paint for a while, but without knowing why I soon became frustrated and gave up. After discovering the Beatles I began to play the guitar, but the same thing happened. There was a point beyond which I couldn’t go. I didn’t improve. I played the same thing over and over. I wasn’t patient enough to see whether I could get beyond that point. At school there were a number of talented guitar players. Kids would bring their guitars to school and play at lunchtime.
I can see now that I wanted results — attention, the engagement of others, someone sitting beside me, interested enough in what I was doing to show me where else I might go. I concluded that playing guitar wasn’t my thing. I remember the pangs of envy and self-hatred, almost erotic in their intensity, which accompanied my failure. That might have been enough for me, but I wanted a ‘thing’. What was my thing?
No one I knew was writing. As a competitive kid, this suited me. I’d have hated to be up against any other kid. I’d have hated not to be the best: I could have given up, gone into a sulk, which finished me off. Writing, for me, was a private, if not secret occupation. Nevertheless, its point, in the long run, was to reach others.