Avoid Writers' Workshops?

"You will learn...more...from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books…” http://t.co/XLIdXTiXfU

— Jon Winokur (@AdviceToWriters) March 11, 2015

I picked up an issue of Vice magazine at the American Apparel on 29th and 7th in Manhattan. It was The Fiction Issue, and the first article I read was A TEACHER AND HER STUDENT by Thessaly La Force. I assumed that the article was about a teacher-student age-discrepant relationship, but it's about when Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead, was Thessaly's,"...  fourth and final workshop instructor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop."

Despite the fact that Thessaly attended a prestigious writers' workshop and was a student of an author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,  Thessaly confirmed my suspicion about the effectiveness of writers' workshops. She wrote, "After receiving my MFA this May, I left Iowa believing that there's no good way to be taught how to write, to tell a story."

Therefore, I will continue to ignore those writers' workshop advertisements in The Paris Review and Poets & Writers.