Deadly prose
How should creative writing teachers handle students who turn in gruesome stories?
By Sarah Elizabeth Richards
April 20, 2007 | In two disturbing plays that Cho Seung-Hui turned in to his creative writing class at Virginia Tech, teenage sex crime victims fantasize about killing their molesters. In "Mr. Brownstone," three 17-year-old high school students sneak into a casino to escape a teacher who they say has sodomized them. "I wanna kill him," says a character named John. "If he's a leech, we'll be able to yank it off and squash him beneath our boots," adds Joe. Jane follows shortly with: "I wanna watch him bleed like the way he made us kids bleed."
In the second play, "Richard McBeef," a 13-year-old boy accuses his new stepfather of molesting him and murdering his father. After unleashing his rage with a tirade of insults, he tries to choke him by shoving a half-eaten cereal bar down his throat. Earlier, he throws darts at a target resembling the man's face, shouting "Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick ... You don't think I can kill you, Dick? ... Gotcha. Got one eye. Got the other eye."
The violent imagery in the plays, and similar works by Cho, had alarmed faculty of the Virginia Tech English department, who repeatedly tried to get him help. In October 2005, one professor, poet Nikki Giovanni, kicked him out of her class because his work was "intimidating" and scared students. Her female students stopped coming to class after they said Cho was photographing their legs with his cellphone.
Former English chairwoman Lucinda Roy went to campus police, student affairs and the dean's office. Without overt threats to himself or others, she was told, there was nothing they could do. Roy tutored him privately and tried to convince him to seek counseling. In the meantime, following accusations of harassment and another report that Cho might be suicidal, police referred him to a counselor, who unsuccessfully tried to commit him to a mental institution.
Cho continued writing horrific tales. Last fall, another English professor contacted a dean -- to no avail. She stopped circulating his assignments in class and he stopped attending. Finally, this spring, Cho's playwriting teacher, Ed Falco, contacted several faculty members after students said they didn't want to read his work. "We did all that we thought it was reasonable to do," Falco wrote to students in an e-mail, which he forwarded to Salon. "There was violence in Cho's writing -- but there is a huge difference between writing about violence and behaving violently. We could not have known what he would do."
Creative writing teachers have long wrestled with what they should do with students who turn in gruesome stories, as many colleges do not have formal policies about how teachers should respond. Further, there are no set rules for determining whether a story is the product of a febrile artistic imagination or a potentially violent criminal. Or both.
"Lots of great literary works are deep and dark and disturbing -- that would be Kafka," says Deborah Landau, director of the creative writing program at New York University, who plans to discuss university protocol with her staff in the wake of Monday's massacre. Yet teachers increasingly are being expected to distinguish between students' pushing their creative boundaries or showing frightening warning signs. That's a tall task, especially when students routinely hand in twisted texts dripping with bloodshed, cruelty, perversion and extreme sex scenes, say teachers.
"Traditionally, [instructors] have thought of themselves as nurturing academic or creative faculties. They don't think of themselves as counselor or being warning systems for spotting mental health problems," says Rob Jones, senior vice president and general counsel for claims management and risk research for United Educators, an insurance company for more than 1,000 educational institutions. "We'd like them to think of whether they could be gatekeepers for identifying students at risk."
The company currently is making the rounds at colleges to present and discuss this training scenario: An English professor comes across the worrisome writing of a suicidal student. What should she do? The correct answer, according to Jones, is for the instructor to contact the student affairs office or campus counseling center. "You can't expect an English professor to make those kinds of determinations based on someone's writings," he says. "But they are the ones who have a window into someone's soul."
But that window isn't always so clear, and it's easy to miss signals, explains Michelle Carter, professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, who has taught the subject for nearly 20 years. Carter, who has read Cho's plays (they are posted on AOL), says, "I've seen more disturbing stuff than that." She says Cho's expression of powerlessness and rage would make her worry that he was more of a danger to himself than others. "I wouldn't have thought he'd get a gun and shoot people."
"Sometimes you can tell they're hurt puppies, and they're writing to express deep woundedness," says Carter. Often, students are experimenting with stylized violence à la Quentin Tarantino. "From the tone, you can tell it's iconoclastic posturing, and it's totally harmless," she says. "They're asking, 'Can I get a rise out of people?'"
