MFA in Creative Writing - Baron Wormser

Teaching Philosophy

I teach Socratically, which is to say that I use each example of writing in a workshop as an opportunity to ask questions about the art of writing. These questions may focus on the innumerable formal issues that concern any writer but also psychological and emotional factors, too. As the co-author of two texts on the teaching of poetry, I have given a lot of thought to my teaching, which is based on decades of classroom practice. I am not interested in airing my opinions (though I have plenty of them) so much as helping each student gain confidence and see more deeply into what he or she has created. What a good writing teacher has to offer is making a student aware of how many possibilities exist in a given piece of writing. I am all about finding out those possibilities.