‘What Does Better Writing Feedback Look Like?’

Dear Yanyi,

I’d love your thoughts on the best way to give thoughtful, smart feedback to fellow writers who you may be in formal writing groups with (or informal ones). And also, how to lead feedback sessions that are generative, illuminating and challenging (in the best way possible). I guess, I’d also like to know in what ways people express feedback on your work is most productive for you. As a BIPOC writer, I’ve been on the receiving end of feedback that I felt was harmful, lazy, and, in one specific case, included an ad hominem attack that the instructor did nothing about. I am now leading a fellowship program with diverse writers of varying ages, genres, race/ethnicity, and gender identities (12 people in all). I do not want to replicate the patterns of harm that I have been on the receiving end of when engaging with the work of others. Do you have any tips, resources or lived experiences that could shed light on this issue? Thank you so very much!

Warmly,
A Better Way to Give Feedback

Dear BWGF,

First of all, I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve been on the receiving end of an ad hominem attack in a workshop setting, and I’m even more dismayed to hear that your instructor did nothing while it was happening. There is so much care that is needed in the line of teaching. For what it’s worth, it’s good that you have a basis of personal experience from which you know what’s a stake as you been crafting this program.

As you and I know, you wrote this letter to me some years ago, so your journey with this fellowship program is probably well underway (perhaps you have more to tell about the topic now—if so, I’d love to hear from you again). I think I received it at around the same time I had just written about giving feedback, MFA programs , and reading each other better , but the intervening years have given me more teaching experiences and, therefore, more insight that I can perhaps now offer to you.

I have loved workshops, rejected them, and come back to them as both a practitioner and a teacher. My current stance is that there’s a time and place for a well-structured workshop, but it must be well-structured, and it must be the right time and place. In particular, workshops can be wonderful spaces of experimentation, whether it’s for beginning writers or seasoned ones looking to “begin again.”

One of my favorite workshop experiences was with the poet Farnoosh Fathi on play, who had us meditate together on the relationship between prayer and play in the first class. What works about this prompt? It was specific, was no one’s darling project, and the group was a hodgepodge of people. The multiple perspectives turned into a rich discussion and contemplation of the other prompts we would do for the rest of the class. The thinking we were doing was loose but self-contained within the workshop’s purpose. The class worked together toward a common learning goal to explore this topic from week-to-week. The feedback we gave each other was not extensive but was encouraging for whatever one might do with the work after that.

I’ve yet to find a full-proof workshop structure that doesn’t somehow have life leak in—and by that I mean all the positive side-tracks, the uglier attacks, or the unconscious microaggressions that deaden the classroom as they do life. However, as I’ve said, a good workshop is a well-structured one, and the structure will at least set up expectations, hope, and a community contract that you, as participant but especially as instructor, are promising to abide by.

What do I mean by this? I mean that if you want feedback that is generative, illuminating, and challenging, you must ask for it repeatedly. When you’re the instructor, you can even bake those asks into your critique process, first by looking at other models (such as Liz Lerman’s critical response process or Felicia Rose Chavez’s flipped author-as-moderator workshop), trying them, refining with your group as you go along, and for yourself as you teach more.

My own protocol that I variously adjust depending on the class that I’m teaching is to describe (the work neutrally), inquire (specifically to gain more insight about the author’s intent), and suggest (radical revisions or prompts based on the author’s questions or needs). I don’t do line edits.

What you ask for in the classroom may not come to fruition, but asking for it will make it more likely to happen nonetheless. Setting a strong protocol can also act as a safety net from those more harmful possibilities of the workshop model. Having the author as the moderator of a discussion of their work rather than a passive listener, for example, could at least bestow permission to deter long-winded digressions that are not helpful to them, and even cut off more harmful comments when they occur. For writers new to workshops, a good structure can also have the two-fold benefit of teaching them a model of giving constructive feedback before they make one up on their own (because they will).

The kind and intensity of feedback you’d offer in a novel-writing group on a deadline will be very different than a group experimenting with poems after the sounds of bird calls. Moreover, the workshop is only one model of giving feedback. There’s also the model of writing letters to each other, one-on-one tutorials with the instructor, or leaving group feedback on a shared piece. However you design it, do design it, and ask yourself these questions of the structure: what situations am I trying to encourage? To prevent? What is this group accountable to? What is this group trying to explore?

I would be remiss not to speak to you directly in this letter, BWGF, about why we instructors ask these questions in the first place. You see, I can hear how much you care for your students in this letter, and I share that care, that want to do better by them, in my own teaching practice. But I have found—and perhaps you do too—that I often give away the things I myself need.

My greatest fear as a teacher is to replicate my own worst experiences as a student. I’ve had teachers who put no effort into challenging us, hostile classmates, and instructors who attacked students themselves. I am a critical person, and I was often critical of my teachers, too: I was angry at them for not preventing certain things or doing enough with others. I wanted my teachers to fail so that I could be the one who knew better; I wanted my teachers, too, to live up to unrealistic, grandiose ideals of comprehensive knowledge; I wanted my teachers to understand and validate me. The love I had given up on at home I redirected into the classroom.

It was this baggage that I brought with me when I transitioned into instructing—the anxious months prepping toward a expertise I would never achieve, working overtime to care for students’ fraught mental health, and the constant fear in the classroom that I would be found out as a fraud, unqualified and unworthy of being at the head of the table. I too asked these questions about the best ways to give feedback. I wanted a silver bullet that would prevent any mistakes—a recipe to save my students’ precious lives from the harm I myself had endured.

You may feel, as I did, the double pressure of being a BIPOC instructor—the tokenizing assumption that because you’re BIPOC, you automatically know better ways to conduct a classroom after having grown up more on the receiving end of that same systemic violence. You may fear, as I still do, the disappointment in your students’ eyes when—yes, when!—you make a mistake on that end. This striving for perfection, too, is a shard of white supremacy. Do not let it lodge in you, despite the promises of power it makes.

It is important to improve as a teacher. But it is also important to acknowledge that what you have to bring is enough, and that your learning will always be a part of this process, whether or not your students, your administration, or your colleagues agree. You cannot prevent the mines of the world from getting in your path, but you can practice thinking and acting with your whole self when they show up.

I signed up for a class with the poet Tracie Morris several years ago. Ostensibly a workshop, it was also a master class in instructor presence. On those evenings in an East Village church classroom, people would sometimes arrive late. Morris, in the middle of lecture, would greet each of them with measured warmth and attention before continuing on with ease.

To this day, I cannot pinpoint what moved me so with her acknowledgements—perhaps it was the absolute calm with which she approached the space, her studious attention to people, always, before the material. It was as though her classroom was circumscribed with her consciousness, and that her students’ movements inside it would be seen, considered, and responded to with authenticity.

I strive to embody that same presence in the classes I teach, and the best I can tell you is that it comes from your genuine embodied presence in the classroom. Not as the perfect expert, the cool people-pleaser, or the idiosyncratic maverick, but an integrated person who happens to love art, too, and who has done it perhaps for a little while longer, or a little differently. I wish you every opportunity to feel that authenticity, and to enact it, too. Good luck.