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Only read aloud, no homework
No Homework
Jennifer Egan's writers group, the one she dedicated The Candy House to, only reads aloud. She advocates for it for a few reasons. The obvious one is that there is no homework.
Hearing It Together
Everyone hears the work at the same time, which is unifying even on Zoom. Listening and taking notes brings a natural triage, since it is much harder to obsess over little things. The big questions get forced on the listener.
Rhythm and Early Signals
Music and rhythm are the basic tools of literary expression, and hearing a piece makes the group think about them. Even with a Pulitzer Prize, she couldn't do what she does without feedback, and she needs to find out early whether a piece even feels alive.
Why was literature once always read aloud?
Before printing, most reading happened out loud, and Augustine's Confessions, written around 397, records his surprise at seeing the bishop Ambrose read silently. Public reading stayed a major form of literary life for centuries. Charles Dickens began giving paid public readings of his novels in 1858 and continued until 1870, performing before large audiences in Britain and America.
How did writing workshops become standard?
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in 1936 at the University of Iowa, became the first degree-granting creative writing program in the United States. Paul Engle directed it from 1941 and helped it grow in prestige. Scholar Mark McGurl argues in his 2009 book The Program Era that university writing programs shaped American fiction after World War II. Hundreds of such programs now exist in the United States.
Why did ancient orators study prose rhythm?
Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric believed a speech persuaded partly through its sound. Cicero's Orator, written in 46 BCE, discusses prose rhythm at length, including the patterns of long and short syllables that end a sentence. Those sentence endings, called clausulae, were studied and imitated by orators. Rhythm in prose was treated as a craft with its own rules.
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