Learning from Practitioners

New Author-Teachers Enrich Creative
Writing Program

David Gessner

Three critically acclaimed authors--David Gessner, Kai Maristed, and Brad Watson--joined the Extension School creative writing faculty this semester. They bring an impressive record of recent publications and a serious commitment to the teaching of writing. They also bring a range of other credentials. Like many of the students in their classes here, Gessner, Maristed, and Watson have arrived at their current careers by indirect routes. A former carpenter, political cartoonist, and homeless shelter counselor, Gessner, Harvard BA '83, worked for years at jobs that, on the surface, have little to do with the teaching and writing he does now. Maristed earned a master's degree in management science from the Sloan School at MIT and was a lecturer on social psychology at the German federation of trade unions. She also bred and trained racehorses. Watson has worked as a ditch digger, bartender, and newspaper reporter.

Gessner is teaching Introduction to Creative Nonfiction this fall and will teach Advanced Creative Nonfiction in the spring. Creative nonfiction is new to the Extension curriculum, but it already is an immensely popular course: Gessner's class was the first fall term course to fill. Students may have been drawn to the course in part because of its topic, which, according to Gessner, "is in the midst of a renaissance at the moment, as evidenced by the proliferation of strong books dealing with autobiography, place, and memory." But the course's popularity is no doubt also due to Gessner's growing reputation as a writer. In a review of Gessner's second book, a collection of essays titled Under the Devil's Thumb (1999), Robert Root states, "David Gessner is one of the best of an emerging generation of personal essayists of place, nature writers who aren't naturalists but who nonetheless write with a finely honed alertness to the natural world."

Gessner has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and (with Scott Russell Sanders) at Bread Loaf. These experiences have focused his vision of what can be accomplished in writing classes. "As someone who has spent a lot of hands-on time in writing workshops," he says, "I'm not a believer in the phrase 'you can't teach writing.' To teach writing is first to teach careful reading, finding new ways to use words by examining the words of others. This means both the constant stimulation of great and varied literature and the active reading of the work of classmates. One of the best things students can hope for in a workshop is to find people whom they trust to read their work, and the best workshops, it seems to me, create a community within a class, an atmosphere where there is a commitment to finding a higher ground."

Maristed, a graduate-level faculty member in literature and creative writing at Emerson College and a member of the fiction faculty of Warren Wilson College, is teaching Intermediate Fiction this fall; in the spring, she'll offer a new course, The Art of the Essay. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Belong to Me (1998), and two novels, Fall (1996) and Out After Dark (1993), a PEN/Hemingway Prize finalist. She also writes nonfiction: her reviews have been published in the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times; her essay, "Nicotine, an Autobiography," published first in The American Scholar, was reprinted in The Anchor Essay Annual 1997 and will also appear in a forthcoming college writing textbook.

On the subject of writing classes, she shares Gessner's vision. "In these workshops a primary goal is to forge a sense of productive community." And she is pleased with the workshop she is conducting this semester: "I'm delighted to be here, teaching a diverse array of self-motivated, well-educated, and open-minded students."

Watson is teaching Advanced Fiction this fall and spring; he also holds a Briggs-Copeland Fellowship at Harvard and directs and teaches in Harvard University's creative writing program. His first book, Last Days of the Dog Men (1996), a collection of short stories, won the 1997 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and has received high praise from readers and reviewers. Shelby Foote called the book "the damnedest writing about dogs you ever saw"; Tom De Haven, writing in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, called the stories "weird and wise, sometimes gruesome and often brilliant." His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 1996 and in The Norton Introduction to Literature, sixth edition. He is currently at work on his second book, a novel tentatively titled Notes on Her Obituary.

In an interview with Allen Snow, published in the Mississippi State University Connection, Watson described what is for a him a productive connection between teaching and writing. "Writing is such a private act. But you can go into class and open up and talk to the students about your habits and encourage them to develop good writing habits, and you also can talk to them about attitudes. Not just about enduring all the years of rejection, but about developing healthy attitudes toward the work ethic of writing. . . . If they're talented, it's possible for them to get to where they want to be if they'll work at it. I think it's healthy to do both: to write and to teach others to do it."