Like most days in October it was cold and bright and breezy, the leaves turning and burnt over the ground like hardened oil paint around us, black and wading. No one cried. Which was surprising because I thought I was going to, but we were all just really quiet and no one moved.

***

Bret Anthony Johnston did not write that.

But he certainly read it, and he can certainly write. Johnston is a native Texan, a former professional skateboarder, and the author of Corpus Christi, a 2004 collection of short stories set in his hurricane-prone hometown. In November he received a National Book Foundation prize for fiction writers under 35. A few weeks before that, around Halloween, I found him with slackened tie and unbuttoned Oxford shirt surrounded by a motley group of nine Harvard students—undergrads and PhD candidates and a couple of future attorneys from the Law School. Over two hours, Johnston spoke of plot, character development, and narrative voice in a decidedly non-rarefied, almost utilitarian, way. He rarely mentioned his own work, or indeed, any published work at all. Technically, he was teaching.

Perhaps the only member of Harvard's faculty more comfortable grinding rails than grading finals, Johnston is rather nobly styled a "Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English and American Literature and Language." It's a title he shares with a handful of other well-known writers, including poet Jorie Graham and essayist Sven Birkerts, and one that's more than a bit ridiculous. Johnston in fact doesn't lecture, and he teaches neither English nor American literature. (He does speak the language quite pleasantly, with a disarming half-drawl.) If the scholars of the English department are dedicated to transmitting indispensable texts—by means of reverence, deconstruction, or otherwise—Johnston's job might be to lift the burden of the canon(s), at least momentarily. In short, he teaches fiction writing, though, like "lecture," the word "teach" is not quite right. Something more archaic—and more apt—comes to mind.

In his day job at Harvard, Bret Johnston professes his craft.

***

The day was typically overcast, the way most of these things are. I had seen this in a movie; I don't even think it was a particularly good movie. Everyone was wearing some form of black, which I guess wasn't really a stretch for me.

***

Is there anything on campus more potentially nightmarish than the creative writing class? In the typical college course, there is a basic cognitive safety-valve that preserves the self-esteem of high achievers and, as a result, the continued sanity of their professors. Indeed, as despairing as it may be to struggle in a class on Austen or World War II or organic chemistry, such realities can always be neatly sequestered in the psyche, if not entirely rationalized away. To fail in these classes—or in the present milieu, to receive less than a B+—never remains, for even the minimally well-adjusted student, a sign of her own intrinsic incompetence or, in the idiom of Harvard's Puritan founding, her predestined moral inadequacy. To wit, the English major can tell herself she's better suited to Shakespeare; the budding historian can specialize in another era; the pre-med can conclude that the questions on the midterm were unfair, or that she simply didn't study as hard as she could have.

The creative-writing seminar denies recourse to the sort of psychological distancing that otherwise makes university life livable. It is, in many ways, the only college course that is real, that portends deep consequences for students. The usual assessment in the rest of the humanities, after all, is the expository essay—a form which is blithely, blissfully performative. Asked to put forth cogent scholarly arguments about the topic at hand, the undergraduate paper-writer is essentially play-acting; our history major is not a scholar of World War II, and her failure to adequately mimic one is understood as just that. In stark contrast, a creative-writing class is about nothing but the students themselves; their writing is judged by professor and peers not as an academic exercise but as an expression of self unalloyed—and unprotected.

Thus cleared of any outside subject of inquiry, the seminar table might seem to become a micro-political battleground, a place where all the anxieties and narcissisms endemic to privileged young adults deploy themselves in conversations and confrontations that are unavoidably personal. Indeed, over the last decade and a half, the experience of the creative-writing course has proven so pervasive and so fraught as to generate something of its own creative-writing tradition. In everything from landmark films (1995's Kicking and Screaming ) to quickly canceled televisions shows (last year's Bedford Diaries ), such a class is imagined as the elite college experience par excellence, a favored setting for both self-discovery and dramatic conflict, a place where characters challenge each other's projects in the affected, rapid-fire admixture of academic jargon and adolescent slang that is now imagined as the prevailing Ivy League patois. It is a crucible, and a hot one.

