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the writer to telling in his own voice as one of the main sources of talent and ability in the art of writing.

In the Story Workshops, we consistently see students who, when they experience the connection of the physical voice to the voice with which they write, become excited about learning the skills of verbal expression. The Story Work- shop method of teaching writing was originated and developed by John Schultz, chairman of the English/Writ- ing department at Columbia College, Chicago, where the Story Workshops are now based. Mr. Schultz is the author of a book of stories and novellas, The Tongues of Men (Follet, Big Table), No One Was Killed (Follet, Big Table) about the Democratic Convention of 1968, and Motion Will Be Denied (Mor- row) about the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and other stories and articles. The Story Workshop method has been used effectively with backgrounds ranging from writers and teachers to students w'ho are public school drop-outs. It accepts the person where it finds him, and guides him to the discovery of his own voice and perceptual powers. It enables him to learn at his own pace. At Colum- bia, Story Workshop has served since 1967 as the basic teaching method for the Freshman English requirement, as well as for the core course for the Fiction Writ- ing major.1

iStory Workshops conducted among a wide variety of teen groups have produced several collections of fine writing, including Look What's Happening, Baby, and Homemade Bread. Writing from the Columbia Fiction and Freshman English Story Workshops appears in the anthologies fl, Don't You Know There's a War On?, and It Never Stopped Raining. "It's the kind of writing that makes me stop what I am doing, pick up the book and set off to find a colleague to share it with." (Robert F. Hogan, Executive Secretary, NCTE)

Story Workshop has for its basis a fully developed theory of voice, seeing, movement, and anticipation. Its format is highly structured, yet flexible. It utilizes a constantly developing arsenal of word, telling, reading, and writing exercises of increasing demand, as the ongoing means of stirring up the student's perceptual powers. Each exercise has its specific goal and implementation, all remain elas- tic and capable of incorporating any useful content or teaching technique into their function. Through the workshop director's sensitive perceptual coachings of the student as he engages in the oral exercises, tellings, and reading aloud, the student grows in understanding of the use of his perceptions and their acces- sibility to him in writing. He develops his talents in a climate of continual re- discovery.

When a Story Workshop director takes his chair 'before a semicircle of students, he can expect at least two things: (1) as director and listener he will share in the semicircle's pleasurable and oftentimes exciting experience of "see- (2) by the time the workshop session is ing" and telling imaginative events, and over, he will have expended a great amount of energy in his director's function of holding both the individual student and the workshop to the process of telling, reading, and writing. This he must do without interfering in or coming between the students and that process.

Everything he does, every moment he spends in the workshop, relates to one or the other of these ends. If he ignores the pleasures and moment-to-moment ex- periencing of his listening role, 'he will find that he has not been listening at all. And if he fails in his role of superb listener, he will have become insensitive to the students' needs for perceptual coaching which only he can give, and the

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workshop will not long produce anything worth hearing.

Story Workshop directors must be writers with a minimum of two years of training in the workshop experience. Di- rectors are trained in no other way, and the training is never "finished." From John Schultz's fundamental breakthrough in establishing Story Workshop theory and method, and from his continued development and exploration, a large body of well-married theory and practice has emerged. This storehouse of practical information and insight is applied and re- applied to each new workshop undertak- ing in a continuous flow of training and seasoning for every workshop director.

Operation of the Workshop

The Story Workshop director faces a semicircle of up to eighteen students with chairs arranged so that each person is visible to the others, perhaps five to nine feet from the director's chair. It is important that everyone be aware of the bodily presence of everyone else, and that no straining or craning be visually necessary in order to maintain that awareness.

The director will usually begin the session with a verbal recall of tellings, readings, and words from the previous meeting. The workshop recall is not a summary in any sense, but a bringing to life of imagery and events. The director coaches the students whenever needed, so the recalled event "can be seen again, happening now." To emphasize the reinforcement function of recall, he may ask such things as, "What do you remember that was particularly clear? See it, tell it happening again right now."

After the recall, the director will ordinarily move the workshop into the area of imaginative play, stirring or evoking

imaginative activity through the use of word exercises, word play. However, at this or any other moment in a workshop session, he may move in many ways with many choices available to him according to the activity he perceives will best move the workshop toward its goal of writing. The exercises are done for their own sake, and for a multitude of reasons all at once. The director must use his awareness of every moment of the workshop session to direct that moment toward wnriting, just as a writer is aware of each word, pause, sentence, and image that is part of the fulfillment of a story. It will happen that the workshop can move directly and successfully into telling after a particularly vivid recall, though it is not usual. The word exercises are most often a necessary prelude and help to vivid tellings. Tellings tend to occur later in the session as the imaginative powers are evoked, stimulated, and al- lowed to build through a wisely chosen series of activities. Again, the director may elect to begin the session with an evocative, well chosen reading selection, or move directly to reading after the beginning recall.

One Word Exercise

In most cases, after the recall the director will begin the oral exercises by asking each student in turn to give a word-"One word," directing the students to push away all ordinary associa- tions with the word just before it. "Gasoline," someone says, then "key chain," then "blue," and the One Word exercise has begun. The director coaches the students to give the "felt word," "the word that surprises you," "the word you have not prepared before it is your turn." Concentration settles upon the semicircle as students struggle together to see and

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feel what each word evokes for them individually. "Let it happen, let the word evoke something for you," the director coaches. Each word should be singular in sound, each one given with a different voice, a voice that is aware of the word. "Give the word while you see it and are aware of it," is important coaching for instantaneous reception of each word in the semicircle, as students tend to separate their awareness from their pronunciation of the word. It is equally important that the director coach the students in the semicircle to actively "receive" each word that is given with their individual feelings, sights, and perceptions.

Quickly students learn to discern between a superficially associative word movement and one that shows deeply felt connections. The movement between bathtub and soap is purely chronological, a superficial sort of association, but the word progression silk, wwander, darken, spoon, crevice, sour, chant, rope, button- hole, peapod, mirror, mouse springs from a higher (and deeper) degree of concentration; it is instantly experienced by the student as multiple leaps of imagination.

