Andrew Blevins on writing fiction, rigor, and teachers as party hosts
An interview with Fractal University's creative writing teacher.
📣 Summer semester applications are NOW OPEN. 📣
Applications for Session 1 close this Wednesday, May 1st.
Applications for Session 2 close May 17th.
An Interview with Andrew Blevins
Andrew Blevins taught Writing Fiction in Spring 2024, and plans to teach a second session in the Fall. This summer he’ll be co-teaching Play Studies with Olivia Tai. Apply by May 17th.
Tell me about yourself. Who are you? What’s your background in creative writing?
From the age of ten or so I kept a journal and wrote stories and recorded my dreams, figuring I would grow up to be some kind of dream scientist. I spent my undergraduate career oscillating between cognitive science and English lit, and later, after I moved to New York, I did an MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College. During and after that program I taught courses in composition and creative writing, which I generally loved, even though the bureaucratic structures around the work could make it feel, as one friend/fellow teacher put it, like something very alive inside of something very dead.
Starting around college, my relationship with writing became a love-hate phenomenon. At the risk of sounding therapyish, I think early approval had taught me that writing was the best way I could elicit love, and with that came a sense that I had to write, or no one would love me, or not enough, or something. As you might guess, this made the process feel airless and heavy, and for years I was really hard on myself and rarely shared my work, despite the fact that when I did, good things happened.
Early in the pandemic I went through a kind of crisis about this, and relatedly started meditating a lot, and at some point the structuring identity of “writer” broke apart and fell into the void. Which was scary. But gradually I saw that I was fine without it, and that my friends still managed to enjoy my presence even if I failed to convert it into textual artifacts. Coincidentally or not, I started writing a blog the year after I made that discovery, and writing became deliriously fun again, so now I do it a lot more.
How did you end up teaching at Fractal University?
I found out about Fractal (the co-living space) originally through the great Sunil Rao, who I met through my meditation community, Evolving Ground. I then got to know some folks at Fractal’s Sunday dinners (RIP) and other events, and got to know them better at Vibecamp, where I was part of an insane roving clown hivemind with Tyler Alterman that was both utterly silly and changed my sense of what’s possible in groups.
“People were learning important and neglected skills, and it felt like an actual community was coming into being, of a kind I lived in New York for a decade without quite experiencing.”
In Fractal University’s opening semester I took two classes: Priya’s community-building class and Tyler and Alicia’s movement class Body Mind World. In both of them it seemed obvious something special was happening. People were learning important and neglected skills, and it felt like an actual community was coming into being, of a kind I lived in New York for a decade without quite experiencing. When class ended, I was reluctant to leave.
So it felt natural to want to help with that, and Fractal University was looking for teachers, and I missed teaching. Priya and Andrew and I tossed around a few options, but it seemed like the one people were most excited about was fiction. So I was like, okay, well, I do know a thing or two about that, I’ll start there.
What’s the structure and curriculum of your Writing Fiction class? Why did you design your class that way?
Everyone in the class drafts a story or novel chapter every week. Then in class we do a flipped workshop form called The Asking (I got this from a lovely book about teaching by Jesse Ball, Notes on My Dunce Cap), where we break into small groups and, instead of giving critiques, readers ask the writer questions. The point of the questions is to help the writer explore possibilities, both in the story and in their process, while preserving the momentum and uncertainty of the work.
After the Asking we have a lesson, which is either a guided conversation or a short talk by me, and then I usually end with an exercise or prompt to start the next week’s writing. Sometimes the exercises are collaborative. There’s an emphasis on being affected by the group’s ideas and writing with and for each other.
This design was inspired by self-interest. I was trying to imagine the structure that would most quickly dissolve my writing blocks and make it easy to rebuild a practice after a long hiatus. I wanted an environment that would push me to generate a lot and break me more fully out of the archetype of the isolated, alienated writer. Of course, it was only possible to imagine this because I had good people around who I wanted to work with.
Can you tell me about a meaningful moment from your class?
What comes to mind is a moment, I think four stories in, when I asked the group how the weekly writing practice was affecting their everyday lives—whether it made them notice things differently, or changed their behavior outside of the writing.
“Writing fiction was opening the possibility of being someone else, a person who wasn’t as carried along by narrative momentum. She was feeling like more of an agent in her own life.”
