Creative writing workshops are made of people! People! OMG WTF PEOPLE!!!

While I'm looking forward to reading Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, a review of the book in the New York Times has sparked some less-than-pleased responses: see Mark Leahy's response at the Sycamore Review blog and Barrett Hathcock's bilious reply in a guest-blogging appearance at Conversational Reading. (Dan Green offers some quicker, less angry thoughts.)

It's probably a broad oversimplification of the discussion here to suggest that it comes down to a tired "Creative writing workshops are the suck!" vs. "Creative writing workshops are the awesome!" debate. Still, interesting reading, if you're into that sort of thing. But I hope it doesn't somehow bizarrely overshadow the Francine Prose book itself, which I suspect has more to offer than the NYT bit indicates. Even if it's all reminders of the obvious sort, I've a hunch it'll be worthwhile reading anyway, for the very reason that the obvious is so easily overlooked and is well worth being made (from time-to-time) perfectly explicit.

(Sort of like the way friend Chris and I were discussing the audience at the Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band concert last night; we were trying to decide (as we are wont to do at thee indie rock shows) what the typical TSMZMO&TLLB fan looks like. We were sort of stumped--as far as we got was the idea that the indie rock fan beard was going to be scruffier than the norm (due to generally increased levels of deep-thought chin-stroking and/or inability to purchase razor blades due to blowing-of-all-cash on PBR tallboys and/or vinyl record-album first-pressings) and that there'd be some generally-more-increased levels of pretentiousness in the very air around the ur-fan than even the platonic ideal form of "indie rock fan" would likely evince--until we realized you really had to dig down to the most obvious fact to get a handle on the situation: the typical TSM... fan is, largely male. This feels weird to me. What's up with that? Don't girls like thee punk post-rock string quartets? Especially when said quartet is 3/4ths female. I know the rest of the men in the band weren't nothing to look at, but the music is something fantastic. Also, note to whoever the tool in the crowd was who made fun of the vocals: You're a tool.)