online teaching

Why Teaching Creative Writing Online Rocks

by

I come from a family of teachers and one of the great joys of my life has been teaching creative writing, which I’ve done at various universities.  I was mentored by a brilliant creative writing teacher in college and she’s always been with me when I read and discussed students’ writing.  Her goal was always to help students deepen what they wrote, find what needed to be strengthened, and improve what they already did well.

Writing workshops are very demanding.  You have to stay focused as you shift from one person’s story or essay to the next, keep things lively and entertaining, make comments that encourage your students, weave together what people are saying and writing, and make useful, salient points.

The venues I’ve taught in haven’t always been ideal.  Rooms can be too warm or too cold, too small, or just plain off-putting.  And fluorescent lights are terrible, especially after a few hours. Being given a creative writing class with twenty-five students (or even thirty) is more than just a challenge.  It’s cruel to the students, a sign of cynicism on the part of a university which cares more about money than pedagogy. Highly-paid administrators don’t seem to understand that this kind of class is far more intimate than most, and that students need much more feedback than they do in other kinds of classes.

Teaching online changes all that for me.  I get to limit enrollment to a very manageable ten students.  That means everyone has truly significant feedback at every level via Track Changes, from style to structure and content.  The assignments don’t all come in at the same time, which creates a better rhythm for reading and responding.

I also don’t get distracted by people arriving late, forgetting to turn in their assignments or having printer trouble, or texting when they should be paying attention to their peers.  In effect, I’m doing an independent study with each participant, so they’re getting more help, advice, encouragement, and analysis for their writing than would be possible in a traditional workshop.

Best of all, I don’t have to worry about finding a parking space and I’m out of the toxic academic environment with overbearing administrators and unfriendly colleagues.  This is pure teaching, and tremendous fun.

Lev Raphael is the author of The Vampyre of Gotham and 24 other books in genres from memoir to mystery.  He teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com.“Studying creative writing with Lev Raphael was like seeing Blade Runner for the first time: simply incredible.”
—Kyle Roberts, MSU Class of 2016

 

 

Fans Keep Asking Me, “Which is Your Favorite Book?”

by

I get that question all the time at readings.

The answer doesn’t pop up immediately, because I’ve published in so many genres: memoir, mystery, literary novel, short story collections, psychology, biography/literary criticism, historical fiction, Jane Austen mash-up, vampire, writer’s guide, memoir-essay collections.

I love them all, or I wouldn’t have written them, but my 19th book My Germany has a special place in my writer’s heart. It’s more deeply personal than my other books, and it’s also the one I struggled with most.

[cover]

I’m the son of Holocaust survivors, and the book is a combination of history, family history, travelogue, mystery, and a coming out story.  The thread that connects it all is my exploration of the role that Germany–real and imagined–played in my family while I was growing up and in my own life as an adult and an author.

It wasn’t an easy set of stories to tell. It took me more than five years to figure out the book’s structure and to let go of trying to force it into a specific mold. I finally realized that I could blend genres, and that set me free to follow the advice the poet Sir Phillip Sydney’s muse gave to him: “Look in your heart, and write.”

My Germany is also the book that garnered me the most speaking gigs of any book in my career: somewhere between fifty and sixty.  That included two book tours in Germany where I spoke in over a dozen different cities, and sometimes even read from it in German, which I had started studying in night classes.

Unexpectedly, I felt comfortable the moment I got to Germany and I remembered something I’d somehow completely forgotten: I grew up in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, where thousands of neighbors were German refugees from the Nazis.  I’d been hearing German in the streets, in stores, in our building’s lobby and elevator since childhood.  So suddenly plunging into a German-speaking environment wasn’t strange; it was comforting, it made me feel at home.

That was one of the many surprises connected to writing My Germany, and it made clear to me the power that memoir has to connect you to your own past in new, revelatory ways.  I was changing, which is why I had to write that memoir, and writing it changed me even more.   A colleague once said that writing is a process of discovery; well, that book opened up new worlds for me, and having just taught an online memoir writing workshop this past month, I’ve seen memoir do that for my students, too.  It’s thrilling.

Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in many genres, including the guide for writers, Writer’s Block is Bunk.  You can take writing workshops with him online at writewithoutborders.com.“Studying creative writing with Lev Raphael was like seeing Blade Runner for the first time: simply incredible.”—Kyle Roberts, MSU Class of 2016