Emily Barton has written a piece for the New York Times about Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer that picks up the same tired, old misconceptions about creative writing programs and leaves them flopping on your porch like an unwanted gift from your pet cat.  Rehashed right down to the bewildering Kafka example I already addressed in this piece, the only real advice that Barton gleans from Prose's book is "it helps to read the masters," something which goes without saying.  While decrying the lack of useful writing manuals, Barton neglects to mention perhaps the most widely used, Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction (although she does mention Gardner), deciding instead to criticize E.M. Forster and Strunk & White, neither of whom are all that integral to C.W. pedagogy these days (certainly not as integral as Burroway, who cites from both).

Perhaps the lowest blow Barton deals comes when she quotes Prose's suggestion that a writer may need to change the way they think about reading until "you see reading as something that might move or delight you."

"Delight?" says Barton. "As a student, I rarely heard the word mentioned..."

Oh, you poor thing.  School is hard.  Required reading isn't fun.  I apologize on behalf of the institution of college.

I don't mean to sound angry.  My argument is not really with Barton or Prose, but with the conventional wisdom that says creative writing programs are self-indulgent at best and, at worst, make bad writers.  This has not been my experience, and as Porter points out, you can't throw a rock in the bookstore without hitting someone who has benefited a great deal from their time in workshop.  Even "bad" workshops give a writer a ready-made audience and an opportunity to see and critique the work of other interested amateurs.  Can someone with a podium please say something nice about workshop?  I'd appreciate it.

[/end rant]