LIFE AS A CREATIVE WRITING TEACHER
By Jean Lee
 

PROFESSOR GEORGE DAVIS

U.S. News and World Report named Rutgers-Newark the most diverse national university in the country for the seventh year in a row.

 

"Not having an undergraduate creative writing program at Rutgers-Newark afforded an unusual opportunity to respond to student desires and needs as they presented themselves in the classroom rather than giving in to teaching creative writing as it has been traditionally done in university creative writing programs,” Professor Davis says. We are standing in front of Robeson Campus Center on a 780 day in April.

For just over six year, working with only a two-course undergraduate sequence, Davis has helped students produce a body of work that would exceed the expectations of most undergraduate programs with concentrations in creative writing, or even MFA programs with dozens of courses and dozens of professors.
Amazingly enough several books have been published that were done in whole in Davis’ undergraduate creative writing classes. One was The Red Moon, by Kuwana Haulsey published by Villard, a literary imprint of Random House.

“Everyone who blesses us with his or her presence in this life is a teacher in some form or another. Thank you George Davis for helping me realize that and many other truths that I knew but had somehow forgotten along the way.”
                           Kuwana Haulsey from the acknowledgements page

PROFESSOR GEORGE DAVIS

“Teaching students who do not see themselves as high literary beings, who simply want to tell stories has been refreshing.” One mystery novel written in Davis’ classes was published in book form in London after appearing in serialization in the student’s native Jamaica. One children’s book was published by Raintree Publishers. At the end of any term there are several books written in his courses circulating in the publishing industry.

“Any one of them might find a publisher at any time, or the writer might come back later with another work or a revision of the finished work.” Each term several students complete screenplays in his classes. “Screenplays are much harder to sell but I am using the many contacts I come across to help these students.

“E.B. White’s daughter had, and perhaps still has, a traveling children’s book show, and a children’s book written by a student in my class was/is being read by Clay Akin of ‘American Idol’ on college campuses (Harvard, and others, the brochure I saw said) as an example of new children’s literature as opposed to the classical children’s literature of E. B. White.

PROFESSOR GEORGE DAVIS

“On our campus to be truly multicultural you must respect how others want the stories of their lives to be told.”

“Another student had two close buddies die in the World Trade Center attack. He was having a really hard time coping. I convinced him not to write about the tragedy of their

PROFESSOR GEORGE DAVIS

“On our campus there are so many wonderful storytelling traditions.”

deaths but to write stories about how much fun they used to have. A producer for “Sex and the City” learned about the stories and came East to work with him. He was still in my class as be began turning the stories into television scripts, under the direction of the producer and me. Eventually he took off for Hollywood.”

We have begun walking toward the building where Davis’ office is located: “I think that creative writing programs should be moving towards an understanding of culture and the place of storytelling in culture. If you want to be effective, you’re force to do this at Rutgers-Newark. For as long as US News has been keeping statistics on it, Rutgers-Newark has been ranked as the most culturally diverse university campus in the nation. Culture and cultural value conflicts produce the themes in individual lives that are worth writing about for our students.”

Of the students cited in this interview, Davis says, there are two Italian Americans, two African Americans, one British American, one Jamaican American, one Haitian American, one African, one Hungarian America, one Indian, two Hispanics. “I don’t think that the primary focus should be on the fashionable art for art’s sake trend in creative writing. I think we need to get back to basics and focus on the many functions of storytelling in all cultures and how those functions can be performed in commercially viable forms in the media of emerging world culture,” Davis says.

“Just as university architectural programs are designed to make our students design better buildings for everyone, our medical programs to make students better doctors for everyone, our law programs to create better lawyers for the variety of functions that lawyers perform in our society, our creative writing programs should be designed to make mass media entertainment and infotainment better and truer for everyone.

PROFESSOR GEORGE DAVIS

“One of the primary function of storytelling at Rutgers-Newark, and in the 21st century, is to help us know people from other cultures better, on a deep soul level.”

“Too many university creative programs think of teaching students to write literary fiction as their only reason for existence. Then they complain that graduates of these programs cannot find jobs. There are more jobs in media for storytellers now than there ever was,” Davis says. “and certainly there is more need for good stories.

Now sitting in his office in Hill Hall at Rutgers-Newark, Davis seems able to go on for hours about his love for teaching the art of storytelling. His claim is that at Rutgers-Newark the air is full of stories begging to be told

in the manner that each person wishes. He speaks of a young woman from Nigeria who came into his course declaring obstinately that she was definitely not a writer. She left after having written over 50 pages of good fiction in one term. He has saved her note to him.

Hello, Professor Davis. This is my final paper . . .I really put my heart into it, as much as it was willing to open itself up. Thanks you for a great semester. The experience was therapeutic and very spiritual for me. Thank you for letting me write.

