On Teaching Creative Writing to Ukrainian Students
In the third week of the war, they bombed a maternity hospital. I watched a video of a mother holding her dead son in her arms, squeezing him to her chest. The boy looked to be four or five years old. Blood dribbled down her dress.
This August I had the privilege of co-teaching creative writing to a group of Ukrainian college students via the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Run for decades by the poet, essayist, and former war correspondent Christopher Merrill, the program specializes in bringing writers into conflict zones so they can both bear witness and at the same time give those whose lives have been turned upside down by war a brief respite from their daily struggles. As the poet Richard Hugo once observed, “Creative writing is the last place where your life matters.” In a writing class, the text you study is your life.
Zoom is a poor substitute for embodied encounters. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, most Ukrainian students had spent the previous two years studying online. Such virtual meetings have defined the college experience for an entire cohort. Ours would therefore seem like another “normal” class in abnormal times.
My co-teacher is the abundantly accomplished award-winning novelist Victoria Amelina who joined our first class from the city of Kharkiv, along the Eastern front, which is anything but quiet. She’d gone there to document the work of women documenting war crimes. Heavy shelling and a 4 a.m. air raid siren made for a sleepless night, but Victoria seemed none the worse for the wear: she was, as always, luminous, wry, and insightful.
Victoria herself is from Lviv — known as the capital of Western Ukraine. The city has had other names over the centuries. As a jewel in the crown of the Austro-Hungarian empire it was called Lemberg. As a jewel in the crown of Polish-Lithuanian polity it was called Lwow.
The city has a history no one should envy — except perhaps to note that despite all attempts to destroy or compromise it, the city survives, proud of its thousand-year history as the cultural capital of Western Ukraine. No doubt the city has been through hell. Lviv-Lwow-Lemberg once housed fifty synagogues serving a Jewish population of 120,000. By the end of World War II, only two synagogues and a handful of Jews remained. During the occupation, thousands of Polish and Ukrainian citizens were executed or deported to Siberia. The Nazis and the Communists competed to see who could be more ruthless. In 1941, many of the Polish faculty at the University of Lwow were executed, along with their families. Among the dead academics was a former Polish Prime Minister.
And yet, when I last visited the city for their annual international Book Fair, it appeared to have recovered from its wounds. The streets were thronged with young people gathered to celebrate the written word. The avenue leading to the festival had been covered by a canopy of multicolored umbrellas. My friend and publisher, the poet Marjana Savka, had asked me to interview Michael Katakis, the executor of Ernest Hemingway’s estate, on the occasion of her publishing house’s release of a fresh translation of Papa’s Collected Works. In 2018, life in Ukraine seemed “normal” — if a little more exuberant than the staid tempo of my native city of Boston.
While Lviv remains one of the safer cities in Ukraine, missiles have landed within the city limits there as well, killing several civilians.
My co-teacher herself had recently published an important novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, in which a dog narrates his life inside an apartment which turns out to have once been inhabited by the great writer of “speculative fiction,” Stanislaw Lem. The conceit allows Victoria to explore the city’s forgotten history.
It’s a city with which I feel a singularly deep connection on several grounds.
On my desk, inside a clear plastic frame flanked by a virulent-red clay Buddha and a terra-cotta angel from Krakow, stands a rejection letter. It is, however, the kind of letter any aspiring eighteen-year-old poet would kill to receive: two and half doubled-spaced pages, in faded blue Cyrillic type, full of thoughtful praise and good counsel respectfully phrased. It singles out one quatrain in particular, admiring its flawless rhythm and natural-sounding rhymes. The editor suggests the young author ignore the modernist predilection for irony and attend instead to that source of all true poetry: the heart. The letter ends with an invitation to revise and resubmit so that she might quickly assume her proper place on the upper slopes of Parnassus, followed by a postscript in red ink emphasizing that the publishing house would be honored to bring out her first book of poems in the near future.
The letter is addressed to my mother who, throughout her life, swore that art and literature offered a credible path to salvation. Long after “forgetfulness” robbed her of her short-term memory, my mother remained a passionate reader who spent 8-10 hours a day absorbed in a book. By the time I came along she no longer wrote poetry, but she retained the soul of a poet all her life. Her very presence was lyrical. She spoke to trees, flowers, and animals — without irony, from the heart, with an eloquent tenderness — and, she insisted, they responded. Her sewing room was a jungle of proliferating houseplants which flourished for decades under her ministrations, including longish monologues and recitations.
Why did such a promising start trail off into lifelong silence? The clue is there on the first page, in the editor’s red ink. The letter, sent from Lviv, is dated August 23, 1939. A week later Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland. Soon after, my mother was forced to drop out of the University of Lviv to attend to her dying mother while caring for her six-year old sister and younger brother. She would bury her mother, but not before seeing her native city attacked and divided between two warring armies, her brother arrested, and a future indefinitely postponed.
My mother was a storyteller whose life offered material to die for, if it didn’t kill you. How could what I’ve seen or been through compare with it? There’s one story I rehearse to myself over and again, unable to shake the image of my mother at the piano accompanying an SS officer playing a violin. Captain Violin, as my mother referred to him, had come to my grandfather’s apartment in search of an appreciative audience and a capable pianist to second his violin-playing. The captain served alongside my grandfather in the Austro-Hungarian army in the first World War. Of late he’d been variously helpful to Grandfather, who worked as a liaison between the occupiers and the natives. Nevertheless, one performer as well as her entire audience was under considerable strain — everyone, that is, except for Captain Violin, though he may have sorrows of his own. He was, however, the only person in the room unaware of the faces peering through the transom behind him. They were those of Edek Scheffler and his wife Esther — former students of my grandfather’s who happened to be Jewish.
Several times my mother recounted for the public record (including for Spielberg’s Shoah project) how the Scheffler’s happened to be there that night on 7 Tarnavska Street. They had arrived in the fall of ’43 after the Germans began “liquidating” the ghetto. Edek and Esther escaped by lying on a wagonload of corpses being transported for burial or incineration. At some point they slipped off and made their way to Grandfather’s apartment. They arrived in the dead of night. When he saw their blackened faces, my uncle brought them down to the basement while my grandfather consulted with his children. He needed the older ones (my mother was nineteen, her brother Orest was seventeen) to get behind the idea of hiding the couple because they would have to help seven-year-old Christine, already in school, to keep this absolutely secret. After a brief discussion it was decided that of course they’d hide the Schefflers. The families had grown close when, for a time, they lived in the same apartment building in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Edek was also my grandfather’s student at the gymnasium. They worried about Christine, though. At seven, one tends to spill everything to one’s friends. Mother later admitted that even she had let her closest girlfriend in on the secret. Christine, meanwhile, never whispered a word.
Orest spent the night building a false wall inside the sizeable pantry, behind which the couple had just enough room to stretch out, with access to a bathroom across the corridor. It was to be their home for the next eleven months.
Once the cook threatened to turn them in. My grandfather reminded her that when a family up the street was caught hiding Jews, everyone was shot, including the cook. Since she hadn’t informed immediately, she should expect the same treatment.
Hiding friends added an implausible layer of complications to an impossible situation.
Unfortunately — for all, but rebarbatively for a fiction writer — you can’t make this stuff up. Hearing countless such stories throughout one’s childhood leaves one aware of humanity’s terrifying range. What we take for granted as normal — Main Street, meter maids and men, the well-stocked shelves of supermarkets — are products of specific causes and conditions. Neither tranquility nor prosperity define the natural order of things. Infected by a knowledge of the past, one struggles to ensure that those circumstances which stoke the demonic within us — unleashed in times of war and revolution — are kept at bay, subdued not by force but rather by a widespread access to all that cultivates the creative and generous sides of our nature.
To return to the present: It’s a remarkable thing, the spirit of these Ukrainians. They seem indefatigable. In my (by now) dozens of encounters with them over the last five months, I’ve yet to meet one who has allowed any sign of fatigue or frustration, never mind grief or despair (which would certainly feel appropriate under the circumstances) to show.
This is certainly the case for the students Victoria and I met on Zoom. Ranging in age from 18 to 50, some are refugees who’ve been forced to flee their native towns and cities because of Russian bombing. Several are from Kyiv, a few from Lviv, a number from towns in or near the war zone whose names I don’t recognize. One is actually an undergraduate studying at Dartmouth.
In our first class, after the usual introductions, we move right into discussing one of our two texts for the day: Ursula Le Guin’s celebrated fable, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. It's a brilliant, densely written four-page story about a utopia, Omelas, whose citizens are always happy, a place full of festive celebration and cheerful collaboration among its cooperative citizenries.
Alas, every utopia has its price, and this one is no different. It turns out that the easy life enjoyed by the town’s denizens is possible only so long as they agree to complicity in a crime. A child of indeterminate sex is to be kept locked away in a basement where it is regularly abused.
When they reach a certain age, usually between eight and twelve, every citizen of Omelas is told about “the child.” Many are taken down to the dingy basement, a dungeon, really, to see it:
It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes – the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
And every citizen is told that the price for their happiness is maintaining the abuse and imprisonment of the child.
Seeing the child for the first time, most of the young people are shocked to discover the price they’ve been secretly paying for their idyll. They wrestle with their conscience. Some weep. They have a few bad nights or maybe bad hours. In the end, most conclude that the happiness of the many outweighs the suffering of one. After all, it’s just one child, while they are a village! And so, they mostly forget about it — until the time comes to bring their own child face to face with the truth.
A few, however, do leave. Here’s how Le Guin describes their departure:
These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
I’ve taught the story before, to my undergraduates here in Boston. But the response of the Ukrainians is deep, urgent, and immediate. Everyone has something to say about it.