It is an easy step from the One Word exercise to simple image telling. The director can isolate a "felt" or "aware" word that was given: "Everybody see his rope," pointing to the person who originally gave rope, "and use it, do something with it. ... Now what's happening? What do you see? Who do you see? What is that person doing with the rope?" Or the director can allow volun- teer images to occur, spun off of any of the One Word responses. "When it's your turn, give a word or a quick sight, an image." Again, the images or sights may be volunteered out of turn as they occur to individual students, or the director may call on students out of sequence. This assists the useful element of

surprise in responding, and demonstrates to the student that he does not need to prepare his response ahead of time; in other words, he does not need to "plan everything" in order to respond at his best level.

Here the connection between the surprise principle of response and the act of writing should be understood. When he is writing, the writer needs to trust that his perceptual and expressive abilities will be available to him at any given moment, whether he has planned ahead or not. If he comes to the "foreseen" moment, and through his "planning ahead" tells it mechanically, without awareness, or the quality of surprise, or his perception, or his voice, that moment will be dead, robbed of authority and presence. The Story Workshop exercises develop the awareness of moment and of movement which give the authority that a reader expects from a story.

An infinite number of variations of the One Word exercise exist, and are continually being developed. It is important to note that the Story Workshop method has been greatly extended and illumined by all the developments, insights, and contributions to the format made by the Columbia staff of thirteen trained writer/directors, under the super- vision of Mr. Schultz. Yet in its principal aims and general structure the workshop method remains basically what it was in 1965, when John Schultz designed it for adults who wished to write professionally. The method of Story Workshop helps the director to respond perceptively in each different classroom situation.

In order to serve the needs of a workshop, its director must be able to ex- plore and develop the basic format of the word exercises with a thorough, not hazy, understanding of the principles in- volved, of seeing and voice, response and


telling, anticipation and movement. For instance, when the word responses are flat, when every word is being given so that it sounds like every other word, the director should know that for some reason the students are feeling constricted in their responding. They are not allow- ing the sights and feelings they have for the words to enter their physical voices. Then it is helpful to coach, "Give your word with a gesture," or simply, "Let your body move as you give your word." If there is body movement with each response, the individual words will cease to sound alike. The awareness of the semicircle will become enriched and awakened in each case with the body experience and expectation-what the student knows, and knows physically- about the word.

The following are some of the common and most useful variations of the One Word exercise:

Give a verb. Give a verb with a gesture. Give an object. Give an object from a dream. Give an object you can hold in your

hands. Do something with it. This variation can move immediately into quick, short tellings.

Give an object you are uncomfortable with.

Give the dirtiest, filthiest, cussing word or phrase or exclamation that you can think of. This variation, often used about the third or fourth session, clears the air of tensions produced by the students worrying about whether or not the director will accept street language. It can leap quickly into short tellings, and often produces unusually strong tellings. (See Voice Acceptance.)

The Take-a-Place Exercise In the Take-a-Place or Place-Object-

Verb exercise, the director asks someone in the semicircle to choose a place that is familiar to him, to "see it now" rather than rake through memories, and stay in the one place in his imagination until the end of the exercise. The student holding the place is instructed to let his eye, that eye which he possesses in his imagination, roam about the place until an object strikes his eye, or chooses him. He gives the unmodified object-"matchbox" in- stead of "torn up blue matchbox"-to the semicircle with his voice. Then the director instructs the students to see the individual sights which have been evoked in their minds by the giving of the object in its unmodified, unqualified form. There will be as many individual sights of the object as there are students in the semicircle, and now each student's sight should be as explicit as his concentration will permit. The director then starts to the left or right of the student in the place, pointing to each student in turn around the semicircle and asking him to respond to his individual sight of the object with a verb. "Hoard," for instance, or "chatter" might be verbs given by persons in the semicircle in response to their individual sights of "matchbox." The student in the place, giving the objects, does not give verbs in response to the objects he sees. When all other students in turn around the semicircle have responded to his object with a verb and his turn has come round again, he lets a moment elapse, lets his eye roam about the place in his mind, then gives the next object that strikes his eye while he sees it.

The director will not permit any two verb responses to be the same word; the second student to give a verb that has already been given will be instructed to "respond again." Responses are not lim- ited to what the object can "do," as in chair-squeak, chain-rattle, or even tail

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light-wink. The exercise works on several levels, demanding a deeper response which engages both the objective and subjective perceptions the student has about the object. The director will coach, "Respond deeply to 'mirror.' Include the implications mirror has for you in your response. Reject-say no to-all cliche responses."

In responding with a verb, the student must be free of any obligation to summarize or explain his sight. He is not "writing in air," but letting the word come out of the richness of his feelings for the object. He is engaging in healthy productive play that rides the great leaps of his imagination just the way any good writer works. In responding, the student must understand that "sight" paradoxically does not always come first, but often follows on the heels of the spoken word, springing always from the same source in image, or from the imaginative event which the student is in the process of discovering. At a deep level of verbal response, photograph-chafe, sand- tease, checkbook-crowd, mirror-float, or tail light-moan, both student and director hear the evocations of the naked word and participate in its power.

After several rounds of verb responses, the director can ask if an imagined place, or image, or happening, or fragment of an event has developed in someone's mind. However, Take-a-Place does not have to be directed toward tellings at all times and is valuable as a stirring up of the perceptual powers. In beginning workshops it is best not to direct Take- a-Place specifically toward tellings until students have mastered the rudimentary perceptual and linguistic demands of this exercise.

The director must take great care to get the sequence of instructions straight for this exercise, and also to spread his

nets wide, being careful to exclude nothing that may be taking place in the students' imaginations. Too narrow a focus on only one sort of "permissible" response will be unnecessarily limiting when the director wishes to elicit imagery and other imaginative events after the Take-a-Place responses have been given. He must make clear to the students that images or events or "sights" may come variously from the place form- ing in their minds, from the objects given, from the verb responses, or from any other suggestions in the student's imagination. The student must not feel moral- ly bound to create or "see" something that he will tell from each object and response. And paradoxically, the director must make it clear to him that there will be times when he will let his place change, too, and that in the act of telling many more surprises will happen.