One student, who entered the class never having written a story, said (or at least this is what I remember) that she was finding that writing characters and thinking up things for them to do was causing her to notice the ways she thought of herself as a character, and set limits on what that character could plausibly do. She had lately been going through a drawn-out breakup, where there was pressure from her ex to slip back into the way things had been, as if he were continually saying, “this is who you are.” Writing fiction was opening the possibility of being someone else, a person who chose differently or wasn’t as carried along by narrative momentum. She was feeling like more of an agent in her own life.
Which is one of the best endorsements I’ve ever heard for reading and writing fiction.
What do you hope students get out of your class? How do you hope they change?
I hope people will discover a way of writing—a style, a voice, a genre, a kind of character, a process, a world—that they really enjoy and want to keep playing with beyond the class. But mainly, I would like for people to leave with an embodied sense of what it’s like to make art, any kind of art, in a way that makes them feel more alive and increases their connection with others. Probably because it’s so solitary, and then for a host of more complicated historical reasons, writing seems to be the art form most associated with drudgery and suffering. Disentangling the activity from self-punishment has been a big deal for me, and, I think, for my writing. I would love to make that kind of shift available for others who are feeling the same sort of friction.
I also believe that making it seem okay to take writing seriously and, at the same time, really love being alive (I know this is shocking and subversive) pushes towards a different kind of literature than the currently reigning sensibility, and I am intensely curious to find out what that looks like.
Your class is quite rigorous, and you have high expectations of your students, including that they write a 1,000-word story every week. What motivated that decision? How is it playing out?
Andrew helped with that. In my initial back-of-the-napkin sketch, the writing expectations would have been about like your average college creative writing course. When I pitched that to him, he said, as I remember, “I’d feel bored and unchallenged.” I realized I’d feel the same way, and that helped me arrive at the approach I mentioned earlier, of working from my own learning needs and assuming someone else would share them.
The interest I’ve gotten in the class reveals that there are a lot of people who want this. It’s cool, people want to be challenged to make art! In fact—and this is actually one of my favorite outcomes of this project—some of the people I had to turn away for lack of capacity actually went and assembled their own writing group, and have been meeting and creating their own version of the class. (Much respect to Annie Lederberg for making that happen.) We’ve been sharing notes and learning from each other, and that’s been unexpected and great.
You once compared the role of a teacher to the role of a host. Can you expand on that? What is the role of a teacher?
Yeah, I am fond of this analogy. Something like: a good party host puts people at ease and helps them relax, while also creating interesting anti-patterns to disrupt the stale or automatic scripts that keep them alienated (“so how do you know so-and-so…?”). The host’s job isn’t really to manage people’s hanging out or lead it to some particular place, but mainly to build bridges that people may or may not cross, for instance giving well-timed introductions or tossing in the occasional provocation when the energy drops.
Teaching is similar. You want to modulate the anxiety of trying new things while also nudging people toward finding out what they’re really capable of. It helps to have a general sense of the territory you’re guiding people through, but if you had everything mapped out, you probably wouldn’t want to spend much time there yourself.
“Many people never step into a teaching role, because they’ve been trained in the polite fiction that teachers are experts and to teach something is to claim Knowledge.”
Main point being, it seems like many people who have a lot to offer never step into a teaching role, because they’ve been trained in the polite fiction that teachers are experts and to teach something is to claim Knowledge. I think one thing that’s special about Fractal University right now, when it’s operating in this interesting liminal space between public university and friends hanging out, is that it lets people experiment with granting each other authority for different reasons. We’re getting to test the validity of some of these inherited assumptions about who can teach and what a good learning context needs.
If someone was curious about designing and teaching a class for the first time, what advice would you give them?
I would say, focus on what you viscerally want to see more of—in the way the thing is done, in your own relationship with the thing, and in the environment that currently exists around the thing. It can be helpful to notice where you feel frustrated, stymied, or doubtful, and ask how social support could help with that. Did you know that “embarrassed” and “barrier” share the same etymological root? In general, imagine your obstacles are shared. Try to build a container in which you’d feel playful.
Also, I recommend this essay by Jesse Ball about creating syllabi. A course design is a way of cohering learners around a shared curiosity and a shared aesthetic. It isn’t a strict plan that you should feel beholden to. It’s best to teach the class that actually exists, instead of the one you constructed in your head beforehand.
I also appreciated this short tweet thread by Robert Hart, who’s teaching a voice class through Fractal University. I like his idea of a class as a way of summoning egregores that themselves take on the work of “unblocking.” That could be just another way of saying the thing I’ve been saying throughout this interview. Don’t trouble yourself overmuch about “being a teacher.” Just invite the right egregores to your learning party, and watch your friends do things you’ve never seen before.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to enroll in a summer course, check out the course listings ✨