In the wake of the massacre at Virginia Tech this week, Salon has posted a fascinating article about what creative writing professors should do when confronted with disturbing works by students. As has been widely reported, the perpetrator of the massacre, Cho Seung-Hui, wrote several scripts for his playwriting class that deeply alarmed the school’s English department faculty. Now, a lot of media pundits are questioning whether faculty could have done more to get Seung-Hui some medical treatment.
But this opens the door to a lot of potential problems, of course, the chief one being that creativity and freedom of speech could be trampled on.
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.
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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 Michelle Carter, [professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University]. “Sometimes working through rage in that way can be healthy,” she says.
Interesting set of concerns. As I prepare for my summer teaching term, which will include a section of creative writing, I’ve been pondering the events at Virginia Tech and their connections (loose ones, I think) to creative writing classes. So far I’ve yet to encounter any really disturbing student stories nothing gruesome or even particularly creepy but I expect that if (when?) it does happen, I’ll be getting in touch with the college counselling services pretty darn quick.
Regarding freedom of speech and the creative writing class, I certainly wouldn’t want to “trample” my students’ creativity, but at the same time I recognize that a college/university class is not a democracy. I determine the content, I assign the grades, and, for a variety of reasons, I give students a short (very short) list of things they’re not allowed to write about. If a student were to suggest that he or she can ONLY write, for example, hate literature or pornography, then I’d probably argue that a creative writing class isn’t the best place for that student.