The following post is taken from my introduction to our popular AWP panel titled “Teaching Working Adult Writers.” The panel focused primarily on our teaching and consulting mission at Grub Street, Boston’s own Creative Writing Center. Please forgive: The first two paragraphs of the post repeat some recent blog material, but the rest is all new. Here it is: A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog inspired by Goethe’s famous line “Do Not Hurry, Do Not Rest.” The blog focused primarily on the first part, “Do Not Hurry,” an idea I repeated to myself thousands of times while finishing my first novel, The Quickening, due out this summer. I’ve repeated the same a thousand more times to my Boston University students, but also to my students enrolled in community colleges, adult education programs, and creative writing centers. “God, I can’t spend another ten years,” my students often lament at Grub Street, Boston’s own creative writing center. A Grub Street consultee in his seventies asked me how long it might take him to finish my suggested revisions on his memoir. “I don’t have much time,” he said, implying that his advance in years put an undeniable limit to the process. Of course, the correct answer to this question is: It takes as long as it takes. But could I tell such a man: “Do not hurry”? Do I have a right to tell anyone? Whether or not we consider our student’s anxiety of aging, the important point is not to give up on those writers who have taken decades to not only achieve the time and energy to return to the classroom, but have also spent decades of practice and silent scribbling before they even walk through our door. Economist David Galenson argues in his 2005 book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses” that creative genius takes form in two very different kinds of people “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, produce their most revolutionary and successful work in their twenties and thirties. Herman Melville, Pablo Picasso, Orson Welles. These are the kinds of artists who make the rest of us feel like hacks. But Galenson argues that there’s a second kind of genius, the “experimental innovators” or “late bloomers.” Geniuses like Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Cezanne, and Mark Twain produce their most important work only after a lifetime of practice. Galenson focuses most of his analysis on painters. He writes that “[Experimental innovators] consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it. [They] build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goals.” Galenson’s analysis oversimplies genius to a certain extent, but his theory rings true for many writers. Take for example the differences between Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. Both poets lived into their eighties. But the conceptualist Pound published five volumes of poetry before he turned 30. A decade later he had exhausted most of his creative output. By comparison, the experimentalist Frost wrote 92 percent of his most remembered poems after his 40th birthday Literary critic Franklin Rogers writes about Mark Twain’s struggles to complete Huckleberry Finn: “His routine seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain only completed Huckleberry Finn when he was 54. In a New Yorker review of Galenson’s book, Malcolm Gladwell writes that “Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The [Twains and] Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.” Jamie Katz, author of Dead Low Tide and A Summer for Dying, wrote: "I walked into a Grub Street workshop as a lawyer in my mid-forties who had published no fiction, with a manuscript for a first novel and the foolish hope of publishing it. Grub Street introduced me to a talented, compassionate, and dedicated instructor as well as an enthusiastic and disciplined group of fellow writers. With their help, I polished my manuscript and a short time later, received a two-book contract from HarperCollins." Sound like an experimental innovator? A late bloomer? Of course, Grub Street and organizations like it—creative writing centers, community colleges, adult education programs, and low-residency MFAs—invite all ages and backgrounds into their workshops, including those possible early prodigies at only eighteen-years old, but the diversity inside the classroom is what separates most of these organizations from the traditional residency-required graduate programs. About his Grub Street experience, journalist Carmen Nobel explained "What struck me about this class was the diversity of the student body. Among the seven of us we had a bartender, a molecular biologist, an engineer, and a marketing writer." The low-residency program at Warren Wilson College describes a similar phenomenon: “Students of the program range in age from their early twenties to mid-sixties, in profession from teacher and journalist, chemist and postal carrier, to lawyer and lumberjack….” The average student of these programs is usually in his/her mid-thirties, an age where most adults marry, have children, and work the longest hours in their careers. How can they possibility fit in class time, assigned readings, and undergo the most challenging and engaging educational experience they’ve had in years? And yet they do, more and more, by the thousands. Low-residency MFA programs have multiplied from a core of four programs two decades ago to thirty-seven at AWP’s last count. New York City’s Gotham Writer’s Workshop now teaches more than 6000 students a year. Denver’s own Lighthouse Writers program has doubled its student numbers in only four years. The Loft in Minneapolis offered nearly 300 classes in 2009. As the Loft’s Executive Director Jocelyn Hale wrote in her last Annual Report, “despite the poor economy, for the past year, I’ve been taking calls from laid-off workers who are excited to turn this period of transition into an opportunity to follow their dreams of creative writing.” In 2007, Boston’s Grub Street had 200 members. Today it has nearly 1100. That’s a growth of 550% in only four years. Grub Street’s The Muse & The Marketplace conference has grown by at least 15% every year. In the same Annual Report, the Loft’s Jocelyn Hale writes, “More and more I have come to admire resilience.” She quotes poet Jane Hirshfield, a Loft Mentor in the late 1990’s: Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. This kind of resilience requires support. In his New Yorker review, Gladwell writes: “On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while [such an artist] is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level. This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.” Galenson himself names Cezanne’s many patrons and friends who gave him money, but many of these same patrons and friends also sat for his paintings, instructed him, and helped to publicize his work. This is the role of today’s non-traditional writing organizations. In many cases, our efforts as instructors can make the difference between those who give up and those who continue fighting for their vision. This year alone, Randy Susan Meyers, a Grub Street student, published her first novel The Murderer’s Daughters at age 57, and Grub friend and Sewanee Conference student Holly LeCraw released her first novel The Swimming Pool only two days ago at the age of 43. Another Grub student, Iris Gomez, will release her first novel, Try to Remember, in May. She’s in her fifties as well. Of course their ages don’t really matter, but what does is the fact that they continued writing even while raising children and building careers. And although in the end Meyers, LeCraw, and Gomez are the ones most responsible for their success, I can’t help but wonder if their positive student experiences kept them going during those long years. This is what our panel will be discussing today, not only the necessity for organizations that take the working adult writer seriously, but the particular difficulties and triumphs in doing so. p.s. If you want more information about the panel topic, feel free to email me at [email protected]. If you want more information about Grub Street, go to www.grubstreet.org.