Shivani Elicits Feminist Response to "Can Creative Writing Be Taught?"

Spoiler (nah): The last line of Anis Shivani's recent piece in HuffPo is "Yes, creative writing can be taught. And we're all fucked because of it." The lead-up to this point has caused a slight stir. Essayist Karen Babine sees a masculine rhetoric pretty plainly:

Extending and complicating a question like this is important for the writing community, but the main problem with Shivani’s rehashing this old question is the gendered way in which he does it, destroying the female perspective and contributions and highlighting only that which is male. He writes in the second paragraph that “Creative writing is not literary writing as has been understood for all of the history of writing. Creative writing is a subset of therapy, with the same essential modalities… More appropriately, we might call it the Oprahfied mindset that penetrates workshop.” Whether Shivani has taken any courses that might have introduced him to the history of rhetoric or the craft of writing is unclear. But the rhetorical canon aside, the main issue that Shivani overlooks—whether intentional or not, in his purpose to incite as much reaction as possible in his readers—is the difference between creative writing and literature: literature is artifact. As my fiction students identified last week, artifact brings to mind archaeology, digging, brushing away, interpreting this long-dead item for what it can tell us. Creative writing, on the other hand, considers a text as a living, breathing thing, something that puts my students in a chair next to Raymond Carver, because “Cathedral” did not spring, fully-formed, from the mind of Carver. He was once a beginning writer too. He wasn’t always Raymond Carver.

What is clear, however, that Shivani has equated creative writing with the feminine, and “real” writing with the masculine, for the purpose of silencing voices other than his own. . . .

Shivani's stance on workshops and MFAs is long-known; he has also defended his "aggressive" writing for HuffPo in the past. From a recent HTMLGIANT interview with Roxane Gay:

A lot of your criticism is quite aggressive and provocative. Why do you take that approach?

It’s “aggressive” only from the point of view of someone writing for one of the tame literary journals or websites; it’s not aggressive from the point of view of the sharpest critics who have plied the trade over the centuries. Most Internet “criticism”—reviews which are really blurbs in flowery language, reverential interviews which never challenge a writer, the sycophancy and nervous politeness and feudal praise—is so far mostly an extension of the genteel, apolitical, personalized mode of thinking engendered in the writing programs. The great critics have been pretty aggressive—it fires me up when I see the New York Times follow a consistent agenda of praising mediocrities and ignoring real literary quality, and shouldn’t it fire you up too? How aggressive should you be when confronted with the literary equivalents of George W. Bush or Sarah Palin? Is any rhetorical tool the limit in countering mediocrity propped up by tottering institutional supports? What deserves my loyalty, art or prestige? Internet criticism, as it exists today, is a form of socialization; a rather elevated form, but that’s what it amounts to.