Deirdra McAfee

Even good work can be predictable, and predictability is death.
—David Lynn, editor, The Kenyon Review

At the weeklong Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, participants make new work every day. Under pressure. Small groups workshop each writer's work daily. The challenge was to fulfill the prompts' demands, to meet strict word limits (450-800 words), but also to make these improvisations shapely. (Thanks to Abigail Thomas's workshop at The New School, prompted short writing was not new; working in this way would have been harder otherwise.) The general quality of the writing—across the conference—was significantly higher than at others, the workshops not only more engaged, but much more fun.

The fresh work, and especially the exhilaration of meeting the challenge, soon made workshop members a receptive and enthusiastic team. This approach returns writing to its roots in improvisation and recitation: each writer reads the work aloud, rather than silently handing around hard copies. Storytelling becomes real and immediate. Listeners not only become more receptive as a group, and much more attentive to every word, they also become more aware of their own reactions, and to the way good stories suggest rather than announce.

The workshop assignments also promoted constant experimentation, especially with our masks—our stories' voice, subject, situation, setting, characters, and language. Constraints on plot, vocabulary, or narration pushed us to try on new masks.

The nature of the workshop encouraged excellence, but an excellence in which writers competed against themselves, not one another. Each funny, eloquent, inventive, or moving piece offered everyone another benchmark; the group's enjoyment of such pieces sparked the effort to make more and better ones—the goal to please or move the audience, rather than to impress or conquer.

In addition, the difficult and salutary exercise of pruning insured tight, sparkling work. Participants' pieces, and their confidence, developed strikingly over the week. The adroit and knowledgeable Tara Ison almost-invisibly managed this transformation of strangers into colleagues.

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