Still, there is something troubling, even faintly sinister, in such portrayals. In Todd Solondz's stunning 2001 film Storytelling, a college fiction-writing seminar is the site of casual sadism, one propelled by the inherent oppressiveness of the situation. Taught by one Dr. Scott, a glowering, Pulitzer Prize-winning black author, and comprised mostly of navel-gazing white liberals with little talent, Solondz's class is a knowing, cringe-inducing creation. No one elicits sympathy. In a famously censored scene, the professor has brutally rough sex with a cloying white student named Vi, ordering her to chant racial slurs at him; as retribution, she turns what happened into a story for the class. But Vi's classmates quickly denounce her tale as racist and a misogynist and are unmoved by her tearful claim that it is true.

The story ends soon after: "Once you start writing," Scott tells Vi and the class, "it all becomes fiction." Responsible for the entirety of her wor(l)ds, even the truth of the matter cannot provide the safety of distance.

***

I really have a pretty good mind. Sometimes it gets me into trouble. It usually gets me into trouble with myself. That's sort of the kicker. She never did give that scarf to me. I wish she had. I would have worn it.

It was a Thursday when she came over for the last time. She had talked me through losing my sister for the past month or so. She had listened, rather, as I wheeled into all the possible ways that things could have been bright. She listened, almost as impressively as me saying something worth listening to.

***

The young man who wrote that, and the other passages, is not a writer.

Z- is a student in Johnston 's fiction class, a curly-haired undergraduate whose short story "For Someone" was among the two "workshopped" on the day I visited. A workshop is the centerpiece of any creative-writing course, and the word itself suggests the singularly ambiguous position of creative writing in Harvard's liberal-arts pantheon. For indeed, more than the most technical engineering or economics class, Johnston 's seminar seemed practical, even vocational. Interpretation was, for the most part, left behind; what mattered was what was on the page, not how it got there.

For the workshopped, the experience can resemble something like the communal village justice of colonial New England or, depending on your view, Cultural Revolution China. The professor facilitates the conversation but avoids dominating it; critique is mostly left to the students, and the writer being discussed is obliged to remain silent throughout. A half hour or so into Johnston 's class, Z- took out a notepad, and steeled himself for trial.

Like much undergraduate fiction, "For Someone" is promising and rough, a florid, heartfelt narrative told in the voice of an angsty teenage boy dealing with the death of his sister. If Z-was not enrolled in Johnston 's class, it might have remained at the bottom of a desk drawer, a personal memento sure to intrigue or excite or embarrass if recovered a decade or two hence. But "For Someone" would meet a different fate: it would go through the sanding and polishing of ten pairs of workshop hands. Whether or nor Z- had ambitions of being a professional writer, he was treated quite like one.

Bret Johnston sounded like he'd been in the hot seat before. If he lacked the gravitas—and the conflicted sex appeal—of Solondz's brooding Dr. Scott, he also displayed many times the empathy. Which is not to say, lax standards. The discussion began with an affirming circuit around the room, each person briefly explaining what he or she liked most about the story. Criticism would be tabled for now. Z- scribbled notes, but it soon became clear that some unanimity—or groupthink—had already been reached.

"I loved the narrative voice," cooed the first interlocutor, a girl with an accent from some indeterminate Commonwealth locale. "I thought that it was very strong. It was completely innovative to me. And I think the descriptions were great as well, because they were incredibly subtle and they came out of the narrative voice and were very touching."

The next student, another softly accented young woman, registered her agreement. "I would so second that. I think the narrator is so appealing, attractive. It's a very human voice, a very tender voice, and fantastic with the language. I mean, just so restrained but also so raw at the same time... I mean, it's something we talked about earlier—to be able to write about the tragic things with a light touch."

And so "narrative voice" became Z-'s great strength. "I totally agree about the voice," said third student. "He had a lot of tenderness to him but it was never overdone."

Offered another: "Yeah, I totally agree...there were these, like, slices of really poetic language that were really evocative for me."

And another: "I really liked the narration and the sense of imagination."

Not every fiction instructor at Harvard begins a workshop with a compulsory list of positive comments. But it seems a canny pedagogical tactic, a move that preemptively disarms the tension. When the circle of strengths reached Johnston, he was ready.

