Teachers are usually guided only by instinct and a gnawing feeling that something is a little too unsettling. Carter has seen stories in which students create characters that commit violent acts or sexually humiliate characters who are clearly based on classmates. For her, that crosses the line. She tells those students, "This writing is aggressive. It's targeting people in this class. That's not permissible." She tells them to stop the hostile writing or stop coming to class.
In 2000, Brian Thorstenson was an SFSU graduate student, teaching an undergraduate playwriting workshop, when an older student in his 60s wrote chilling plays portraying his classmates raping and dismembering babies. Students complained that they didn't want to act out the roles in class. When the author started leaving notes on his assignments that read, "This story is true. This actually happened," and offered to bring a gun to class to use as a prop, Thorstenson, now a lecturer in creative writing at the college, says he went straight to Maxine Chernoff, the chairwoman of the English department. Together, they went to the campus police.
Eventually, a dean, who is no longer there, ruled that the student had free speech rights and no official action was taken against him. "I was surprised by the dean's reactions," recalls Thorstenson. "I didn't feel supported." The dean did agree to remove the student from the playwriting class and Carter says she was asked to tutor him. Her conditions: She would never meet with him in person, he would drop off his homework to the English department, and he would never learn who was reading it. Afterward, the man stopped taking creative writing classes and they never saw him again. (Chernoff says current university practice is for concerned teachers to contact their department chair and write a report, which is sent to a dean who handles disciplinary matters.)
Controversy over whether creepy creative writing should be treated as artistic or dangerous made headlines in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. At the time, Jan Richman was a creative writing instructor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She was so aghast with one student's work that she literally didn't know what to do. She went to her immediate supervisor for advice about a student's story that started with a scene involving the narrator taking out his pocketknife and cutting off the nipples of his sex partner, and ended with him hacking off victims' limbs and genitals, painting the room with their blood.
"I've read a lot of violence, [but] there was something about this," explains Richman today. "The details were incredibly precise. There was such a passion behind the violence." Richman now teaches at the continuing education program at City College of San Francisco.
Richman's boss gave the story to his boss and on it went up the administrative ladder. The head of campus security called the city police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over worries that the details were so vivid they could only be supplied by someone who committed such crimes. Next, the school expelled the writer. Then his parents complained that Richman had assigned readings that contained graphic violent scenes. Their son, they argued, was simply emulating one of them: "Girl With Curious Hair" by David Foster Wallace. In the story, a narrator talks about how he likes to burn women (and sometimes men) with matches or a lighter during sex.
After meetings with school officials, during which Richman says they questioned her reading selections, Richman was not invited back to teach the following semester. "I felt like they over-reacted by expelling this student and not helping him," she says. "If they thought he was that big of a threat, you'd think they'd be glad that instead of handling it myself, I did bring it to the attention of superiors."
Sallie Huntting, executive vice president of public relations at the Academy of Art University, says she can't comment on the Richman case, but stresses that instructors of all art forms are encouraged to report disturbing work by students. "You must err on the side of caution," she says.
Creative writing teachers point out that they're not trained therapists and not equipped to determine when a student is potentially unstable. That's why instructors aren't held to the same liability standard as psychological counselors, explains Sheldon Steinbach, a higher education attorney with Dow Lohnes, in Washington, D.C. He advises that teachers report distressing writing to the dean of students, who would know how to evaluate students.
While writing instructors can't ignore alarming screeds, a better barometer may be to see if a student's behavior matches. "It's one thing when [a student] hands in a disturbing story, and he's friendly and nice," explains Tamas Dobozy, a visiting scholar who teaches a fiction writing workshop at NYU. "He's just trying to create a horrific story. Then you get a student who hands in normal work, but is strange. Is there a connection between the work and student? Sometimes yes and sometimes no."
Landau, creative writing director at NYU, adds that a lot of students deal with troubling topics in their writing, from date rape to incest to mental illness. "Students are often bringing their lives to class in the form of their work," she says. Teachers should worry, she says, when students also act troubled in the classroom. If a student seems dangerous, Landau immediately reports him or her to a dean. Otherwise, her first strategy is to call students into her office, ask if they need help, and remind them of counseling services.
At her new job, Richman tries to assess the level of horror at the outset. If students bring in disturbing work, she's much quicker to tell them, "I think you put this in for shock value. There's no literary merit." She adds: "I don't want to squelch anyone's creativity. But there's a tendency for young people to say, 'I'm going to be as gross and twisted as I can be.' [The goal] isn't just to push limits. There are skills to be learned."
Despite such guidelines, creative writing teachers still have to rely on their own imprecise judgment, especially in classes where students may be encouraged to write with intense emotion. What may be one student's cause for concern may be another's catharsis, says Carter. "Sometimes working through rage in that way can be healthy," she says. "If students start worrying that every time they write something violent or aggressive or express anger or rage -- or they fear they'll be sent to an administrator or a therapist or their parents will be called -- you can't teach art classes with that hanging over them. Part of teaching in the arts is to push people to places of disturbance. It's a really funny dance."
About the writer
Sarah Elizabeth Richards is a journalist based in New York.
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