In any case, when Take-a-Place is directed toward imagery and event, vivid tellings should follow. Tail light- moan may conjure the presence of a man in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up driving a country road at night in an old station wagon. There is a smell of creek water and the raw scent of fresh oil blowing in the windows. He is warm, his legs ache, he is sleepy, and he must sing to keep his eyelids from sneaking down. The loose muffler rattles and drags on bumps, and up ahead the red gleam of another tail light moans around yet another dusty curve that he must follow before he can lock the car and fall on his bed and sleep.

Students should feel free to give short images as well as full tellings.

Coaching

Without concentration the student and any writer "sees" or senses nothing of


any vividness or import. It happens frequently that the student trying to tell an image will keep his eyes to one degree or another on the director for approval. This invariably weakens or prevents the imaginative sight. It is imperative that the director coach the student until his eyes are off the teacher and his entire concentration focused firmly on the imaginative sight in his own mind. Then he will be only vaguely aware of sights and faces in the room. He pours his full trance- like energy on the event taking place before his mind's eye, and wastes not a shred of energy upon looking inadver- tently to the teacher for approval.

While the student tells, the director plays the role of a superb listener. He asks only those questions which help draw forth the image without "leading" the movement or causing interference in the telling. "Where is she--What is she near?" Not: "Is she close to him?-Is she touching the gun?" Again, construc- tive questioning will be, "What is she doing right now?" Not, "Is she washing her face?" Ask, "What sounds do you hear?" Not, "Do you hear a train whis- tle?" "What is she doing with her hand?" and "Where is she looking?" can increase the student's awareness of the sight, unless used insensitively, while "What happens next?" is a coaching instruction that keeps the movement flowing. Along with "See it," and "Listen to your voice," "What happens next?" is one of the basic principled instructions of Story Work- shop. It calls upon the student to extend his powers of curiosity and seeing, to extend and "let happen" his play of intelligence and perception, to anticipate, to make leaps of imagination, to begin to get in touch with the movement of story and the vivid, revelatory completeness of image. "What happens next?" followed by "And then what happens?"

followed again by "And then what happens?" goes a long way toward laying bare the bones of any potential story movement.

Sometimes the director can jolt free a blocked-up telling by asking, "Where in his body is he aware of that fear? What does it feel like?" and "Tell it in present tense, present time." "Tell it in the third person." "See it now!"

The Written Exercise

The written exercise, which may take place any time during the workshop session, but which generally occurs toward the end when perception is judged to be at a peak, is structured to draw forth, not diminish, the reality of the imagined event. All writing coachings are aimed toward getting the student's perceptions onto the paper through his voice with the minimum of interference: "Write as fast as you can!" "Get this voice," the director coaches, perhaps touching his own throat, "down on paper." "Tell it to the paper"-"Write it the way you tell it"- "Let your arm be an extension of what you see" -"See everything you write"- "Be aware of the place, see objects, see what the people are doing with objects." Notice that the student is not given a limiting topic to write about. The perception of the individuals in the workshop is presumed to be unusually high at the time of the written exercise, and it is very likely that the student will be able to get down on paper some of the sights which are passing before the eye of his imagination at the moment the written exercise begins.

When writing a first draft, contrary to the usual classroom instructions, the student is told he should never stop to rearrange words. Never worry about sentence structure, grammar, or punctua-

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tion, or stop to look up the spelling of a word in the dictionary. During the heat of a rough draft, he should avoid doing anything that could block the rapid flow of perceptions or his sense of the movement of the event transpiring in his mind. Throughout the workshop experience, the director makes plain the fact that grammar, punctuation, and spelling are essential to clear writing, and that they are to be given all due attention in the proper order of things: that is, before the final draft and at the end of the process of retelling, or rewriting. The director will find that by that time the student has learned much and become confident of grammar.

Group Effort

The student's privacy must be re- spected by the director when he tells in the semicircle and when he writes in his journal at home. In the semicircle the student is not revealing secrets: rather, with the director's aid, he is exploring and testing the possibilities of his writing materials according to his best perceptions. A student in the semicircle par- ticipates with the director's countenance, demand, and personality upon him, and in full sight of every other student in the room.

The impact of the word exercises is spontaneous, usually producing a lively and enjoyable shared experience which in turn causes a redoubled flow of energy back into the activity of the workshop. However, Story Workshop does not operate on an encounter group philoso- phy, nor does it use encounter group techniques. A director who tries to use it that way is misusing the workshop. Whenever interpersonal conflicts or satis- factions supersede the goal of writing and telling, the workshop is in trouble. Story

Workshop does employ a group effort and concentration that is strongly beneficial to the individual. What helps the individual is good for the group effort. A person sitting in the semicircle should have no worry of violation by the director or the rest of the group, for the single reason that the aim of the workshop is to produce good writing, not to save souls or engage in therapy. The director does not seek to render therapeutic interpreta- tions of the imaginative events told, or of any of the proceedings of the workshop. He does not indulge in the manipu- lation of personalities. He has no cause or need to stress interpersonal relationships. The student will become aware of interpersonal relationships that interfere with the learning process, and will usually acquire the insights necessary to set these aside. But the director may have to take firm, objective action to set aside some interpersonal hang-ups, conflicts, rivalries, or mutual admiration relationships. His clear anger, expressed for the sake of the writing goal of the workshop, will be life-giving at times. Every activity and demand that takes place in the workshop is moved solely toward the writing objective.

However, many positive growth changes and therapeutic results do occur for the student in this work context. The director will often ask the group to strive to listen, to concentrate, to tell, and to engage in the general question of what is good writing by making an effort and by relaxing and being attentive and "letting it happen." All these efforts are felt by the individual as energy directed toward him, put at his disposal, to be used in his own way at his own pace and discretion. The uniqueness of the individual is stressed; the semicircle is never purposely leveled toward a sameness or uniformity of any sort. If a same-


ness does seem to be in effect and the students feel it, then probably there is a complicity between students and director to keep it so. Sameness can properly be seen only as a curse to writers strug- gling to speak in their own voices.

