Poetica Magazine

I entered my first creative writing class at age forty-one.

Well, that's not completely true. I had taken one class in high school in which my teacher had marveled that the voice in my writer's journal, where I was allowed to use first person, disappeared in the official class pieces, which had to be in third. It turns out I can't write fiction and neither he nor I had never heard of creative nonfiction. At forty-one, I finally heard of it.

I went on to take about seven classes with the professor of that later class, all of which had some workshop element. She always protected her student writers. She admonished all of us quite firmly before we ever workshopped any pieces to  be kind when critiquing, to always find something nice to say, and that when we had suggestions for the improvement of one of our classmate's pieces we had better use kind language to state them. In other words, kindness ruled the day. 

The result? In each of the classes I took with her, all the students ended up close, connected - especially surprising since she taught students ranging in age eighteen to eighty at a community college.  We also ended up better writers than how we had started.

The few times I've taken art classes there hasn't been such a protected atmosphere, which is probably why there have only been a few times I've taken art classes. In the last class I took, as I was learning the rudiments of oil painting and how to paint still lifes - a very basic class - two older women students, sisters, wandered through the room looking at everyone's artwork and talking loudly. They hovered behind the artwork they liked and complimented it, gushing over it, but fell dead silent at those that they didn't like and walked quickly past. Of course, there was dead silence when they got to mine.

I'm the first to admit that I can't paint.  If wanting to paint led to ability, I'd be Chagall.  In this particular class, there was a definite disconnect between what I was looking at - a three dimenstional apple - and what was on my canvas - a cartoon apple.  

Afterwards, I wondered why the instructor hadn't done the same thing that my writing teacher had done so many times, protected the students from criticism, both spoken and unspoken.  Why weren't we safe to try out painting without worrying about a lack of talent, in my case, or a lack of experience or training?  Wasn't there supposed to be a learning curve?

And this makes me wonder how many of us have stopped doing something we want to do by premature criticism.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor