Writing Takes Precedence Over Rules, Theories and Glamour at This Fiction Workshop

At the first Santa Monica College Writers’ Conference in 1987, Jim Krusoe, one of the co-founders of the fiction workshop, watched uncomfortably as author Ann Beattie reduced a young student to tears by harshly criticizing her manuscript.

“Ann was real cruel, I think, about this woman’s writing,” said Krusoe, a creative-writing instructor at the college for more than 11 years.

Four years after creating the writers’ conference with fellow writing instructor Cathleen Long, Krusoe sees the Beattie incident in a different light.

The student that Beattie berated has a novel coming out in October.

“And Ann Beattie, it turns out, is going to be writing a jacket blurb on the novel praising it,” Krusoe said.

Such happy endings are rare in modern fiction, much less modern fiction workshops. After all, the art of teaching and learning creative writing has long baffled even great authors such as Somerset Maugham, who once said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

For Long, an English and writing instructor at the college since 1974, and Krusoe, a veteran of the Los Angeles literary scene and author of six volumes of poetry, the most pressing mystery was why the area had so few fiction workshops.

“It has been a real puzzlement for me,” Krusoe said. “I had been sitting back for years waiting for someone else to start one, and they never did.”

That changed in 1987, when Krusoe and Long created the Santa Monica College Writers’ Conference, held annually during the third week of June. For a fee of $245 each, students sharpen their prose and experience the writer’s life under the guidance of four successful authors invited by Krusoe and Long.

“It is one of the truly serious writing workshops,” said Charles Baxter, a Michigan-based writer and fiction-workshop veteran, who taught at the conference in 1990. “It’s well-advertised, and quite well-known. And the student writers--if you can call them that--were some of the highest caliber I’ve seen.”

When this year’s conference opens Monday, Long and Krusoe will have studied nearly 100 applications and manuscripts, some from as far away as New York, Pennsylvania and even Bermuda.

“We have an enrollment limit of 48,” said Long, co-author of a textbook for beginning writers, who admitted that the selection process is the most difficult part of the job. “Right now we have a waiting list.”

Most of the participants who land in the conference are from Southern California and range in age from 20 to 60.

Since its first year, the tuition for the conference has increased only $15. Long and Krusoe cite college President Richard Moore’s support as essential to the conference’s steady success. Loyalty comes from the students as well.

“We have a lot of people who have taken it every year,” said Krusoe. “Quite a few people come back.”

Those who don’t make the cut are eligible for the morning lecture series for a tuition of $40. Although they won’t have the opportunity to work on their writing, they can sit through the readings given by the featured authors.

Long and Krusoe choose the four conference leaders--always two men and two women--as carefully as they pick the students. Every year they try to match two local writers with two out-of-state authors, and, if possible, assemble an ethnically diverse panel at the same time. Past conferences have included Joy Williams, Mona Simpson, Mary Robison and PEN award-winner Bernard Cooper, among others. This year the conference leaders are Michael Cunningham, Judith Freeman, Jay Gummerman and Sherley Anne Williams.

“I have to really respect their work, because it’s too hard to be nice to someone for a week if I don’t like their writing,” Krusoe said. “Ideally, we’ll have four different types of writers, but they’re less different at times than what I want.

“Sometimes there’s disappointment with a leader, but it’s happened only two times so far. But that’s a part of the learning experience.”

“I just don’t see a lot of egos on parade. It’s not that kind of place,” said Nicola Allen, who has been a student at the conference every year it’s been held. “You also start to feel that you’re part of a community.

“It’s not an us-versus-them feeling,” Allen said. “You don’t see people schmoozing.”

Probably because there’s no time. The conference is designed to keep the ever-wandering creative mind in a writing mode. Though the beach beckons a short distance away, conference students won’t see a tan unless they write under a lamp.

“We didn’t build it on social activities,” Krusoe said. “It’s more like a work camp.”

Every day, the students are given a specific fiction assignment, such as evoking the landscape of his childhood in two pages by the following morning. The exhausting in-class schedule and intensive series of outside writing exercises make the conference more of a “process workshop,” according to Krusoe.

“I think it is the only conference that I know of where people are actually writing,” said author Katharine Haake, a conference leader in 1989. “I saw students whose work dramatically changed.”

Haake, who teaches at Cal State Northridge, said she’s skeptical about standard writing workshops, where students present finished products or works in progress for group critiques.

“A workshop tends to reinforce what a person is already doing. It’s product-oriented.

“The Santa Monica conference is the only process-centered conference that I know of in fiction. It’s a much more democratic way of proceeding since everybody is generating work at the same time and under the same types of restrictions,” Haake said.

According to Krusoe, part of the idea of bringing in local writers as conference leaders is to create long-term relationships that benefit both mentor and student.

“This conference has taught me a lot about writing,” Krusoe said. “I’ve learned what East Coast publishers are really looking for. It’s taught me a different way to see my students’ manuscripts.”

The conference forced Baxter, who teaches at the University of Michigan, to review his perception of L.A. writers.

“I suppose I’d expected some sort of L.A. style of writing, neo-narrative, high-concept, glitzy stuff, but, no, it wasn’t,” he said from his Ann Arbor home. “There’s a lot of earnestness in the Midwest. People spend their lives out here trying to be sincere and I hadn’t expected that much in L.A., but there’s some of that too.”

Allen said the conferences tend to demystify the writing life by simply revealing that all writers, even the most successful ones, share the same doubts and problems.

She recalled a question-and-answer session during the first conference, when Los Angeles writer Mitchell Sisskind was asked what deep force drove him to get out of bed every morning to put words on paper.

With the room of eager writing students waiting for the secret, Sisskind deadpanned, “Coffee. Lots of coffee.”