Two writers’ workshops

Writers usually only seek feedback from editors and other writers. Maybe sometime from readers they are close to. I wonder if that’s had an effect on lit? Or maybe I’m just navel gazing?

In Sudhir Venkatesh’s public reading at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, broadcasted on NPR’s Book Tour, he has an interesting quote about a part of his draft process for his most recent book, Gang Leader for a Day. It’s a memoir of his years researching a public housing system in South Chicago, before it was all torn down.

The quote below refers to a group of women from those projects that he met with regularly in order to help them to learn how to write. They would all go to a diner and write about their experiences and read what they wrote back to Venkatesh. Later, they helped him with his own writing in the same way:

…These women were some of the first people who read this book. They did something that I hate them for, but I love them for it, because it was one of the hardest things I had to do.

They would read it out loud to me.

They said, you know, you… we were forced to read our experiences to you. Getting beat up. Having a baby. Being scared and so on, and you just sat there and took it all and did whatever you did with it. … Now we’re going to learn what it was like to be you. You’re going to have to sit and listen to your own voice.

I participated in a similar and wildly different experience last night. David Strattan White is a Philadelphia actor and playwright who recently moved to Indiana. His play, Simulations, got a staged reading at The Walking Fish Theater last night. Six actors took on its five parts, plus stage direction.

The play is about a temporary merger between real world and that of The Sims, a virtual world you can experience inside your PC [More on this in future posts, but it was a fun reading].

The actors read it through and then a discussion followed about what worked and didn’t work about the play, what they liked, what they thought was funny and what maybe he should change. After hearing Venkatesh’s piece, I couldn’t help but think of how different his experience was to this one of White’s. In last night’s discussion, many of the people in the room were also writing plays or involved in theater or at least comfortable with writing. With reading, anyway.

Venkatesh got his stuff looked at by non-writers, and they were willing to make it much more uncomfortable for him. In fact, they might have even enjoyed making him squirm. Why not? They wanted to write but couldn’t really, and he had a book deal.

Both experiences are valuable and important, but it just made me think of how seldom “writers” get a serious critique from people that don’t much like literature. After all, it is awful hard to get that audience to read. That said, our perpetuation of that internal feedback loop might be a contributing factor to the non-readers so vastly outnumbering the readers these days.