When Rachel Paris arrived for her first workshop in the University of Auckland’s Master of Creative Writing (MCW) programme, she was well established in her day job: a senior lawyer and partner at Bell Gully, one of the country’s biggest law firms. She left the workshop an hour later flattened by the volley of criticism from her peers.
Paris, 48 and a Harvard University graduate, had volunteered to be the first of the cohort’s students to have their work critiqued. When she’d arrived for the class several minutes early, the only other student there, who was in her 20s, asked if she was the teacher. When the class started, the onslaught of feedback about Paris’s writing made it clear she was not.
The teacher was, and remains, celebrated New Zealand novelist Paula Morris MNZM (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whātua) who has modelled the one-year, full-time course on the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which she attended and which has been the launching pad for some of the world’s most lauded writers, including Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, John Irving and New Zealand’s Eleanor Catton.
As at Iowa, Auckland workshop students aren’t there to supply platitudes but to make each other better writers. As part of the course, it is expected that students will share and critique each other’s work. Paris’s fellow students had arrived at that first workshop having already read several thousand words of the novel she was writing. They immediately began telling her what was wrong with it.
“Paula encourages people to go for the jugular,” Paris says. Under MCW convention, she was not allowed to respond or to defend her work against the onslaught, the intensity and extent of which did not suggest the work under discussion, See How They Fall – then in early draft form, – would eventually top New Zealand’s bestselling fiction list, get published in the United States and have the screen rights optioned by a Hollywood production company.
“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Wasn’t it embarrassing?ʼ or ʻWasn’t it terrifying going from being a competent lawyer to this person being told that your writing was not very good? How did you manage that?’ And the honest truth is that it was really hard and I didn’t necessarily enjoy the first couple of months.”
Paris says it helped to remind herself that all the people in the workshop were there to help each other get better. “If you’re in that mindset, it definitely helps you cope. I don’t want to put people off, because it is brutal, but in that kind of really constructive way.”
Students are allowed to praise each other’s work, but via a letter rather than verbalised in class. “You feel physically shattered,” Paris says, “and then you go away and you sort of take a deep breath and read through the letters people have written and then you should come out of it and go, ‘Okay, I can do this.’”
The criticism helped. Even before its success, See How They Fall won the University of Auckland’s inaugural Phoenix Prize, a gift of $3500 for an MCW manuscript “of high quality with strong potential to succeed commercially”.
“It’s a much better book than it would have been,” Paris says. “And, as I said, I don’t even think it would have been a book, because I think I would have lost faith in myself halfway through the process.
“I’m so grateful to all of them.”
No feedback, please
Nicky Pellegrino has never been a member of a writing workshop or any other writing group: “I just made it up as I went along.”
But the author of 15 bestselling novels also sees value in socialising with other writers. “The actual writing is solitary and there is no way around it. But it is really important to have a community around you.”
In May, she was part of a creative retreat in Tuscany ‒ Italy is often the setting for Pellegrino’s novels. At the retreat, writers and visual artists from around the world worked on their own projects during the day, coming together in the evenings for drinks, dinner and talks. No one gave her feedback, she says. She didn’t even talk about the novel she was working on.
“I just don’t want to at the moment,” she reasons, “it’s too much of a hot mess.”
In August, she will lead a similar retreat in Taupō, which will include two writing workshops. “I’ll do a bit of informal mentoring, but it’s also an opportunity for people to meet and chat socially,” Pellegrino says. “We’ll all have dinner together and hang out together, which was what was really nice about the thing I went to in Tuscany.”
One of Pellegrino’s closest friends is Stacy Gregg, who writes bestselling novels for children and teens. The pair meet frequently for coffee and talk about writing-related issues they’re struggling with, such as the “nitty gritty” of the books they’re producing and the plot problems they’re having.
But she doesn’t solicit – or even want – help with her works in progress. “I don’t want anyone to critique my novel until I’ve got a complete first draft and I know that the story is as good as I can possibly make it on my own. It’s like if you get lots of people cooking a recipe and people sneaking in extra salt and a bit of pepper.”
When Nadine Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) was offered a Northland retreat in May this year for a “micro-residency” with a writer from Shetland she’d never met, she had no idea what to expect. What happened, she says, was mind blowing.
Hura, a poet and writer whose first book, Slowing The Sun, was published in April, picked up Roseanne Watt from her city hotel. Hura had two typewriters with her. Watt, who is 13 years younger than Hura, aged 47, had never used a typewriter before. When they arrived at the retreat, they took their typewriters to their respective rooms and started writing to each other.
At the end of their week together, the two returned to Auckland with everything they’d written and produced a multimedia performance for a packed theatre at the Auckland Writers Festival. It included readings from their letters, video poetry, musical interludes and a zine for the audience to take home.
