We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Wade Newhouse a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Wade, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

A lesson that I’ve learned as a teacher and writer is that people really hate but can also really use constructive criticism if that criticism is given from a place of support and knowledge. Making grammar corrections on a student’s paper, for instance, doesn’t reward the process that a student went through to get to that point–just as an editor asking about tiny details in a story I have submitted is not as useful as a comment or a suggestion that suggests real understanding of what I was trying to do in that story. In the past few years I have submitted stories to editors who asked questions and made suggestions that showed me that they could put themselves in my place; if they had real criticisms, those criticisms arose from a good approximation of how I had arrived at what they considered to be a mistake. I have tried to remember what it felt like to receive such critiques and give my students some subtle signs that I am not reacting to their work from someplace on the outside but from a position as a partner in their work.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have been teaching in one form or another for more than 30 years now. I teach all manner of literature, academic writing, and creative writing classes. I was doing my own writing, however, since I was a child, so even though I have only been PUBLISHED as a fiction writer in the past 10 years or so, much of my teaching comes from an exploratory storytelling place rather than from a desire to impart some kind of “wisdom.” I have also been an actor for most of my life and a director pretty consistently for about the past 9 years. When you wrap these all together, I am a teacher by vocation who writes and acts and directs as “hobbies,” but of course the point is that these activities all intersect and nurture one another. What I learn as a teacher informs how I direct student plays–but also what I read in the classroom affects what I write and how I think about the characters I play as an actor. Each place I work (classroom, stage, empty page) helps me think about the others, and when I am working hard at ONE thing I feel like the other areas of my work are being enriched as well, even though most people only know me in one of these creative spaces at a time. I feel that we, as a society as well as a profession, make a great error when we do not think of teaching as a creative act. The way I think through a lesson being planned or a classroom experience being delivered is very similar to the way I plot a writing project or direct a scene in a play. They are all about telling stories, gathering resources, brainstorming plans, and ultimately focusing energies in ways that help other people understand ideas that are constantly forming and reforming in my own imagination.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Most people, especially people who are hostile to creative thinking, assume that MONEY is the resource everyone craves, but I think respect and trust are more important, particularly in today’s world of increasing bureaucratic hostility to art and education. Teachers are accustomed to having less money and fewer resources than “businesses” and profit-generating institutions, but these days the real enemy to creative development–on an individual level but also in schools and communities–is the attitude fostered by number-crunchers, politicians, and even sometimes well-meaning thinkers and community leaders that teachers and artists are just making things up for their own personal obsessions or political goals. Parents seeking to “protect” children by removing books from libraries and state governments dictating what can and cannot be taught in schools and universities are ignoring in some cases decades of training, experience, and relationship-building that lie at the heart of all successful work, creative or otherwise. While I do not think most creative types want to think of themselves as “just like” bureaucrats or other financially-driven institutions, the fact is that people get GOOD at being creative the same way they get good at cutting costs or running businesses: they get good by being trusted to make decisions and to experiment with processes to see what works and what doesn’t. People who put on plays and people who build lessons for kids in schools need the same room to try and fail and hypothesize and imagine outcomes as the people who make rules or enforce them. Most importantly here, the people who make rules in school systems, universities, and civic organizations need to adopt humility toward people who make things (in this case, art and learning) and not assume that practicality trumps expression.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being creative is watching “something” come from “nothing” and knowing that the power comes from its appearance in the world. We are used to thinking this way about physical objects–sculptures and paintings and architecture, for example, take up physical SPACE and so there is a tension between presence and absence. Writing and acting and teaching, however, take place largely in the imagination and the memory, and so there is a transitive quality to their emergence and whatever comes after. I can feel a lesson coming together in the classroom sometimes and I have to HOPE that someone else in the room feels it too, because once it passes there will be no record of it. Similarly, a great moment in a play–great to me as an actor or as a director–will not be preserved and so I feel a great rush, a great desire to make sure other people feel it as well so it transcends my own emotional investment. Knowing that someone else in the space (the classroom, the theatre, the quiet reading chair) shared my heightened sense of living for that moment is, for me, the reason to live through the inevitable post-creation letdown and look ahead to new projects.

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• Other: TikTok: wnewhouse2