A Chat with Catapult Online Instructor Justin Taylor

“A workshop opens your eyes to what’s been done. You never know what’s going to be the thing that lights someone up.”

While writing can often feel like a solitary endeavor, there’s no denying that a classmate, mentor, or colleague who really gets your work can change not just a story or a project, but your life as a writer. That’s why Catapult offers an array of intimate, high-quality writing classes led by writers at the center of the contemporary literary landscape. Now, by bringing some of our classes online, we can offer the same opportunities for growth and connection to writers all over the world.

Justin Taylor (Flings, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, and The Gospel of Anarchy) taught Catapult’s first online workshop (August 22-October 5), and has also taught creative writing at Columbia University, N.Y.U, and Sarah Lawrence College. His second online Fiction Writing Workshop for Catapult starts tomorrow. Last week we chatted by phone about his new course, his approach to teaching, and what students can expect if they sign up for one of his online workshops.

How long have you been teaching writing?

I’ve been teaching writing in some form or another for ten years now. I started teaching creative writing around 2009 or 2010. When I was still in New York, my mainstays were Columbia and the Pratt Institute; I taught workshops and seminars, both undergraduate and graduate classes. Since moving to Portland, I’ve taught at Portland State and some low-residency MFA programs.

Having taught in classrooms for years as well as online, what do you think of the online format for a writing workshop?

My preference is to teach in person, but I think Catapult has done a great job developing the online course platform and recruiting students. I was really impressed by the group in my first Catapult class. The biggest drawback of an online class, obviously, is that you don’t get to see people face-to-face, or grab a cup of coffee with someone afterwards. As an instructor, a big part of my role is moderating the conversation as it goes along, making sure one person isn’t dominating it and recognizing when someone else might want to speak up. When it’s all happening online, it can be tougher to notice when someone is looking for an opportunity to jump in.

Having said that, not everyone can drop what they’re doing and come to an in-person workshop for a semester, or even for six weeks. The online workshop, when done well, can offer students a great deal. Catapult online workshops allow for line edits to be made on manuscripts shared online—you can highlight and comment on specific phrases or sentences. Writing workshops are supposed to teach you how to be a stronger editor and critic—that’s 90% of the class, really, when your own pieces aren’t being workshopped. By developing such a strong platform and making that central to the online course experience, Catapult’s done a great service to its students. The other thing that’s nice about Catapult’s online class chat sessions in particular is having the complete archive of the workshop discussion. If you want to go back and see exactly what was said about one of your pieces, you can easily find and reread the entire log.

Can you share some of your plans for your upcoming workshop? What can students expect if they sign up?

It’s a six-week class with eight or nine students, so we can workshop three students a week and everyone will get to go twice. The assigned reading and lecture material will appear every other week, and in the interim weeks there will be optional writing exercises. My lectures are grounded in three assigned texts from the Ben Marcus anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. They’re really craft lectures—on topics such as openings, making the most of your secondary characters, point of view and themes, and flash and experimental fiction—but they’re presented as close readings of the stories from Marcus’s book.

In my class, the actual workshopping starts pretty free-form. I’ll usually start by asking for people’s first thoughts—the only stipulation I make is not to start with just “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” I want to know what questions a story provokes, where the readers feel its energy is. The discussion will build itself from there, and I’ll moderate or redirect as needed. Right before the time is up, I’ll usually try to synthesize everything we heard in the workshop and offer my own thoughts, including one or two concrete ideas toward revision. That way the student comes away with some things to work on if they want to revise.

I can see all the students’ line edits, but they can only see their own, and only the writer of the piece can see mine. Sometimes there will be a scene with fifteen comments on it, and it’s interesting to see which things everyone noticed and responded to. The line editing forces students to read slowly—and hopefully read twice—ensuring they are ready for the workshop.

Other conversations we had in my last online workshop covered the writing life, revision, how you know when something is done and ready to publish, how and where to submit work. Those are topics students are always interested in, and I’m happy to have those conversations as time allows.

What’s the most valuable thing you’ve ever gotten from a writing workshop, as a student and as an instructor?

The most valuable thing as a student of a workshop is just the attention you get—people read your work and take it seriously. The promise of a workshop is that a group of smart, dedicated people will invest their time and energy in your writing and ask you to do the same for them—it’s community, it’s exchange, it’s fellowship. Writing is a lonely enterprise, but it has to enter the world at some point. The writing workshop, for all its imperfections, is maybe the best way we’ve come up with to help facilitate that transition.

As a teacher, I love reading new work; I like watching students developing their craft, figuring things out, and finishing their stories. I also just like talking about fiction—I teach stories I think I know by heart, and invariably, someone tells me something I didn’t know before. It keeps me on my toes.

Some people like to say that you can’t teach writing. (I don’t think that’s true, and obviously you don’t, either.) In your classes, what do you always try to teach?

Inspiration can’t be taught; a certain level of innate talent or genius can’t be taught; but that’s true across the board, in every subject. At the most basic level, you can teach grammar, syntax, clarity. I can teach you how to write dialogue, how to structure a scene, how to cut or condense redundancies in your prose. I can show you why I think a given story works or doesn’t work—and the “I think” is really important. In terms of fiction, there are traditions and structures, a history that is very much knowable and teachable. My argument about why, say, Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf” is a brilliant story may not ultimately convince you that I’m right, but you’ll learn how the story works and why it succeeds so powerfully on its own terms. You’ll learn something about O’Connor, about me, and about your own taste and ambitions for your own work. Disagreement is fruitful!

Obviously students aren’t going to find the answer key in a workshop, because there’s no one thing that makes writing good. But asking those questions, reading and figuring out what works and what you like, is valuable. Who are the writers you love? Who are the writers you don’t love? What kind of work do you want to do? A workshop opens your eyes to what’s been done. You never know what’s going to be the thing that lights someone up. I want to show people what’s out there and help them get their work to the next level—whatever that means for them.