Their pairing had been arranged by the writers festival’s artistic director Lyndsey Fineran, who noted their similarities: both writers have an interest in political advocacy around climate change and language reclamation – Watt writes in both English and Shetland Islands dialect, Hura in English and te reo Māori.
Says Fineran: “I just had a real sense – knowing the work of both and the kind of shared themes between them – I just thought they were gonna click and, my God, did they.”
Hura describes the connection between herself and Watt as “the breathing of each other’s stories”.
“We had a creative process that was really similar,” she says. “Roseanne said she felt like she could see a poem in the land and that her process was one of excavation to try and find what was already there, which is an incredible way to describe it and very similar to how we talk about moko, when you say that the person’s moko kauae was always there; it’s just making it visible in the flesh.
“Being able to make those connections across such a vast distance was kind of mind blowing, and it makes me think – and Roseanne was the same – that sometimes writing is a very wairua-led process.”
Hura’s writing has always been deeply connected to others. “In Māori communities, it’s not a solitary thing at all. It’s just not something I hear anyone say anywhere. You might write your words on your own but your capacity and opportunity and desire to share them is often incredibly collective.”
She is co-chair of Te Hā o Ngā Pou Kaituhi Māori, a national committee of Māori writers that provides opportunities for people to meet, connect, collaborate and learn from each other.
“It’s such a colonial idea that a person – usually a white man who’s very disciplined – sits at a desk and he just does that day after day, and that’s all it takes, just discipline. But I’ve written quite a lot about that subject. It’s not just discipline. There’s quite a lot of privilege involved in writing – the privilege to even have time to write, to have access to editors, residencies and stuff like that.” In other words, a lot of it’s about connections.
Generating writers
Also part of this year’s Auckland Writers Festival was Damien Wilkins, who gave one of the programme’s 14 masterclasses, leading a session on writing about grief.
Wilkins this year won New Zealand’s richest book prize, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction worth $65,000, for his 14th book, Delirious. He is also director of one of our leading writing schools, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters.
Founded by poet and writer Bill Manhire, IIML and Manhire’s earlier creative writing course at Victoria have produced many eminent novelists, such as Catherine Chidgey, Tina Makereti, Ashleigh Young, Elizabeth Knox, Emily Perkins, Eleanor Catton, Pip Adam and Paula Morris.
As with Morris’s masters course, IIML’s MA in creative writing operates on the workshop model. But Wilkins says his understanding of American workshops such as Iowa is that they are “ruled by a kind of competitive spirit” and that many of the students there see the workshop as their “audition moment”.
He says this is not the case in New Zealand, where youʼre unlikely to get rich and the expectations are different. “People come in with aspirations for sure, don’t get me wrong – but I think the stakes are so low that it informalises a lot of things and makes it less about competition.”
In a world in which writing education is increasingly easy to get without ever leaving your house, Wilkins believes courses like those offered at the IIML are valued by writers precisely because they bring people together.
“I think the bodies-in-the-room thing is just so important. We all felt this when in the Covid period everything went to Zoom and it was impossible to read the room and you realise how much information you’re getting. It’s all vibes, isn’t it? When you’re with people in a live setting, there’s so much communication going on.”
Live settings aren’t all alike, of course. Wilkinsʼs writers festival masterclass, in contrast with a workshop, was about direct dissemination of information. That’s not to say it was not of value, just that the value is different.
“You can definitely learn interesting things from listening to writers talking,” he says, “but it’s not this kind of interactive, generative moment.”
The masterclasses at the festival are restricted to 45 attendees and cost $65, which is more than double the cost of a regular session, but Lyndsey Fineran says they are among the fastest events to sell out in the programme.
“I think it does speak to the hunger and the appetite for them,” she says. “I think it shows that we’ve got a huge amount of budding writers in our audience.
“That divide between writer and reader in the programme isn’t as strict as you think.”
Part of the masterclasses’ appeal, Fineran says, is that attendees feel they’re having a unique experience by getting close to writers such as Wilkins.
But readers also like getting close to each other. Festival surveys show that 40% of attendees are members of book clubs and Fineran says it’s common to see friendships being struck throughout the festival.
Falling into place
Rachel Paris says that without the support of the others in her MCW cohort, she probably would not have continued to work on what became See How They Fall, which was released in April.
She says the sense of connection and community was inspiring, while the constant deadlines and accountability stopped her from giving up.
Prior to her studies, she’d been warned that writers were ultra-competitive, and that no other writer would be happy for her if she did well. Parisʼs experience has been the opposite.
“It wasn’t competitive at all,” she says. “And I have to say, even since finishing and getting my book published, other authors – even authors writing in the same genre – have been so generous and kind and supportive.
“It’s just so nice to have a bunch of people who are going through the same thing at the same time and can give you that external support and camaraderie.”