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We were free to do as we pleased. By which I mean, as we saw fit. All of us wanted to be good teachers, and make an impact, so there wasn’t a risk of anyone going to Niagara Falls, or absenting themselves to drink gin in the hotel room (otherwise known as “Niagara Falls”). And no matter, since Antanas Sileika, our playful but attentive director, who greeted us cordially each morning as we arrived at the Humber School for the Creative and Performing Arts, was definitely taking roll.

On the first morning before classes began we helped ourselves to coffee and considered the pastries with Day-Glo blobs of something in their middles. Chatted and pretended we weren’t absorbed in what was to come, which, in my case, we were. Unlike many of my esteemed colleagues – who included Alistair MacLeod, Nino Ricci, Miriam Toews, Martin Amis and David Mitchell – I had never run a fiction workshop and was anxious about how to proceed.

Neither had Martin Amis (though he teaches at Birmingham, he doesn’t read student work). Nevertheless, Amis seemed pretty cool about the whole thing, engaging those who were up for his witty banter on death and addiction. “They say this,” (gesticulating with unlit, hand-rolled cigarette) “cuts seven years off your life. Yeah, okay. But guess which seven.”

Telex From Cuba, by Rachel Kushner, Scribner, 336 pages, $21

Likewise David Mitchell had never taught, and he and I nodded nervous good lucks. I’d spent long hours preparing for our first class session, hoping, probably in vain, to summon the best of myself to that small conscious part of the head’s dark ocean. (The woman I’d seen the day before, outside the rehabilitation hospital on University Avenue, in a blue terry robe and slippers, reading a book called How to Control Your Conscious Mind, was a lot more hopeful than I am. But I can afford to be a realist in a way the woman in a blue terry robe and slippers on University Avenue perhaps cannot.)

Back to this supposed “best” part of myself: The issue was not simply that I wanted the students to like me, to feel they had been handled with tact and respect, and that I wanted to not seem fraudulent, even as I wanted all those things. Foremost, I wanted to help them activate something in themselves, in our single week’s time – surely a projection of having wanted this illusive activation to happen in me when I was a student.

I got an MFA, and I’m not against them, despite the public grumblings about the rapidly growing so-called fiction industry, which seems to harm neither writing, nor students, nor teachers. People who don’t want to rush in and join the straight world (by which I mean find a white collar, for-profit day job), get to see if they have anything artful in them. To want to be creative is a tender and political act – as a way of life, mind you, not a “hobby,” since hobbies imply that adult life means making pottery or symphonies only in one’s spare time.

In fact, a fully engaged life produces no empty spaces, no “spare” time. And writing programs provide jobs for writers who don’t get big advances on their books – many serious authors don’t, and certainly poets must teach.

“ The poems I crafted in elementary school had more energy in them than what I came up with as 'workshop fiction,' following the pedantic rules of structure and point of view and story arc”

Most importantly, crucial aspects of writing can be improved upon with guidance, but which aspects these are depends on who you talk to. The received wisdom seems to be that talent is innate, and craft can be taught. But I don’t think it’s so cut and dry. A lot of times focusing on craft seems to miss the point. Here is Marilynne Robinson, for instance, from a recent Paris Review, in which she explained why she doesn’t teach technique: “Frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of a story lies . . . When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, a discipline of language and imagination.”

In the early stages of working on my novel, I asked a dear friend for feedback – a writer who had not, coincidentally, gone the MFA route. I expected I would get the usual, you know, “Try it in first/third person” et cetera. But what this friend said was, “I know you, Rachel. You have distinct opinions and ideas. Your own strange manner of interpreting the world. It’s not activated in what I read. Use it.” There was a gap between me in the framework and craft of fiction, and me as mind. I had to close the gap. I’ll be a little hyperbolic now: The poems I crafted in elementary school had more energy in them than what I came up with as “workshop fiction,” following the pedantic rules of structure and point of view and story arc. And how were these rules taught to me? Certainly not by example. I don’t recall teachers sharing how it was they’d managed to engage themselves and enact the “striking change,” the “discipline of imagination” that Robinson described with such exactitude. My teachers had mostly seemed dignified emissaries of great but unspoken judgment – a little like low-paid psychoanalysts, hoping for transference – from The Land of Fine Writing. Fertile, cultivated land from which we students were a long ways away.

Halfway into the week at Humber, I heard that another instructor had read the Yeats “tread lightly on my dreams” poem (He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven) to his students:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

The poem is about unrequited love. But it certainly works by analogy. Indeed, tread lightly, respectfully. Okay. But. I’d rather risk firm footing than to not tread into, consider, and assess the thread, the maker, and the dream. Everyone loves to hear that his dreams are gossamer and fine and you better not ride roughshod. But if the dream is fine the way a spider’s web is fine, it has its own tensile resilience. And what if I celebrated their dreams and trod too lightly, without alerting them to the distance between their capability and their actual writing? I had in my class an Olympic-level athlete, a high-powered lawyer, an associate professor at York, and so on and so forth. There was a lot of cloth here, and I brought in more: Bolaño, Sebald, more Bolaño. I wanted them to see the good stuff and to grasp some wisp of possibility for their own good stuff, rather than coddle what was beneath their potential.

Of course, I would not be able to close the gap between their idiosyncratic energies, and spirit, and what was still inert in their prose – they will have to do that – but I could at least point out this gap, hopefully with empathy: not from the Land of Fine Writing, but as someone who had faced herself honestly, starkly, the way I wanted them to face themselves, and to understand that their real dream will be made of cloth that is stranger, more elaborate and unique than they have yet imagined. “How to Uncontrol Your Unconcious Mind.” Let’s all read that.

Rachel Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles, where she is at work on her second novel. She was a guest teacher at The Humber School for Writers’ summer workshop (July 11-17) at Humber College in Toronto.