Umi

The 50 pages were the first part of a novel about a rail-thin young woman, not so happy in a country where the fleshy earth-mother standard of beauty prevailed, who comes to America and found happiness because thin is in.

“For example, we often hear the question: what can a graduate do with an MFA in creative writing. I think that is the wrong question. The right question is: what can I do if I know how to tell a good story. The answer is: wonderful things for which I can get good pay, and I can inform and uplift the human spirit.

“I am not against writers seeing a piece of work as art for art’s sake, but I think that the greatest beauty is in the human spirit expressing what is true about itself. Art for art’s sake can easily slip into a lack of moral concern.” Davis says. “Pleasure without moral concern slides easily into post modern obsession with endless permutations of the small self.”

A comment from an older student reveals that Davis is not anti-literary.

Dear Professor Davis: This week I began to see more clearly how powerful you are as a creative writing teacher, and I want to thank you for opening windows that I nailed shut for years as a writer. I am beginning to understand even more your genius as a teacher. You are the first writing teacher in my life who has allowed me to work in my voice. You are the first writing teacher in my life who without theatrics or self-gratification has encouraged me in a most serene and natural way. Not since I worked on my poetry with William Shawn and Harold Moss at The New Yorker have I experienced such encouragement as a writer. My writing class and Rutgers University are very fortunate to have such a gifted and caring professor.           

                                                         William Quigley

By now well over 100 students have come out of one or two terms of his course with, say, 50 to 80 pages of good solid fiction in their own voices. “The happiest feeling is when they go on writing after they’ve graduated. From his email he produces a note from a woman who graduated two years ago.

Hey Professor Davis! I am so excited! I just finished my second screen play (completely typed) I'm reading it over now for any errors or to make any changes! It is the best feeling in the world. . . Write me back and let me know how is everything! Take Care!!

Tanesha Littlejohn

PROFESSOR GEORGE DAVIS

“One of the most important things you can do is respect the unique way that a young writer’s story gets told.”

“I try to give them something that they can use –a well defined skill. Fiction is a craft. Fiction is an art. The true nature of fiction has what can be called a craft-art duality, a nature that is a complementarity. My 10-year long Spiritual Intelligence Action Research Project (a study of the relationship between tangible and intangible reality) led me into the study of how principles from new physics apply to other areas of human learning. Creative writing is best taught with its nature as a complementarity ever in mind.”

Complementary is a term Davis borrowed from his research to enhance his teaching methods. “It is a term used to describe a relation between two opposite states or principles that together are needed to completely describe the nature of a thing.

“To be successful as a creative writer it seems that it is impossible to view storytelling as a craft without also viewing it as an art. Learn the craft so that you can express the art seems to be the axiom. Everything contains its opposite. In a post-Newtonian world many processes will be viewed as complementarities. Irony is the term often used in a Newtonian world view to describe an exception which is actually the rule.”

Presently a jazz or acting studio most closely approximates the kind of complementary process that Davis says he has incorporated into his teaching of creative writing. “In jazz the best improvised music sounds crafted and the best crafted music sounds improvised. As Duke Ellington said ‘you’ve got to find a way to say it without saying it. "creative writing has a push/let duality. Push hard enough to let the student write; tech well enough to have the confidence to stay out of the way.”

“In physics complementary is the tenet that a complete knowledge of phenomena—light, for example-- on the atomic level requires a description of both wave and particle properties. The principle was pioneered in 1928 by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It is impossible to observe both the wave and particle aspects simultaneously. Together, however, they are both necessary for the full description of the thing. Creative writing is like that with the craft-art duality.

“After studying creative writing’s dual nature I came up with what I call the Studio Method, as opposed to the older Workshop Method of teaching. In the Workshop method a student reads his or her work in class and other students and the instructor comment on it. If there are 15 students in the class each student might get only one or two chances per term to have his or her work looked at.

“In the Studio Method the student writer creates as freely and artistically as possible at home in response to a series of loosely structured assignments. The student’s work is emailed to the instructor before every class. The instructor reads the work so that when the student comes to class there can be an informed discussion of any problem of craft that the student encountered.

By teaching the craft-art duality of storytelling, in studio, Davis has been able to have students in the same class working on literary fiction, genre fiction, creative nonfiction, children’s literature, plays, screenplays and “participatory literature” for new media.

“The other thing that makes this possible, something else that came out of my Spiritual

PROFESSOR GEORGE DAVIS

Intelligence Action Research is the study of the relationship between brain, which is tangible, and mind, which is intangible, and eventually into brain science.” A copy of Scientific American is on the floor beside the wheel of his office chair. He points to it.

You learn after a while how to stop focusing on the words on paper and focus more on the words still trapped in the young writer’s mind. No matter how clumsy those words on paper might be at first the

only important thing is getting the words out of the mind or brain with the kind of fullness and complexity to capture the complex truth of the individual human spirit revealing itself on yet another day.


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