"For me, um, narrative voice," the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer quipped to the class's giggles. "Actually, for me, the thing that I liked most was not the narrative voice. It was the, for lack of a better term, emotional insight. There's stock emotion that we see time and time again in stories, especially stories dealing with death...And there's not much of that here. Instead, what we get are some very original insights, insights that seem to me very true.... They open up the story in a way that a lesser writer wouldn't be able to do."

It sounded like impressive praise. But if the praise arrived in isolated, elicited admirations of "voice" and "insight," the criticism—the so-called "constructive" criticism that is the raison d'être of such workshops—built slowly and cumulatively into a group will, a general verdict. For the uninitiated, the shift was ultimately dramatic, surprising. It began, though, with a quibble about a pronoun. In an early passage in his story, Z-'s narrator imagines his dead sister Lisa buying him a scar—"I wish she had," he says. In the next paragraph, without clarification, the "she" shifts to refer to Lindsey, the story's love interest. It is a subtle move, and a student announced that she found it confusing. Another quickly concurred.

Johnston jumped in. "My thoughts are right there with you," he said. "That's absolutely something the author needs to hear...I can't imagine there's one person in this room who wasn't confused." He added that that particular problem could be easily fixed. But, in perhaps the clearest sign of his skill as a teacher, Johnston had quietly opened the floodgates.

What had been a reserved, stilted group burst into a fluid discussion of other ambiguities in the text, culminating in the remarkable revelation that many had misidentified the narrator as female. Suddenly, Z's much admired narrative voice had become the major point of consternation, though perhaps that's what his classmates were really thinking all along, confusing obtrusiveness with strength. As one student tried to steer the conversation towards the story's dialogue, Johnston politely cut him off.

"What," he asked, "is the plot of the story?"

A few seconds of stark silence in the room, made starker still by the bells ringing for the 3:00 hour atop nearby Memorial Church. Someone hazarded a guess.

"Coming to terms with death of sister?"

"No. That's the theme."

"Oh."

The workshop had reached its climax, a tense calm in the middle of the storm. Asked in an equivalent-level literature course, Johnston 's question would have been decidedly banal. Plot, students are told, is something to overcome, or more accurately, merely the surface at which a sophisticated reader begins drilling for thematic interpretations, philosophical profundities, intertextual allusions. There could be no criticism—really, no love of literature at all—without this basic desire for deep meaning. Still for practicing fiction writers, none of the various and opposing schools of literary criticism are really relevant to their central quandary: indeed, telling a story—any story—is hard.

Other students took stabs at explicating the plot of "For Someone." They spoke matter-of-factly and at length, before finding themselves doubling back with more questions than answers: Where, in fact, is the conflict? Why should we care about these characters?

After ten minutes or so, Johnston artfully brought the discussion full circle. "The author," he proposed, "might just be lost in this voice. The voice might just be so intoxicating that it may seem as though there's a conflict here—it may seem as though there's a plot here—but I'm just not finding it."

The bluntness of Johnston 's words was obvious, and little soothed by the fact that he never referred to Z- by name, instead speaking only of "the author." Z- himself looked increasingly withdrawn—slouched over, gaze averted, lost in his notebook. But after declaring that "For Someone" lacked a plot, Johnston turned upbeat. He led the class in a discussion of where and how conflict could be introduced and assured "the author" that his work would only grow more heartbreaking with increased development of minor characters. The story was, in short, not fatally flawed but simply unfinished, had simply been waiting for the suggestions of helpful peers.

Z- declined to make any comments at the end of his workshop; each of his classmates gave him their homework assignment for the week—a typed one-page, single-spaced letter with thoughts on his story. Johnston asked to speak with the writer privately, as he usually does, and the rest of the class filed out for a break. They returned five minutes later, ready to begin L-'s workshop.

***

A little is fine, but not too much.... It was a velvet sinkhole; it just sucked everything into its softness...

***

Happily, fiction's own imagined nightmare scenarios— egomaniacal, belittling professors; pretentious, sniping students—found little verification in my visit to Bret Johnston's fiction-writing class. Civility reigned, perhaps to a fault. Nevertheless, those used to the solitary nature and the confidential assessment of college work might have sensed a certain quiet violence, a violence less about the personal degradations of Storytelling than the gradual transformation of storytelling. Indeed, Z-'s story was fed through what might be called a "focus group" in Washington or Hollywood; a sample audience led by a proven professional let him know what "worked" in his work and what didn't. There's little doubt that "For Someone" will become a better short story for it, but, in the long run, are workshops any way to mint new writers?

