This Week's Mentor To Meet: Brian Gresko
Our latest installment of Say Everything.
Hi friends,
Our 2022 newsletter is a celebration of writing instructors who create exciting and holistically supportive writing environments. Consider it a counter to the empty diversity lip-service so many institutions love to sling. Here we slide away from writing programs so we can center great writers and the chaos/mystery/frenemy that is writing itself.
We’ve reached out to the writers who y’all—our MFA App Review community—have named as thoughtful and talented instructors, and we've compiled some of their ideas on creating nourishing spaces for students. We hope that these spotlights are just the start (or middle!) of your relationships with these writers and their work. <3
Introducing Brian Gresko, Instructor, Catapult
Brian was nominated by Mai, who shared:
Brian Gresko taught me at Sackett Street and teaches at Catapult. They are super generous with their time even out of class, are a cool parent, and host Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn.
How has your pedagogy changed over time? What catalyzed those changes?
When getting my MFA—I graduated from The New School in ’09—I didn’t take any courses on leading workshops or teaching writing, so for a while I thought I wasn’t qualified to teach. I’m grateful to Julia Fierro, at the Sackett Street Writing Workshops, who encouraged me and gave me my first opportunity. From the start she said I had practical expertise to share, and that if in doubt, I should just run my workshops like the ones I had at The New School.
So at first, that’s what I did. I told the author to sit quietly during the discussion, and made sure the students never referred to the author by name, but instead said “the writer” or something like that. Quickly I realized I didn’t like this, which made sense: I didn’t love it as a student either. For one, it feels icky and powerless to be sitting there silently while people talk about your work, as if you’re getting chewed out by your parents, especially if you’re writing nonfiction and your work literally represents your life experiences. But also, sometimes in workshop I just wouldn’t get out of the experience what I wanted to get out of it. Like, the class would focus on a specific line or paragraph and the discussion would disappear down a rabbit hole, and the whole time I’d be thinking to myself, okay, I’ll just edit that out, let’s move on. Those discussions could be helpful in revealing trouble spots I hadn’t anticipated, but more often than not I’d find that my questions about the work weren’t addressed, because I never had the opportunity to ask them. And worse, instead of leaving the workshop with ideas of how to proceed, I’d just walk away feeling like I wasn’t a very good writer.
Even before I was done leading my first workshop for Sackett Street, I started to pivot from this model. I leaned into my background in teaching middle school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; East Harlem, Manhattan; and Shanghai, China. In that environment, workshops are student-centric, which means you’re talking to the student on their terms, and trying as best as you can to provide them the help they need, which differs for every kid. As a teacher, you are by all means encouraging the student to speak, and ask questions; not to argue, but to clarify. And you’re also giving gentle, but specific, recommendations. My reading played a role in my thinking here too. I read widely, from literary to pop to genre work. It doesn’t make sense to bring the same kind of concerns you might to a sci-fi piece to, say, a work of autofiction. Those authors bring very different intentions to their work, and so I want to create a workshop space that meets each one of their needs. There is no platonic ideal of writing, there’s just writing, and it’s all different and messy and glorious and unique in its own way.
At first, in the workshops I led, I gave authors an opportunity to provide feedback or ask clarifying questions at the end of their critique session. Over time, I moved even further toward an author-centric workshop, and away from the idea of critique entirely. That’s been fed by pieces like Beth Nguyen’s seminal essay on Lit Hub “Unsilencing the Writing Workshop,” and via conversations with other writers and teachers, like my friend Jennifer Baker, and from books like Matthew Salesses’ Craft In The Real World, or essays about writing by Alexander Chee, Melissa Febos, and T Kira Madden.
Now, I ask authors to intro their work, to tell the table what their hopes and intentions are for the piece, and to specify if there’s anything we can help them with, any place they’d like us to focus on, or questions they’d like answered. We talk, especially in nonfiction classes, about how the narrator is a construct on the page, so the conversation happens at multiple levels: there’s the narrator on the page, and the idea of the author that comes via that narrative voice, and then there’s the human being sitting at the table with us, who isn’t pointedly ignored but engaged in the conversation. And there’s a stated awareness that the author has the authority on the page, and it is not the workshop’s goal to come to consensus or to dictate via that consensus how or what the author should be writing. There needs to be space for the author to have their own voice, their own language, their own culture and experience on the page, and it is not the author’s responsibility to make all readers feel equally welcome to that space if the author doesn’t want that.
I’d say that last idea has been highlighted for me by the vast number of stories I hear from authors—either via interviews I’ve done, or just from hosting events—about how even bestselling books sometimes almost didn’t sell, and it’s only because of one editor who champions the book that they got published at all. This has shown me just how much of publishing is about finding that one reader, and how much it’s also just about luck. A writing teacher and a writing workshop, doesn’t know more than the writer does; in fact, they might know less. The goal of the workshop should never be to make the author feel silenced and small, but, hopefully, to excite them about returning to the page.
Brian Gresko (he/they) is a writer based in Brooklyn, and the editor of the anthology When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Experience of Fatherhood. He identifies as white and gender non-conforming. His work has appeared in Longreads, The Literary Hub, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, the L.A. Review of Books, and Poets & Writers magazine, among numerous other publications. He co-runs the esteemed Pete’s Reading Series in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and during the 2020 quarantine hosted The Antibody, an online reading and conversation series. He currently teaches for Jericho Writers and Catapult, and has previously led workshops and classes for the Sackett Street Writing Workshops, The Center for Fiction, and the New York Public Library. Brian received his MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and graduated from Oberlin College as a first-generation college student with a self-designed, cross-disciplinary major entitled "Narrativity in Film."
