David, there's some discussion about this (among other things) in the comments of yesterday's entry of my journal, including a link to one of the Odyssey participants.

Thanks! I’m trying to give the workshop participants the benefit of the doubt — especially since at least in matters of writing I have a decidedly pro-Gene Wolfe bias — but it’s hard. :)

There's lots of talk about it at the tangent online newsgroup on sff.net, beginning here.

Mostly of the "Stupid whiny Odyssey students!" variety. Which, I must admit, was my first reaction. My views has since changed to "One stupid whiny Odyssey student and a bunch who have thin skins, who will likely suffer if they continue in this field, poor things."

I’ve never been to one of these six-week workshops, but I’d be surprised if by week three or four I wasn’t feeling stupid and whiny. I think it’s a natural reaction to being thrown into a terrarium a long way from home with a bunch of strangers. I doubt I’d have survived the legendary Harlan Ellison Week at Clarion, for instance.

That said, I doubt I’d have gone so far as to hand him a letter complaining about it. (I’d probably have been afraid to, for one thing.) I might have written one, but only to get it out of my system.

It’s interesting that in most of these workshop journals each participant seems to have come in with a very clear idea of what the workshop, or a workshop, should be. It seems to me like that’s setting yourself up for trouble.

Had I been there I would have been so pissed off that other students made Gene leave, even if I was one of the recipients of a harsh critique. Maybe i'm just weird but the harsh ones are the most useful, the one's that usually teach me the most.

But even so, you know, the more I read of the SFFnet discussion, the more I find myself itching to take the side of the students. Hopefully the “spoiled, egotistic, namby-pamby Little Lord Fauntleroy” tag will turn out not to be indelible. It would suck to have this following you around for the rest of your career.

I also can’t help but wonder if reactions would have been the same had the writer been someone less widely respected, or someone with more of a reputation for abrasive behavior.

Which is not to say that this

This is excellent, though you write bad sentence after bad sentence. I want you to write a poem every day so you can improve your prose.

isn’t one of the most insightful pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard.

Gotta wonder what the real story is, the actual text of the letter. In general tho' it sounds as though:
A thin-skinned student got through to a thin-skinned author, effectively sabotoging the course for all concerned.

- As a student, I'd want a refund.

Sounds like a reasonable summary. I’m not sure who I’d want the refund from, though.

Since reading the student's accounts I've softened slightly but still fall "against" them. Gene should never have left, as was mentioned in the sff thread, he had an obligation. Perhaps his best course of action would have been to tell the students who didn't wish to have him as an instructor suit themselves. Although I'm not sure what would have been best for those students who wanted to learn. Have Gene stay and lost the input of some of the class, or have Gene go and lose his input. I think I'd opt for Gene's input.

Although I can empathize with the students, the letter was over the line.

During the fourth week of my Clarion, probably the most well-known name of the six weeks was instructor. He openly denigrated outdated societal taboos of fondling and having sex with children. He praised a story in which a man receives a blowjob from a young boy throughout the entirety of the narrative. He gave short, lazy treatment to the actual manuscripts (my story critted by Sean Stewart was blanketed with comments...mine from the week four instructor had a single sentence at the top of page one, something bland and useless as criticism).

Some people, including myself, weren't too happy. But we didn't write a friggin' letter of protest. He was one of the Grand Masters of SF, so we were respectful, even when we could tell he was half-assing his Clarion stint and trying purposefully to be as offensive as possible.

Sounds like Wolfe was abrasive. Like others have said, grow a hide or get out of the game. Not that this excuses flamethrowing in workshops. I despise it. The purpose of a critique is to help a person improve a story, not to boost your own ego by shredding it.

My understanding is that a single student authored the letter and misrepresented it as something that spoke for the entire class. If that's true, then the class, the director, and Wolfe allowed themselves to be suckered by one little boo-hooing punk. Wolfe should have stayed and completed the job he was hired to do. If we expect students to grow thick skins, can't we demand it of paid instructors as well?

Spoken like a man who has forced himself to stick an unrewarding teaching job out to the end. :)

If anything, I think we should expect the instructors’s skins to be quite a bit thicker than the students’.

I doubt Wolfe was out to boost his ego. I’d be surprised if he wasn’t giving the honest truth as he saw it, and with the best intentions in the world. Unfortunately, intentions aren’t always enough.