For this reason, workshop differences of environmental circumstance, cultural, and ethnic background are welcomed, not "overcome," because they are integral to the student's voice and experience. If we accept his voice, we accept his culture and his background. We welcome it, wherever he comes from, and work to develop from there the many broadening and heightening cultural, imaginative, and linguistic possibilities. No workshop director should think for one minute that he could pretend to accept a student's voice and then trick or transform him into something standard, and still have authority and presence in that student's

imaginative events.

The Director

In trying to assist the student, the director must take full care not to violate or stand in the way of the student's most precious responsibility: the discovery of his own voice and perceptual powers. This discovery process cannot be ac- complished by any amount of explaining or defining for the student what the discovery ought to be. The director's "explaining" energies should be trained on making the directions to the various exercises clear to the student, and on making clear that both director and student are out to discover the student's writing voice. The director can expect to explain these instructions again and again as long as he directs a workshop. They are really instructions for the basic principles of imaginative work.

The basic instructions of Story Work- shop director to student, of artist to himself, are the basic principles of imaginative and perceptual verbal expression.

See it-Literally in your mind, as clearly as in a dream, see it. See what is evoked by the word, see your imaginative event, see what is happening as you write. Seeing is conceiving. It is also "perception" in general. "Touching" it is "seeing" it. "Smelling" it is "seeing" it. "Ab- stracting"-be careful how your students understand that word-is "seeing" it.

Listen to your voice-See it, and tell it so someone else can see it too. See it, and write it so someone else can see it and experience it. "Listen to your voice, listen for your voice." Writing is not altogether an extension of speech, but writing has its source in voice, and we want the power and authority of voice to flow into and be present in the writing. The student enters the process of discovering his voice, its responsive abilities, and its sustaining power of presence and movement in writing as well as speech.

Let it happen-suspend the manipulative efforts to come up with content, values and attitudes in writing that will meet the approval of seeming literary trends-let the story happen-let the event happen- let the people exist-let all the powers of imagination, curiosity, intelligence and voice work together-let it happen.

What happens next?-This instruction helps the student to reach out with all the play of his imaginative and perceptual abilities. It develops his powers of anticipation, of making choices, combinations, simplifications, leaps. It helps him to permit the movement of a story or other imaginative event. It helps him come near enough to experience the event so that he can anticipate what can happen. What is happening an hour later? The next day? What happens next?

Give it-Give. It. "Giving" it means that you let go of what you have to say in speech or writing and also release your urgency for someone else to hear it. "Giv- ing" it and the need to give it, for teller and listener, may be what actually calls forth the awareness of word and image. The difference between "given" words

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and the same words when they are not given is startling to the listener. The word not given causes nothing to happen. The given word causes perceptions, imaginative sights, and feelings to be evoked for the listener and for the teller listening to his own voice. You can see this difference on paper when the student writes down words, too. There is a different tone for each act of perception when it is given.

Listen-and listen to what happens to you as you listen. The listener learns, perceives, affirms, celebrates, and has pleasure of what he hears. In a Story Work- shop, the roles of teller and listener, and teller listening to himself, move from one participant to another and back again. The director/teacher is mainly an active authority/listener, though vigorous speech of many different tones is often needed to bring life to the workshop.2

The director's approval of a student's telling or writing is in general a powerful thing so long as it reflects the director's strengths, honesty, ability, and positive views of life rather than his weaknesses. He should suspect that something is wrong if the students' voices begin to sound like his voice when it is flat and not working. The director should in no way reinforce a student's work on the basis of his fondness for the subject matter or the manner of telling. He may rightly express his approval of the quality of perception in the writing itself.

When the director finds himself in- clined to give approval to any form of sentimentality, or to writing that tries for the stereotyped laugh, the joke, or the punch line, or to writings that are notable mainly for their avoidance of perception, then both he and the workshop are in trouble. Any avoidance of the director's will be unanimously reflected in avoidance by the students in the semicircle.

2John Schultz, "Columbia College's Story Workshop," Associated Writing Programs Newsletter (January, 1973), Washington Col- lege, Chestertown, Md.

Those areas of life that annoy, hurt, dis- please, anger, or in any other way un- settle the director will disappear from his students' telling and writing, and perhaps from their perceptions as well. He might just as well instruct his semicircle: "These portions of the truth are not good to write about, and will not be rewarded here." The loss will be limitless. It will spread through the entire workshop and will be observable in every activity from the One Word exercise to the telling, the reading, and the writing. It will be a "black mass" said in tribute to the negative powers inherent in all teaching. It will be the death of the workshop. Every area of life is valid material for the writer.

Vital responses must not be denied in favor of slavish responses to the director's fantasies and biases, usually prevalent in the culture and reinforced in the schools. His willingness to become self-aware cannot be overstressed. Also, to assist his objectivity, he should ask an experienced director to "sit in" and observe him and his workshop. The observer always par- ticipates.

No director is perfect, and all will from time to time give approval to aspects of writing that affirm their own perceptual weaknesses, rather than reinforce the student's strength. The director is obliged at all times to stay on the edge of his awareness of his own vulnerabil- ities. His approval is given or withheld in many subtle ways. It can come from non- verbal sources such as the total body gesture or stance, when he crosses his legs at a particular moment in the telling, turns his head, or moves his hand. Approval or disapproval can be conveyed by anything the director does, and often by what he does not do. But his healthiest and most accessible counterbalance is to continue to elicit and recognize a broad variety of


experience and of nuance of experience in the tellings, readings, and writings.

The director's responsiveness, his genuine excitement and pleasure, should never be withheld from the workshop. rt not only conveys his willingness to hear whatever content will be told so long as the student struggles to tell with the full use of his perceptions, but it offers a teaching reinforcement which can greatly advance the students' understanding of image: what it is and when it has hap- pened.