Unlike the citizens of Omelas, the students are sharp (and principled) enough not to accept the status quo as inevitable. They ask: are these really the only options we have? Either we stay and accept the child’s suffering, or we leave, and let the child suffer anyway? Who devised this system? Who says we have no other choices? And is it really possible for those citizens who’ve been initiated into the truth of things to be happy? Are their festivals manifestations of happiness, or are they perhaps distractions, the “bread and circuses” that keep them from looking at the reality underpinning their easy lives? Is everyone who visits or works in Disneyland truly as happy as they appear? If they were, would they be in Disneyland in the first place? Or is it possibly a symptom of an illness Thoreau diagnosed as “quiet desperation”? Accepting the inevitability of the current situation is the easy way out, but surely it’s not the only way? Where is it written that a human sacrifice is demanded to keep the peace?
All our cohort immediately recognized one thing: they, the Ukrainians, are that child. They are suffering so that Europe can live in peace. Ukraine forms a buffer zone between the mafia state known as Russia and the corrupt and decadent (think Putin’s friend and former German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder who purportedly receives a half-million euros a year for sitting on the board of a Russian oil company) but still relatively democratic states of Europe. Ukraine is the child in the basement. Our students know that they are the designated sacrifice.
Of course, they understand the problematic and even self-serving aspects of this logic. Most people feel their lives present them with challenges enough to keep them busy for a lifetime. Why should they seek to burden themselves further with someone else’s problems? How can they assume the responsibility of trying to liberate the child? Even billionaires feel put upon by the demands made on them by their lesser brethren. Even billionaires — of whom there are some 14 in Massachusetts, whose combined net worth of over 144 billion dollars is three times the annual budget of this state of eight million — even they suffer relationship problems and frustrations as they strive to grow richer than Elon or Jeff. It’s human nature to keep growing our corporations, because aren’t they people too? Unless we’ve somehow stumbled on a revelation that helps arrange life’s variegated experiences into some kind of moral hierarchy, unless we’ve learned the art of perspective, we remain stuck in the prison of an illusory, endlessly desiring self. I say illusory because a narrow, self-oriented perspective is based on a misperception of the self as truly independent and self-existent when in fact interdependence is, like it or not, the way of things. Nothing exists in a vacuum but rather inside an infinitely complex web of interrelationships. And we seem to believe that for us to enjoy our comforts at the present level of consumption, we need to keep a child in the basement.
Now the title of Le Guin’s story is “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the implication being that those who leave do so because they refuse to accept the system’s inherent cruelty. What’s so moving is that most Ukrainians are refusing to walk away. Instead, the writers I know anyway, are choosing to stay. They’re forfeiting prestigious safe-havens at major world universities in order to fight, as it were, to liberate that child that’s been in the basement far too long already. They are refusing to sacrifice Isaac, or to offer a maid to the minotaur, or to leave the people of Mariupol in the hands of their Russian oppressors. They are rewriting the ending to Le Guin’s story as we speak.
So many of us have mouthed pieties about “never again.” We’ve genuflected at the altars of Orwell and Camus and Simone Weil and my personal heroine, Susan Sontag, in theory. It made us feel good to align ourselves with these heroic figures in theory. What does our respect for such figures and our allegiance to the values they embody look like in practice? That is the question this war has summoned us to answer.
Our last class coincided with Ukraine’s Independence Day, August 24th. Air raid sirens could be heard in the background through our students’ computers. Victoria was back in Kyiv which experienced an incredible 148 warnings in one 24-hour period. Our students didn’t flinch. Our host from the University of Iowa, Mike McGinnis, who wanted to record them reading excerpts from what they produced, stressed that it wasn’t obligatory and, should they be anxious about possible reprisals, students could present their work under the black square cloak of Zoom anonymity. Instead, each proudly claimed ownership of their work by reading with their cameras and lights on. Their voices drowned out the sirens. Among the readers was an eighteen-year-old high school student whose poem, set in the future, decried mankind’s cupidity for allowing the ecological disaster of war to lay waste to the planet.
There are so many remarkable and indeed inspiring stories that have already emerged from this war, and I’d like to close by sharing just one:
In the second month of the war, as bombs hailed all around them, a young couple in their twenties managed to escape from the devastated village of Irpin along with nineteen dogs, five cats, a hamster, a turtle, a chameleon, a triton lizard, and one miraculous endangered paedomorphic axolotl. At one point two of the dogs, frightened by the bombs, fled for cover, and the couple had to make a return trip, again with missiles exploding around them, to find them. They and their fellow creatures all made it to safety.
Now I just want to point out that one of the animals they rescued, the paedomorphic axolotl (a kind of salamander) is a singular creature capable of regenerating not only appendages but also vital organs such as eyes, heart tissue, even its nervous system. One might see it as a metaphor or as a reminder that no matter how severely we may have been wounded, we humans too possess an astonishing capacity for recovering, regrouping, and becoming whole once more.
Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. His four novels have variously been named a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian Writers. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, Ivan Drach, and Skovoroda. His shorter work, including essays, stories, and reviews, have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Missouri Review, The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review and elsewhere. He’s received a three-year Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction, the McGinnis Award in Fiction, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his contributions to the literary community. As founding editor of Agni he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Most recently he has been organizing readings in support of writers in Ukraine, as well as interviewing writers for his For the Record series which appears online at Agni Online (https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/for-the-record-conversations- with-ukrainian-writers/), as well as on Arrowsmith Press’s website.