On the Workshop Experience
October 8, 2026
by Nancy McCabe, creative nonfiction and ficiton faculty
A member of a workshop I recently led was surprised if not a bit scandalized that we often started sentences with the words, “I like. . .” It’s true that in traditional workshops, saying “I like” is taboo. Instead, we’re urged to stick to craft-oriented statements like, “The dialogue is strong and often witty,” offering examples to back up our statements.
I’ve been thinking about this in light of online discussions of the workshop model. In a recent post, Q: Do good publishing credentials make good teachers?, Becky Tuch quotes from a couple of widely-shared social media posts suggesting that the workshop model is fundamentally flawed—an experience akin to combat, a “feeding frenzy,” or an ego trip. Many readers voice agreement with these critiques, calling into question my assumption that in general approaches to the creative writing workshop have significantly evolved.
After all, I was initially drawn to Spalding because of the emphasis on creating a supportive environment that doesn’t preclude rigorous critiques. Reading Felicia Rose Chavez’s 2021 book The Anti-racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Writing Classroom, I was encouraged by how much the methodologies she recommends align with the way we teach at Spalding (though I also found ways that I could do better.)
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The traditional creative writing workshop in its purest form certainly has the potential to be damaging; my early experiences with it shaped the way I teach writing. In high school I took a creative writing class from an old guy (probably younger than I am now), Mr. Wolf. Early on, he growled that he didn’t want to read any “pimply weepy puppy love poetry.” He hated everything I wrote. He scrawled negative comments all over my stories and poems. He ridiculed some of my word choices and he made a boy in front of me rewrite one of my sonnets to make it less “sappy.” While calling roll once, he paused on my name and said, “McCabe. Mother’s little helper. Have you ever gotten in trouble with the law?” Everyone snickered. I rolled my eyes.
There were no craft lessons, discussions of student work, prompts, or reading assignments. We sat in rows and wrote. I loved having dedicated time to write, even if I wasn’t warming to Mr. Wolf. One day, Mr. Wolf got fed up with constant jokes from my classmates about what a curmudgeon he was. He marched up to the chalkboard and wrote “Things I Love.” The room went silent except for clicking chalk as he made a list that included his wife, jazz, and whiskey.
After that, we bonded. He started taking me seriously as a writer. He told me to read Flannery O’Connor. He called me up to sit at his desk and engage in earnest literary discussions, like what profanities were acceptable in college magazines. Classmates looked startled as they tuned into the conversation between Miss Goody Two Shoes and Mr. Curmudgeon, earnestly saying things like, “Shit seems to be okay, but not fuck.”
A couple of years later, right after I got married, I enrolled in a college poetry workshop, one that largely followed the traditional workshop model. I didn’t find my professor or classmates to be ego trippy or unduly harsh, but there were no model texts or craft activities. We just submitted poems for discussion every session. All I could seem to write were despairing poems, leading the group to conclude that my marriage was in trouble (they were right).
One day the professor announced that a poem I had submitted was a total failure. I was using the image of sunlight filtering through blinds like a rippled potato chip as a symbol of the sacrifices my mother was making (including no longer eating potato chips) because of a medical diagnosis.
The whole class bristled at his evaluation, but I appreciated his honesty and saw his point. My choice of images WAS minimizing my mother’s life-or-death decisions.
When I was twenty-two, I was the only woman and youngest student in an MFA fiction workshop. In that program, instructors were rumored to set on fire student writing that they considered substandard. Once again, class sessions largely focused on what was wrong with our work.
With trepidation I turned in my first story, a thinly-veiled autobiographical piece about a sensitive young girl’s breakup with her high school boyfriend. I was nervous enough about the critiques of the male instructor and all of my male classmates. Then, right before class, it was announced that a Famous Writer was visiting and would be leading the workshop discussion.
My stomach was a whirlpool of terror as I took a seat at the seminar table headed by the Famous Writer, whom I considered quite old (I just looked him up. He was a couple years older than I am now.) My flight-or-fight response (mostly flight) had already been activated by the way everyone avoided looking at me as if they were a jury about to pronounce me guilty. And then the door opened and a parade of undergraduates filed in to sit along the walls and observe the Great Writer At Work. I had never wanted more badly to shrink or turn invisible.