For instance, in the early sessions of a beginning workshop, immediately after a fine image has been told, it is helpful to ask, "When in that image, at what moment in the telling, did something first happen for you? Do you remember what he (the student teller) was saying then?" And in a longer telling where several such "moments" have occured, the director can ask several students around the semicircle for another moment when there was a "quickening," and another, and so on. Identifying the sharp moments in a telling provides a way for the director to give practical definition of his shorthand language, "moment," "happen," "quicken," etc., language which he will use frequently in relating word, image, and event to movement and story. At the same time it reinforces what the students need to understand about the Recall.

The director must, of course, expect that the students in the semicircle are making "formulas" about what an image is, and how they may successfully arrive at one according to the "moments" in the images which he has just helped them to identify. He should know that this is part of the learning process and cannot be avoided. (When directors try to avoid the making of formulas by withholding their own responsiveness, they only suc-

ceed in bringing a deathly blandness to their workshops.) In the following sessions the director will simply have to deal with any formulas which appear in the students' writing or telling. He does this by holding up every kind of good image that happens in the workshop, both in student tellings and writings, and in pub- lished works which are read aloud and recalled.

The director's expectation is also a significant aspect of his relationship to his workshop. It is the same with any teacher in any classroom in the land: if the director or teacher expects his students to be "dumb" and to perform poorly, then he surely will not be dis- appointed. Expectation has two functions: self-fulfilling-thinking a group will do poorly or trusting that it will be "good"-and sharpening. If the director lets himself not know exactly what to expect in a given moment, it sharpens his perceptions about what he sees and hears and senses is going on in the workshop session. Accordingly, this has a quickening effect upon his sensitivity to what is needed next, what exercise or activity will best move the workshop and the individual forward. The director will, of course, also plan for the workshop session.

The director is a power in the semicircle and should never experience himself otherwise. He should simply place full concentration on the strengthening aspects of that power. It is largely through his sensitive use of approval, voice, gesture, and selection that the student apprehends the positive, often strin- gent, demands necessary for his process and growth.

Reading

The reading aloud in the workshop

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is the occasion for a synthesis in the growth of the student, a coming together or joining of the principles of image and movement. These occur simultaneously in the process of writing or reading a story. When either director or student reads aloud, there will be a vibrant, ex- pectant concentration on the spoken word. This quality of listening is an active unifying force unheard of in most classrooms today, and much could be said here about the educational implications of active listening. Certainly the semicircle is an educational format which makes alert and intelligent listening possible in the classroom. It provides a fertile atmosphere for any learning activity that the director would like to try. But the highest moment of synthesis, and perhaps the most productive event in the workshop, occurs when the student, reading aloud, hears his voice and perception joined with the voice of the story.

The workshop stresses the use of a broad variety of reading materials to en- sure a broad spectrum of writing possibilities. It concentrates on no one author or culture or genre or style. In a high school or adult workshop, five or six books are assigned for the semester. These will be read outside the workshop and parts of them aloud in the workshop. If the age grouping permits, the director will be sure to include in the oral reading vivid excerpts from longer works, such as Moby-Dick, War and Peace, Huckle- berry Finn, Native Son, and other fine novels. Also, in the oral reading he will include complete short movements to be read straight through in one workshop session, brief stories with strong movement: folk tales and fairy tales of all times and cultures, poems, articles, excerpts from writers' journals, and selections from the works of naturalists and other scientists. These stress that good

writing of all forms proceeds from sight, perception, movement, and is told with the power of the author's own voice.

The director may ask the students to bring in short selections of unassigned reading which they wish to share with the semicircle. This adds considerably to the idea that reading can be pleasurable; and that aloud or silent, it need never be seen as the solitary performance of duty or interminable droning of a dull classroom experience.

In the outloud reading of any selection, the director may ask the student to ex- change seats with him, and let him read from the director's chair. Or he may pass the book directly around the semicircle for each student in turn to read a portion of the selection. This method has the advantage of saving the time used in changing chairs and settling attention as each new reader begins. Because less concentration is broken between readers, the voice of the story is more consistently and stably present in the voices of the several readers, a boost to the uncertain reader in his search to "find the voice of the story." However, the strongest coaching and frequently the clearest student readings occur when the student takes the director's chair. He is then more aware of the force of the attention of the workshop poured in upon him. When the student accepts and uses this force, it brings added clarity and authority to his reading. For this reason it would be a serious mistake not to allow every student the experience of reading from the director's chair at least some of the time.

The same principles of seeing and perception that apply in the oral telling apply to the oral reading, as they do also to the act of writing. The communication of the scene from the printed page happens for those in the semicircle only


when it happens for, is "seen" and felt by, both the writer and the reader. This often varies from moment to moment in a reading, causing variations in reception. Listeners in the semicircle will sometimes comment that the reader was alternately "in" and "out of" the story during the reading.

Seeing is as natural to reading as it is to telling and writing; but most of us, in the process of "getting educated," have lost the knack of seeing what we read; we tend to read only for the retention of information. Many conditioned factors present obstacles to the reader's perceptions. It is the function of the director, through perceptual and voice coachings, to hold the student to the process of seeing and perceiving moment to moment, sentence to sentence, and image to image.

The student quickly learns to absorb coaching and respond to it with a minimum of interference. First and most basic is the instruction to see-"See it; see every object, every action as you read." If the student is rushing so that neither he nor the people in the semicircle can see what is being read, the director may say: "Take your time and see it; stop now, and see him kicking that snake before you read another word-we'll wait; everyone, see him kick the snake."

Once the student understands he is literally to see what he is reading, and then tries to see one object or action and suc- ceeds in doing so, he almost invariably goes on seeing the next action, the next object and the next. He forgets he is engaged in the strain of a public reading, and enjoys what he is seeing in a way that draws everyone in the semicircle into the story. If nothing intrudes between the reader and his vision of the story, he will continue to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel everything that transpires

in the story, and to communicate those perceptions with his own voice.

