Faber & Faber to open Toronto writing school this fall

According to a report by The Globe and Mail‘s London-based columnist Leah McLaren, the independent British publishing house Faber & Faber is planning to launch a writing school in Toronto this fall. Set to open in October, the Faber Academy Toronto will employ at least one high-profile Canadian author: Miriam Toews, who is published by Faber in the U.K. and whom Academy head Patrick Keogh says will be “involved in an essential way” in the school.

From the Globe:

The Faber Academy, a successful offshoot of Faber’s core publishing business, was launched 18 months ago in Paris, with a course taught at the legendary English language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, by novelist Jeanette Winterson.

Since then, the school has expanded to included short and long courses in London, Dublin and Geneva, with an expansion to Edinburgh and Glasgow planned for later this year. Instructors have included Tracy Chevalier, Anne Enright, Paul Auster, Kazuo Ishiguro and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.

McLaren speculates whether Toronto has a deep enough talent pool to match London’s, though from the sounds of things, the school’s administrators are aiming high:

After taking a series of meetings with writers including Margaret Atwood, Anne Michaels, Michael Redhill, Madeleine Thien, Michael Helm, Andrew Pyper and Ken Babstock, Keogh says he is so confident the Toronto school will be a success, Faber is already looking into plans to expand the model to Montreal and Vancouver.

More discouraging words for would-be writers

Sam Sacks of the New York Press takes a stab at that educational institution we all love to hate: the graduate-level writing workshop. The importance of workshops in contemporary American literature can be seen both in their ubiquity (with almost every American state possessing at least one school that can grant an MFA in writing) and in the increasing “common-sense” notion, held by swelling factions that include publishers, that writing schools are to a life of writing what universities are to careers: a necessary first step.

But assessing the yields of the “best” of America’s writing programs, as collected in an anthology, Best New American Voices 2006, Sacks finds the stories dull and formulaic and suggests that the creative writing education system is at fault. According to Sacks, the notion of creative tutelage has strayed far from the mentor-protégé relationships enjoyed by Stein and Hemingway, Tolstoy and Chekhov, and Flaubert and de Maupassant, to “large, impersonal, ever-shuffling workshops … led by authors of, on average, mediocre ability who throw only a part of their energy into helping their students. The result of all this is as predictable as it was inevitable: writing is taught by rote.” Another related result is a rule-oriented, lowest-common-denominator approach to teaching, whereby all students, even ones with potential, are treated as mediocre for the simple fact that most students are mediocre. The result, argues Sacks, is that programs cater to mediocrity and discourage daring as both irregular and impractical.

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Click here for the full story from the New York Press