The Famous Writer cleared his throat. Then he announced, “This story is part of a genre often written by women. It’s called The Literature of Pain.”
Mortified, I slid down in my seat. The Famous Writer went on to discuss my story in a similarly mystified vein. I was too humiliated to absorb much of it.
Later that semester, I submitted another story about a husband and wife that led everyone to conclude my own marriage was (still) in trouble. (It was.) When I got back copies of my marked-up story afterward, no one had praised my brilliant metaphors or descriptions. But, mysteriously, every single classmate had underlined a sentence about the heaps of picked-clean chicken bones on the couple’s plates. Some had written things like, “good” or “vivid,” but mostly they wrote nothing else. Just an underline.
I pondered this for a long time, gradually seeing that that sentence was more muscular than any of my others, and that the image made an understated comment about the couple’s relationship. If I had said, “The bones were stripped clean like the emptiness of the marriage,” that would have been clonking the reader over the head. As it was, the line contained a subtle resonance, and I saw that I needed to do more of that.
One more example, from many, many years later: I attended a workshop in my region that I’d been told was for serious poets. I was by then so unused to the traditional negative, ego-driven model that I was startled at some of the critiques. When the leader dismissed one of my poems, saying, “This does NOTHING for me” and everyone else agreed, I quit the workshop. I found good homes for all of the poems that had been decimated. But I also felt surprisingly demoralized and stopped writing poetry for a couple of years.
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Here are some of my takeaways from these experiences:
When Mr. Wolf made his list of “Things I Love,” I saw him in a new way. And I realized much later that I learned something about characterizing through reversal, how our depth of understanding of human complexity grows when a character does something unexpected.
Rigorous criticism presented tactfully can be helpful, but pure negativity can just feel discouraging and demoralizing.
Being honest (even, in my case, pronouncing my poem a failure) means that we’re taking other writers seriously. But my professor took a risk, assessing me as capable of dealing with his half-joking characterization. He thought I could handle it. (I could.)
Don’t other a student’s work with statements like, “This is an example of The Literature of Pain.” (I’m still mortified.)
Sometimes we learn more from positive comments than from suggestions. Identifying what writers are doing well gives them a foundation to build upon. In my case, having to work out for myself why everyone responded to the same line made the lesson more powerful.
Sometimes, instead of instant judgments, an initial neutral summary of the work can be extremely valuable. Here’s one of my recently published essays: Six Things that Seemed like Good Ideas Till They Didn’t | North American Review. I’d know I’ve done my job if a reader were to say, “This is a lyric essay in the form of a list of plants, materials, and inventions that humans once embraced only to find out that they were at best nuisances and at worst toxic. It turns out that the items in the list come from a conversation the narrator has early on with her new boyfriend. Underlying all of the items in the list is romance as another thing that sometimes seems like a good idea till it isn’t. The list offers a framework for the narrator’s evolving feelings about romance and this new relationship.”
If instead readers say, “This is a piece extolling the virtues of plants like honeysuckle, lotus, and multiflora rose, and then the narrator dies at the end,” I’d know that I haven’t succeeded in getting my point across at all.
Sometimes, it’s even okay to say what we “like” in a piece of work. It’s a way of acknowledging our subjectivity instead of pretending, as in some traditional workshops, that we can make a wholly objective assessment. I’ve received acceptances that said, “We loved this” and rejections that said, “I just didn’t fall in love with this.” We should be prepared to say why we like things. But we should also be able to respond as human beings.
These statements should not replace craft-oriented statements about why elements move us, further or bog down the work, are well-structured, create strong characters or dialogue or metaphors, etc.
On the other hand, statements like “I don’t like this” or “This doesn’t do anything for me” have no place. If an element doesn’t work for us, we should be prepared to say why, with diplomacy.
I really needed to get out of that marriage. (I did.)
Nancy McCabe is the author of ten books, most recently the middle-grade novel Fires Burning Underground (Regal House, 2025), the comic novel The Pamela Papers (Outpost 19, 2024), the young adult novel Vaulting through Time (CamCat, 2024), and the memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved? (U of Missouri Press, 2020). She’s currently working on the craft book Creating Some Measure of Beauty: The Healing Power of the Artful Essay, under contract with the University of New Mexico Press.