If a reader insists on rushing pell-mell across the page, the director will coach him to "Slow down!" "Give it time to happen," "Take the pauses; listen to the pauses, be aware of the pauses; the pauses are part of the story," or tell him to "Give full value for every word!" The good story being flatly read, and consequently rejected in the semicircle, means that the director must pursue his job of coaching even more vigorously than before. "Listen to the pace of the sentence!"-"Listen to the pace of the sentence in your voice." Many times a directly spoken "Give it!" will shift a flat reading into clarity. The director can help a faltering confused reader by coaching, "Trust that the sentence will end," or "Feel the span of a whole sentence; now hear that in your voice." His simple admonition to "Take each word as it comes" can relieve a student from worrying ahead. This worrying ahead, or worrying about getting to the end of the sentence, causes some poor readers to continually compound their "mis- takes."

Both public-speaking classroom habit and emotional desperation will cause readers to grasp at the exterior inflection, to act out, to punch certain words or syllables in the effort to forcibly insert meaning into them from the outside, ig- noring the well-springs of their perceptions. But reading content and presence, no less than telling content and presence, can never be imposed or driven in from the outside. Like every other activity of the workshop, it must begin with the perceiver and proceed in an outward direction. The director must move to re- verse the direction of the energy in a punched, public-speaking reading. "Read it in a monotone"-"Equal stress for

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every word!" Here the reader may need the director's help to establish a prec- edent. He can demonstrate, "Equal- stress-for-every-word. ..." But to snap a strongly entrenched pattern of exterior inflection, he must be fearless: "Quit acting! Stop doing things with your voice!" It should be clear that that sort of acting is not good theatrical acting either.

"Listen to your voice, as if you were hearing it from the outside," brings to bear a fine self-correcting objectivity. When the reader who is already seeing everything he reads and giving it sensi- tively and clearly, actually hears his own voice reading, he invariably communi- cates the written event with a further releasing of authority. In the case of the experienced workshop reader, the director may use more sophisticated coachings: "Exaggerate every perception! "- "Read in a monotone"-"Dreamy smooth and slow," or "Staccato!"-"Now read at normal speed and see everything you read." If the director uses these coachings vigorously in sequence, they can cause a sensitive reading to blossom into a powerful reading.

The director must not fail to have the audacity to interfere with a poor reading. It is not a kindness to let it go on. Poor readings have a tendency to de- teriorate even further without coaching, due to the reader's feelings of panic which are heightened by corresponding waves of impatience or boredom coming back to him from the semicircle. Thus a sort of spiraling paralysis envelopes the director and his workshop so long as he hesitates to perform the function of getting the reader into his perceptions. Di- rectors also do their workshops no good by hoarding the oral readings to themselves out of worry that weak readers will not provide "the great experience"

they wish their students to have during every workshop session.

The director may witness a strong shared reading experience around the semicircle which is vividly reflected later on in the recall of imagery, and yet find that it has not been a reading that leads to or helps develop writing. One of his most cherished responsibilities as director is the choosing of material which evokes telling and leads, ultimately, to writing.

The first basis of the director's selec- tivity is to discover stories which give a universal experience with a strength of voice and perception that moves student writers to set down their own unique stories. Their stories can come from limitless combinations of experiences and imagination spun off of the universal of such a strong story. "Gym Period," by Rilke, is a story told out of the author's memory of the death of an unathletic boy during the gym class of a military school Rilke was forced to attend in his youth. In this one story movement, we find not only the universals of repressive institutions with all the fears, pains, and feelings of failure that accompany them, but also the element of competition, and amazingly, the seeds of humor. Like the workshop exercises, stories of strong voice and universal content will offer students the maximum writing possibility, and the permission to act on these possibilities, at the same time they exert a high degree of writing demand. They cause excitement about communication, about writing, and they clearly demonstrate principles of writing.

In oral readings-for that matter, in the course of tellings as well-the director may be surprised to hear laughter from the semicircle during a passage that is not funny in the usual sense. The passage can be sad, fearful, tragic even, as in "Gym Period," and still evoke the


honest laughter of recognition. This laughter is to be welcomed in a workshop because it signals the recognition of a common human experience. Laughter of recognition may be caused by any emotional content. Also, the laughter during a painful passage may be a healthy relief, and a true indication that the reading, or the event on the printed page, is being perceived and experienced by the reader and the entire workshop.

After a strong reading experience of a story such as "Gym Period," or of the killing of the kitten in Richard Wright's Black Boy, or of any story that tells of an almost universal human experience, the director may often elicit strong writing or telling with the following exercises:

Instruct the students to concentrate on their feeling about the story and respond in turn with a surprise verb. Then have a quick recall of imagery and event. Then ask, "What is the story about?" Here the director should not want debate, but a concrete, evocative statement, such as: "It's about a boy who killed himself by succeeding." Then the director may ask, "What does the story remind you of?"

Good writing or telling may come out at this point.

Voice Acceptance

Now a few words should be said about the honesty of the teacher.

It is entirely necessary to the operation of the workshop that the director relieve the student of his prior understanding that certain words are bad and to be de- leted from his usage, and that certain words by comparison are good. Many teachers are personally afraid of the in- trusion of the language of the street, not because they fear the words themselves, but because they fear that the "raunchy"

words will take over completely, and that unconstructive attitudes will develop among students. Actually, the opposite occurs. After a brief flurry of acceptance, the feared words are almost always given appropriately along with all the other words in the student's speech. The acceptance voice then brings about a new discipline and a new intensity of listening in the workshop.

The workshop director must make it plain that there are no bad words. The student's prior understanding comes directly out of twelve years of biased insti- tutional schooling. During this time the student was continually and emphatically reminded by the attitude and "permission" of his teachers and by the fabric, air, and appearance of the institution which he attended, that he must leave his own language outside. Words, phrases, syntax, and sentence structure which con- stitute his reality of speaking, hearing, perceiving, and understanding, and which therefore reveal his own voice, all had to be left at the door when he entered the classroom. In all his school years he has been operating according to a dual standard: one language, vocabulary, and syntax for outdoors and home, another for the classroom. He has one language and vocabulary to use in expressing himself about all the things that are vital to him- his daily realities of play, fear, anger, guilt, home, pleasure, work, fun-and a second language for school. Little won- der that "school language" is dead, re- moved from him, abstract in the negative sense, and not vital to his keen interests. Imagine the dishonesty of the teacher who in effect says daily to his pupils: "Leave your reality at the door of this room; now please learn; and, oh yes, be creative, too." Who learns without a firm base in his own reality? Who can suspend a sense of his own being and yet sustain

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curiosity? And who can perceive and learn without a curiosity to lead the intelligence of his imagination?

