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Written in blood

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.