In February of 2004, Paige Holtzman, then a tenth grader at The Latin School of Chicago, approached me with an idea she had about starting a national literary magazine for high school fiction writers. We would create a website and invite public, private, and parochial high school students from every state in the country to submit fiction, which would be reviewed, rejected or accepted, and edited by a staff of editors we'd recruit from Chicago-area high schools, we'd have fiction contests and high school litmag contests, and meetings on Saturday mornings, and bake sales to raise money...
Of course she had no idea what she was getting us into. We sent editorial staff invitations to a dozen area high schools in May 2005, had our first meeting before school started in August, held a PHS
500 school search internet party in September, sent out just over 300 invitations to schools across the country, sweated out October and November when only a handful of submissions came across our laptops and into our mailboxes, extended deadlines through January, made countless mistakes, and now, miraculously it seems, we await the April publication of the inaugural issue of Polyphony H.S.
What I hadn't anticipated was how the magazine would shape the workshops that dominate the agenda in my own creative writing class.
The Workshop Method
In Senior Writing Seminar, The Latin School of Chicago's only creative writing class, students write three stories and three revisions. Each of the original stories is workshopped in the classroom. Though some high school creative writing teachers opt out of the workshop method, it's arguably the most important part of my class, and potentially one of the most valuable experiences in a young writer's development. When the workshop is done well, it immediately validates a student's writing, lending a seriousness to the manuscript, which has the potential to urge everyone to work harder on his or her own writing. The workshop also serves as a kind of publication; for some students, it will be the closest thing to publication that they'll experience. And finally, it gives students something that is primarily absent from a fiction writer's life: a live audience-a chance to see how readers react to their prose.
In the "Workshop," students come to class having read the story in question. The author is present in the room while the rest of the class critiques the story. The success of the workshop is critical to the success of the class; teaching the workshop then, becomes extremely important.
When the author's manuscript is being discussed, he/she is not allowed to talk. The theory here is that the text must speak for itself. It is not the reader's responsibility to fully understand the author's intention, but the author's responsibility to equip the reader with the information necessary to understand it. Once the writer begins to explain or defend the work, it becomes difficult for the other students to be forthright in their criticism.
Students are instructed to be supportive. They must begin their comments with positive statements, followed by suggestions for improvement. It is important for the writer to know what works. Starting with the positive makes it easier for the writer to hear the comments that follow.
Students are directed toward specificity in their criticism. Comments that begin with, "I didn't like this," or "I liked this..." are not as helpful to the author as drawing specific attention to the successes and deficiencies of his or her work.
Using PHS to teach the Workshop Method in the Creative Writing Classroom
By the time my second semester creative writing class began, we had closed the submissions window for Polyphony
H.S. This year, I decided to use Polyphony H.S. submissions to teach my students the Workshop Method. This decision allowed my students the safety of workshopping a story not written by a member of their class. These warm-up workshops helped me to teach effective workshopping, proofreading, and editing strategies, without the pressure of students thinking they might hurt the feelings of the author before they'd mastered the method.
Using Polyphony H.S. as our classroom text also allowed students the opportunity to workshop stories by amateurs. Though I used handouts of stories by some of the old pros as a way to show how good writers might bend, break, or apply the "rules" of
fiction, I find that workshopping stories by Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor
is less edifying than workshopping stories by a junior from Westfield High School
in Westfield, Indiana, or a sophomore from Convent of the Sacred Heart in San
Francisco. I like the fact that students might walk away from such workshops
thinking, I can do this. I can write a story that might
be published in PHS.
From the first day of class then, we began to discuss the formal elements of fiction by observing and analyzing them-by seeing them fail or succeed-in
student fiction. We began to discuss structure, dialogue, tone, voice, plot,
setting, summary, scene, diction, etc., using very specific examples from PHS.
Teaching Editing Skills
The ultimate goal of this process, of course, is for the student/author being
workshopped, to be fully and appropriately equipped, as he/she enters the RE-VISION
phase, to turn his/her first draft into a better version of itself. This can
only happen if the author's classmates have served as effective editors. Workshopping
PHS stories gives us the opportunity to discuss editorial skills and proofreading symbols, and to show students what to look for in stories. Ideally, what students learn from the workshop method, will help them become better writers.
We might begin by addressing such general questions as:
What about this manuscript caught the editors' eyes?
What has the author done successfully?
What are the deficiencies of the piece?
What does the author accomplish with his three most direct lines of communication with the reader: title, introduction, conclusion?
What does the author accomplish with this particular word, sentence, paragraph, section?
How is an author served by this narrative point of view?
What might be a better way to make this particular point?
What more would you like to know about this story?
What could make this a better story?
After we workshop one of the stories in Polyphony H.S., I collect the texts and quickly review them after class. I am immediately suspicious of texts that aren't marked with deletions and other editorial suggestions. Though this may mean that the story was simply brilliant, more likely it suggests that a student-editor did not read the text, or did not read it closely. I want each one of these edited stories to provide its author with some direction for its improvement. A student receives a perfect workshop grade if he participated in the workshop, edited the text closely, and attached a paragraph of attentive editorial commentary of the workshopped story.
The LitMag Assignment
Since I began teaching creative writing, I have given my students a LitMag Assignment. The assignment begins with a one-class session in the computer lab. Students research a national literary magazine, and put together a one-page summary of it, which includes contact information, a sample paragraph of fiction published in the magazine, and the published writer's guidelines. From the total packet of researched magazines, the students are required to choose one to which they will eventually submit their best original stories. The assignment is a great way to introduce students to the thousands of independent literary magazines on the market, and to teach them proper manuscript form. I think they also benefit from the discussions we eventually have about rejection, and the various ways with which it can be dealt.
Having been fully introduced to Polyphony H.S., though I suspect many students would still decide to submit their stories to one the big guns, such as The New Yorker and Ploughshares, my hope is that some of them will consider PHS an appropriate recipient of their manuscript.
My classroom workshops have never been as successful as they have been this year. Though the possibility remains that I may just be getting better as I go along, I'm inclined to give more of the credit Polyphony H.S.
You can learn more about Polyphony H.S. at www.polyphonyhs.com.
Billy Lombardo directs the Community Service Program and teaches fiction at The
Latin School of Chicago. He has had stories recently published in Story Quarterly, Cicada, and the Bryant Literary
Review. His collection of short fiction, "The Logic of a Rose, Chicago Stories," the winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, will be published by BkMk Press in April 2005. He is currently adapting "The Logic of a Rose" for the stage, and writing a baseball novel.
He can be reached through his website www.billylombardo.com.
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