It's a controversial question that's been brewing since at least the 1980s. In the trickle-down world of arts education, after all, Harvard's creative-writing courses have become essentially small-scale models of the M.F.A. programs that have produced some of the nation's bestselling contemporary writers. (Harvard does not offer its own creative-writing M.F.A.) Johnston himself is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, likely the most prestigious M.F.A. destination of all. But even Iowa tacitly acknowledges that many consider advanced degrees in creative writing nothing more than expensive credentials: "Though we agree in part," reads a message on its website, "with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in that light....We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged."

The statement is intuitively quite accurate, but it elides the fundamental concern surrounding the rise of the creative-writing workshop over the past three decades. Obviously, writing cannot be "taught" absent talent; to wit, even Harvard's beginning fiction, poetry, and essay courses require promising samples from applicants. And it is equally obvious that raw talent is not alone sufficient to produce great works; the question is whether the communal workshop method ultimately does more harm than good to the talent it molds. So emerges, then, the derisive term "workshop fiction"—that is, a work so laboriously polished for a broad audience as to be completely anonymous. Might genius precisely lie in the rough edges workshops work to sand away?

In a 2002 Village Voice article titled "Young, Gifted, and Workshopped," writer Taylor Antrim weighed in. "I've taken," he wrote, "my own sample of new books by young writers (40 or under) who are graduates of M.F.A. programs. Certainly, Meera Nair, Steve Almond, and Raul Correa cover varied terrain in their debuts. And while there is much to admire in their books, they share an underlying contrivance, a received and overly strict notion of what constitutes a story and how best to tell it."

In short, by reducing art to a matter of conventional strategies, structures, and audience responses, the formal teaching of creative writing might unwittingly drain its very creativity, foreclosing the possibility of crafting anything truly new. Yet, there remains, as in all fields, something invaluable to be gained by learning from experts; not only did Antrim's article carefully avoid condemning M.F.A. workshops outright, it was followed by a most telling byline: " Taylor Antrim has received a Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia M.F.A. program. "

***

To this mansion where a Swedish immigrant lady, herself once a cook and now a philanthropic widow, dreamed, snowbound, while frozen lilac twigs clapped at her storm windows, of a new Jerusalem and a Second Coming and a Resurrection and a Last Judgment. To hasten the Second Coming, and all the rest, you had to reach the hearts of these scheming bums arriving in a snowstorm.

Sure, they let us in.

***

Bret Anthony Johnston did not write that, nor did any of his students, though all read it. It is, in fact, a passage by one Saul Bellow.

Distance. Before the workshops, each of Johnston 's classes begins with a designated student leading discussion on a short story he or she especially admires. On the day of my visit, the selection was Bellow's "A Silver Dish." The conversation soon turned to ambiguities of voice, as Johnston expressed a particular bewilderment to the class.

"I fell in love with this story and read it time and time again," he said. "But I never understand this thing on page 24—when we're solidly in what I think of as Woody's story, Woody's point of view—and then we get to this one sentence, 'Sure they let us in.' Does anybody even come close to understanding this?"

The class went back and forth on the sentence, able to determine neither who was saying it nor what it meant.

Eventually, Johnston admitted something like defeat. "Here," he considered, "we're like three-quarters of the way though the story and he's either got us or he doesn't and so he takes this kind of leap and, for me, it always does kind of stop me. I always kind of think, 'I don't know what this means,' but it doesn't make me put the story down.

"Is that because it's Bellow? I mean, if one of you did this, would I put the story down?"

The answer, of course, was so obvious it had to remain unspoken. Only Bellow could have done it; the same words written by a student would be something different altogether. Which is to say, how and why "this kind of leap" works cannot be taught or learned, only professed. Minutes later, the class put away the narratively incoherent Bellow and turned to another story: "For Someone" by Z-.

Jonathan Liu '07 thanks Bret Johnston and his entire class—Z- and L- especially—for letting us in.