What I’m Reading: ‘Notes on My Dunce Cap’

Much teaching of creative writing at colleges strikes me as being caught in one of two ruts. On the one hand, there’s a hands-on, formalist approach that developed out of Wayne C. Booth’s 1961 book Rhetoric of Fiction. On the other, there’s an approach that uses intuition and feeling as the means of enabling the writer’s creative process. The first method focuses tightly on the specifics of the page, the second broadly on the writer, but both take for granted the idea that writing is learned in a traditional workshop setting.

Jesse Ball’s Notes on My Dunce Cap doesn’t take the idea of the workshop as a given. Instead, Mr. Ball thinks of the creative-writing classroom as a place for improvisation. He argues that theater is “the most useful tool for disputing hierarchies that accompany the student invisibly wherever they go,” and that it is by disputation of such hierarchies and by becoming beginners that we realize our potential as writers. Mr. Ball offers radical alternatives to the standard workshop model, including the use of lucid dreaming, different arrangements of bodies in the room, arbitrary but formal questioning procedures, leaving the classroom altogether, and exploring surroundings through a process known as the situationist dérive. Notes on My Dunce Cap is a provocative and illuminating book, one of the few books of pedagogy I find inspiring.

Brian Evenson is on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and the author of more than a dozen books of fiction.