Fresno State writing prof contemplates class impact
Fresno Bee 4/18/07
On Monday, even before the gunman's identity was revealed, some connected with Virginia Tech's creative writing program were privately concerned it was Cho Seung-Hui, a student whose writings were chilling and troubling.
"This is something every creative writing teacher in America has faced. Something disturbing catches your eye. You wonder if there's a danger. But 99% of the time, it's someone who would never do anything. They're just writing their frustrations. My heart went to my gut when I saw that it was an English major," Yarbrough said.
Cho's writing professors had suggested he get counseling. They had talked to administrators. One professor told media she alerted police. But rules protecting student rights had curbed further interference.
Yarbrough, a creative writing professor at California State University, Fresno, says that what happened at Virginia Tech will rewrite those rules at campuses across the country.
"We don't know how to talk about this right now, but we're going to have to find a way," he said at his Fresno home on Tuesday.
"The vise we're going to find ourselves in is that literature more often than not disturbs people. But even as you know that art has the power to disturb, there's also the possibility that on any given day, there is a disturbed person sitting in your classroom."
Yarbrough is certain that creative writing departments will work on guidelines of when to report disturbing writings to authorities.
"This is nothing we haven't talked about before. But you know, sometimes your hand gets forced. And the scope of this has impressed on everyone walking into a creative writing class the tough line between freedom of expression and protecting the 25 people you're responsible for in that classroom."
He feels that one possibility may be redefining when a person is disruptive to a class, so that schools could remove that person from the classroom.
"People always think of disruptive as ranting and raving. But there's different levels of disruption. If someone is writing about dismembering women, that can be disruptive to every woman in the class."
At the same time, Yarbrough, whose own novels and screenplays often include graphic depictions of sex and violence, is hardly a proponent of censorship.
"As a writer, you try to mirror reality. So we can hold it up and look at it and maybe figure out how to be better human beings.
"But you can't write seriously about life without writing about things that disturb people. Some people are disturbed by anything that says life isn't the way they think it ought to be."
He's a fan of director Quentin Tarantino, known for the violence in his films. Yarbrough easily quotes dialogue from "Pulp Fiction" and admires a graphic ear-cutting scene in the movie "Reservoir Dogs."
Writers such as Yarbrough may seem the unlikely leaders of efforts to force professors to report writings about violence to administrators or even police, and re-evaluate some student-rights regulations.
But, he says, this is the right group to lead the discussion because of their dedication to the precarious balance.
"Writers tend to take what they do pretty seriously," he said. "And one of the worst things that can happen is if there's some sort of blanket knee-jerk reaction that dismisses freedom of expression."
Yarbrough watched the tapes of the Virginia shooting incident with the eye of someone who once called the campus home. It was his first teaching job. He met his wife in one of the student quads shown in the endlessly repeated footage of the violence. He empathizes with his longtime friend Edward Falco, who taught one of Cho's writing classes.
"Ed Falco did exactly what I would have done. He's the most conscionable person I ever found. He's the consummate professional who's seen everything a gazillion times. I told him, 'I don't see anything you could have done different.'
"But now everyone in my profession has to to sit here looking for answers as to what to do different. I'm sitting here too, but I don't have the answers."