Thinking Like a Poetry Editor:  How to Be Your Own Best Critic
 
(“The Ossmann Method” Poetry Workshop)

I am dedicated to teaching creative writers how to be better self-editors. My work as an editor and publisher has taught me to be more objective about editing my poetry, and it’s so enlightening and empowering that I am excited to share it. With that goal in mind, I developed a new teaching method for creative writing workshops which essentially reverses the traditional model, and so far, it has been very successful. The essay below provides a description of how I developed the method and how I teach it. If you are a teacher or workshop leader, I hope you will feel free to use this method in your own poetry (or prose) workshops.

"Turning the Writing Workshop Model on Its Head: 'The Ossmann Method'”

I have for the last two years been teaching employing a new workshop model that creates such a positive learning experience I’d like to share it. I know from talking with colleagues that I’m not alone in my desire for a new creative writing workshop model. Throughout my undergraduate and graduate years, I was dissatisfied with the traditional creative writing workshop model without knowing exactly why. It wasn’t until I’d been a professional editor for a few years that I identified what bothered me and developed a method to address it. I first taught it in 2005, for a Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance weekend workshop seminar, and called it “Thinking Like a Poetry Editor: How to Be Your Own Best Critic.” Since then it has been suggested to me several times that I call it the “Ossmann Method,” which suggests to me that I have something worth sharing.

The traditional model, wherein the writer being critiqued sits silently during the process, is a sometimes more and sometimes less positive model, depending on the teacher’s emphasis (what isn’t working in the writing vs. what is, the level of tact, etc.). The dynamic, in my experience as both writer and teacher, is always a dependent, disempowering one for the writer who sits silently, being instructed as to how to improve. It was in joining my desire to teach writers how to be more objective in revising their own work (by learning to think more like professional editors) and my desire to create a workshop model engendering self-discovery, self-confidence, self-trust and true collegiality, that I first imagined a workshop format that effectively reverses both the traditional model and its controlling dynamic.

I have been teaching using this model for two years now at The Writer’s Center in White River Jct., Vermont, and also demonstrated the method at the Stonecoast MFA January 2009 residency. Its effect has been dramatic for participants (several of whom have asked for permission to use the model in their own workshop teaching):

Thank you for your words about my poems.  I must tell you that Saturday had such an impact on me, that I'm ‘seeing’ them and ‘working’ on them as per the critiquing discussion—word choices, deletions, etc.  This hasn't happened to me before as the result of any workshop...I've always thought of this as incubation, but this after-effect is purposeful and focused.  It is excellent discipline before hitting the keyboard— or putting pen to paper.  Thank you again!  —Peggy Sapphire

Here’s how the method works:

I begin workshops by asking each participant to describe—instead of giving their bio—one of their writerly obsessions: a stylistic technique or poetic or prose device, a favorite word or image, theme or subject. Participants enjoy this and it is a good first step in learning to observe themselves as writers.

I turn the traditional workshop model on its head by asking the author being critiqued to speak first and critique her/his own work, noting correlations between the criticisms s/he has for other participants’ works (written down in advance of the workshop) and her/his own before group discussion of the work begins. This offers a taste of what it means to be both writer and editor, a position in which it becomes easier to objectively self-assess—and harder to ignore the need; to spot dull vs. energetic syntax or dialogue, generic vs. original imagery and other strengths and weaknesses previously overlooked. It also empowers the writer in the process, and engenders an unusually positive and congenial workshop environment.

Advance preparation by the participants is required for the success of this model, and so far, students have found the preparation valuable and instructive. It is in performing this work that the student first begins to learn editorial objectivity about their writing:

PARTICIPANT ADVANCE PREPARATION

Please read, critique and annotate other participants’ work before attempting to critique your own, and use the notes to inform your critique of yours.

Please prepare tactful, written comments to offer verbally to other participants, listing a minimum of two strengths and weaknesses for each work. It is as important to learn your strengths as it is to learn your weaknesses, otherwise you risk succeeding only by accident. After you have finished this, please do the same for your work.

Please bring your annotated copies of participant work to give to the authors.

Some suggested strengths/weakness to look for in preparing for workshop (the following list includes both poetic and prose techniques, and many apply to both genres):

• Use of syntax
• Description (too much, not enough, originality)
• Use of imagery/symbol
• Balance of abstract and concrete imagery
• Diction, voice
• Flow and rhythm of language (assonance, alliteration, repetition, rhyme, syntax)
• Presence/lack of tension or risk: (narrative, linguistic, formal, emotional, etc.)
• Capacity to surprise
• Line breaks, punctuation, word choice
• Point of view
• Mood, tone
• Word choice (best, most accurate, evocative word for context)
• Use of dialogue

OSSMANN METHOD WORKSHOP FORMAT

Author Self-critique

• The work being discussed will be read aloud and then critiqued, by the author.
• Try for an objective as possible critique of your work’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Hint: what seemingly unimportant, small things have bothered you about your work? What words or images do you over-use in your writing?
• Try to avoid using or thinking “I like/don’t like,” but if you must, always be specific about why. Learning not to use this construction will allow you to offer more tactful, professional and useful criticisms of other’s work, and will help you to be more objective about your own. One of the reasons we don’t see weaknesses in our work is that we’re too attached to what we like in it—a phrase here, an image there, an ending.
• Try to avoid being self-deprecating or unduly or falsely modest.
• Ask any specific questions about work you want group to answer.
• Please don’t explain or defend anything in your work.

Group (and teacher) response

• Please respond to the author’s self-critique (gently).
• Was the author accurate in assessing her/his strengths and weaknesses?
• Offer the strengths and weakness you found in addition to those the author mentioned (please use specific examples in the work).
• Recommend model authors for study, or authors whom you think might inspire the writer.

A final word about “the Ossmann Method”: because the writer critiques her/himself first, the sting is taken out of the other’s critiques, and the writers, instead of feeling vulnerable and defensive, authors feel intelligent and competent, learning to see their own work with a new perspective, and to trust that inner voice so often repressed or ignored. I hope that others will feel free to try this workshop model…and watch the magic happen!I am glad to provide demonstrations of this workshop method; and also (if you email me at: aprilossmann@hotmail.com) to provide my advance preparations for the Ossmann Method workshop in PDF format for easy use.

April Ossmann is the author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007). She has published poetry in anthologies and numerous journals including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Colorado Review, and is the recipient of several awards for her poetry including the Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice award for ten poems published in the summer 2000 issue of Prairie Schooner. She offers consulting services in editing, writing and publishing and  teaches poetry workshops at The Writer’s Center in White River Junction, Vermont, and has taught creative writing and literature courses at Lebanon College and the University of Maine at Farmington, and has taught seminars for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing. She was Executive Director of Alice James Books from 2000 – 2008.