In the Gere article, she describes the Tenderloin Women’s Writing Workshop, and Lansing, Iowa Writers Workshop in which they are groups of people of the community coming together to develop their writing with the help of each other. While reading this article I questioned her when she said that these groups are just a “tiny portion of the enormous number of individuals” that take part in groups like these (76). If this is such a large population of people how have I never heard of these groups? Have you heard of any? Gere claims a major reason we don’t know of these groups is because our history focuses on classroom literacy rather than outside the classroom walls. Do you agree with her points?
Along with this, I know at least ten book clubs, and zero writing clubs. Writing clubs does not even sound right to me. Why do you think that reading is able to be sociable while writing is personal? Would you want to share your writing in these clubs?
I feel as if the lack of knowledge, possibly the lack of existence, of writing clubs can be due to the contemporary pressure put on writers to succeed in academia. Reading is something that is more open to individual interpretation than writing is, in my opinion. Like I talked about in class, I feel as if the idea of submitting writing to a writing club for criticism is scary to me since I want my writing to be perfect and sometimes I get a bit offended when people criticize it because it feels as if I am not succeeding. I know I wouldn’t want to share my writing, mostly because of my predisposition to the criticism and need for success in academic situations.
When I initially read this story about the writing clubs, I thought the same exact thing! I’ve never heard of a writing club – we had book clubs in high school, but never writing ones, so this was a new thing to me. Part of this is maybe because when one is taught to read, they are done so on a reward based system. Once you can read one type of book, you get to move onto the more difficult genres and so on. Also in society, reading is seen as both a communal activity and a by-yourself kind of thing. Reading is effortless (once you know how to do it). It is seen as something that is a way to connect with people and to relax. Many memories regarding literacy are made with reading as well – especially for me. All of the memories I can think of regarding my literacy revolve around the books I read when I was younger.
With writing, I think that it is given a negative stigma because you are normally receiving feedback about how to fix your writing to make it better. A lot of effort has to go into wanting to become a better writer; it is not something that will happen over night with a little bit of practice. No one is telling you to fix your reading, and this is because reading varies so vastly from person to person. Also, like dnewman said above, having someone else read your work or even you having to read your work aloud to people, like we do in class, can be scary because of the criticism we may receive. In the long run though, it maybe beneficial to have more of those writing groups around and promoted – it may change the way writing is looked at as well as make everyone better writers overall.