When the student enters the workshop, he is sure to play the academic game of pleasing teacher and finding the "right" answer unless the director prevents him from doing so. He thinks he must find out what the director wants; it is the only pattern of classroom survival he knows. In a thousand subtle ways, he earnestly presses the Story Workshop director to answer his all-important question: "What do you want, teacher?" None of his former divining rods obtain; he is thrown into academic limbo. Finally, he will come to understand in his bones that the director is saying, in effect: "I want what you can do; I want what you can tell," and that the director has realistically high expectations about what the quality of that might be.

Now the director's attitude can have a positive effect upon the learning processes of both the well-prepared, or gifted student, and the so-called drop-out, or the student who barely functions academi- cally. The gifted student, in playing the academic game so well, has often nar- rowed, minimized, and suppressed his talents and abilities. The drop-out, or poorly-prepared student, habitually tests low on standardized tests. The student does not exist who has not long ago ac- customed his mind and body to playing or "failing" at the academic game. The director must refuse to cooperate in the seductions of that game. He should com- bine this refusal with positive encourage- ments, such as "Use your words to tell it," and "Tell it with your own voice." This will force the student back upon his own reality, consequently upon his own curiosity, strength, and possibilities. The director's insistence upon the student's own reality and this necessary forcing

him back upon it are by no means always met with jubilation. But in no other way will the director be able to make it possible for a student to express himself about those aspects of his life which are lively and important to him, the aspects upon which he can willingly lavish his care. In some cases, the director will have made it possible for his student to write, and also to become a writer.

The student whose classroom situation allows him to accept his own voice and language and syntax as valuable is liber- ated to advance from that base in his own reality, and enabled thereafter to learn, to make changes in his punctuation or grammar or sentence structure because those changes serve the clarity he so keenly desires. Grammar, punctuation, and syntax are most certainly concerns of clear writing. But all teachers would do well to remember that these were first an abstracting from principles of speech, a "drawing out" and codifying of the factors observable in speech. Then these ab- stracted codified principles are reimposed upon the written word. If we hope to use them productively, we must understand that all three, grammar, punctuation, and syntax, grow from voice, perception, and movement, not vice-versa.

Notice that most students speak more grammatically than they write. It is vir- tually impossible to commit a "comma blunder" when speaking. If we examine a spoken sentence, we see that breath pauses do keep separate thoughts from running into one another. Heed the warning. To pretend to accept a student's voice is of no use. It is the Story Work- shop director's actual acceptance of voice and syntax as being valuable the way it is, even if it never changes, that allows the "poor" student to hear his voice in all its strength, beauty, and possibility. Then he is free to develop the "skills" which


he lacks, and which he has been punished so long for lacking. His desire to tell images, stories, events will overcome his entrenched feelings of failure. Now he can become aware of the language alterna- tives, the many choices which are available to him in finding a way of telling (his own variety of street language, or vocabulary and syntax aided by "Stan- dard English," etc.) which will best serve the meaning he wishes to convey in a given moment, or sentence.

Process

In the Story Workshop none of the director's time or energy is wasted in correcting papers or determining grades for papers. Neither does he let himself be plagued by trying to grade inadequate pieces of student work as if they were "finished." He regards every telling and writing moment in the workshop as part of a process taking place over time. This process should not be fragmented and prevented from happening by putting the emphasis of success or failure on each iso- lated piece of work. The director sets down a simple letter grade based on performance and individual progress at the end of the term, or whatever grading period is allotted. He keeps a folder of each student's work, to gain an overview of the semester and make visible the process, the progress, the weakness, and the breakthroughs that have occurred for the student. Ordinarily, he finds it is better to refrain from making notations on his students' papers, since written comments from the teacher are traditionally received in a context of negative criticism, and are therefore unproductive. When he does jot notes on student papers, it is only to remind himself of something he wants to say to the student, and he is careful to let the student know this.

In the workshop the director does not "hand back" work in the usual sense. When possible, both he and the student keep copies. The director may at times talk with the student about his writing. Any time he talks to the student about his writing, he tries to relate problems and breakthroughs in the way he hears the student tell, orally, in the semicircle, to the way he tells on paper, and vice- versa. This kind of talk and comparison is one of the Story Workshop director's best tools, and he should never for any reason ignore it. The director knows a great deal, perhaps more than he realizes, about his student's abilities and problems and the way he best solves them for himself. When the director is talking to a student about his writing, he should stop and think about the way that student tells, and listen to the student's physical voice in his memory.

Breakthroughs generally occur first in the oral telling, though not in every case. An obstacle in one area may be overcome or dispelled by attention to the other. When the director reinforces the ongoing activities of the workshop while he is talking to a student, even a brief amount of conversation can remove obstacles to his better writing. In more leisurely con- ferences, the director can make use of reading and telling exercises which allow the student to discover and recognize his continuing problems. Let the student read aloud his own work to the director in the conference, and he will probably recognize some breakthrough moment in a piece in his folder. Then he may embark on his own solutions. Sometimes the director may point out things to him.

The director can ask students to read aloud from their notebooks to him in a conference, or to the workshop. If the language on the page is stiff, or the sentence construction awkward, or if things

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(objects) seem to be missing from the piece, he can say, "Tell me what is happening here." In conversation the student invariably answers in words and con- structions that are natural to him, usually with a commensurate increase in perception and clarity. This is the director's chance to suggest, "Why don't you say it that way here, too?" as he points to the page of writing. Or he may ask, "What is the image here?" Frequently this question elicits whole portions of the movement that were left out of the writing, but which may now be incorporated in the rewriting, or retelling. We need to understand, because it is demonstrable, that the writer's unfaltering voice and feeling of telling his strong perceptions are just as necessary to exposition, argu- mentation, and observation, as they are to poetry or story. Rewriting of exposi- tory forms may be handled in much the same way.

Rewriting is not only a necessary process, it is part of the total process of the act of writing. In rewriting, or retelling, the student freshly perceives, experiences, reflects upon, and weighs the events on the page until the story emerges in all its strength and fullness of movement and relationships, and the final copy is done. The director occasionally asks students to retell one of their images or events in the oral tellings in the semicircle. The increase in perception is often dramatic. Story Workshop stresses the value and necessity of the rewriting process. It demands the best from each student at that moment in the development of the student's ability. It calls forth full development at every level of capability. This demand is expressed through the director. Possibly for the first time in their lives, some of the verbally gifted students will have demands placed upon them which are commensurate with their

abilities. The student has another chance to

view writing as process when work of other students in the semicircle is read aloud, by the director and by other students. The director does not announce the name of the writer before the reading, and when the piece is finished, he asks, "Whose voice is that?" The students learn to recognize individual writing/ telling voices, and to make the connection between the way an individual tells aloud in the semicircle and the way he writes. They will gain an experiential knowledge that it is the same voice.

When the director has finished reading a piece of student work, several heads may turn toward a particular area of the semicircle. Students do this almost uncon- sciously, before they have consciously begun to work on the problem of voice recognition. Their ears have simply been reminded of that portion of the semicircle where the writer of that piece customarily sits and tells. Someone will point across the semicircle and say, "I know it's over there!" This often happens on the first reading of a student's work, making plain that the identification is based on the voice connection between the spoken and written tellings. It will happen in different ways with other groups and directors.

Voice identification is not based on habitual subject matter, though the students will make many wrong guesses through a dependency on content until they learn that content can be a distrac- tion from searching out a voice. There may also be students who habitually write about the same subject matter. Students come to identify the voices of their fel- low students accurately and naturally. "He talks like that," they will say, or, "I could hear Wanda's voice running under the words while she was reading


his story . . . was that weird!" Here the listener refers to the truly remarkable experience of hearing the voice of the reader merging with the voice of the writer. Sometimes the semicircle will be annoyed when the director breaks the profound and moving silence that follows the reading of a fine piece of writing merely to raise the theoretical question of voice identification. Someone will finally sigh, "Nobody but Joe could have written that story," and it will be a statement, not a guess.

Style

In the workshop context "voice," or the whole person, is seen as an extension of speech, as an extension of the body. "Style," then, is the full and even pointed development, the full flowering, of the person's own voice. It is not something which he may acquire solely by exterior means, as some systems of teaching rhet- oric imply. When the director coaches, "Listen to your voice," he means, Listen for your voice, discover your voice and its potential for expressing perception, believe your voice. . . . Immediately the presence of the event and sharpness of its telling are increased. When voice gives fully the moment of perception at the moment of writing, it gives the story its authority; it makes the listener or reader see and believe. It both gives perception and compels belief. A student in my semicircle once said in completing an evalu- ation questionnaire, "I like myself better now that I hear my voice in my own stories." Getting to know one's own voice is as health-giving as getting acquainted with one's own body. The vitality re- leased in the recognition of voice flows powerfully back into the student's writing.

Recall

Normally each workshop session ends with the recall. There are two major kinds of recall: the verbatim recall, an ever-sharpening process of memory and selection tending ultimately to re-create the verbatim image, and the type of recall which is used directly after a powerful reading of a story such as Rilke's "Gynm Period." Here the director will use the recall to trigger more telling and writing from the student's experience and imagination. "What does that remind you of?" "Let it trigger something." The tellings or writings which result are given in present tense.

There is a third kind of recall that is occasionally useful and exciting. We can call it Creative Recall. It gives a startling and sometimes effective emphasis to the value and power of imaginative play. In this exercise the student recalls something told or written and retells it, sometimes greatly or wildly different, as his own. Sometimes he finds different nu- ances, or tells it from a different point of view. This kind of recall should be used sparingly, usually when the workshop feels stiff or at a low ebb of energy.

The director coaches the verbatim recall with "See it now,"-"Let it happen now!"-"Let the relationships of the people in the story and the feeling of its movement be present in your voice as you recall any moment of it." Unless the director's demand says otherwise, students, especially in beginning workshops, have a tendency because of their prior training to summarize-tell a synopsis of an entire story-rather than to give a vivid moment as it "happens now!" Through the recall they come to see that the imaginative event, told with full perception and the voice that gives the movement and relationships of the story,

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happens afresh, over and over. It can be sustained over time as long as there is human voice and perception to tell it. The same event is received again and again with new pleasure as long as the teller is truly perceiving the event.

Here, as in any other moment of the workshop session, the physical ease and confidence of the director in front of the workshop is important to the students' feeling of a depth of acceptance. For the students also a sense of having free physical space is very important, in the recalling or during any kind of response, reading, or telling. The director should adjust physical barriers, such as desk seats, to minimize tendencies to lean on or hide behind objects. Sometimes having an object such as a coffee table between the director and the workshop helps the feeling of free space and distance. That is, an object that you can't lean on.

The director must make clear, many times and in many sessions, that the person who is recalling an image is not being repetitious and cannot bore the rest of the semicircle if he actually sees again

and tells the image. Directors and students come to under-

stand that the Workshop Recall is one of the richest and often one of the most relaxing moments in the workshop session. Then the pleasure and good feeling and realization and reinforcement of having experienced a great deal, and of having enjoyed a great deal together, will be at its highest. The director and his semicircle will feel a greater unity during the closing recall than at any other time.

All subject areas can use the universal principles of learning made available through Story Workshop: curiosity, desire, and clear, sensitive perception. All learning experiences are enhanced by the process of a guided self-discovery of the principles of writing and telling, and the reinforcement of perceptual experience through the use of a selective Recall.3

3A student response to the Story Workshop method, "You Must Begin at Zero: Story Workshop," by Patricia Stoll, will appear in the December 1973 issue of CE.