The third in a series by Kirsten Ogden regarding the KR Writers Workshops.
Part Three: In which the blogger waxes rhapsodic about the most important piece of advice she got from The Peter Taylor Fellows during the nine-day workshop.
While the most wonderful aspect of the KR Writers Workshop (besides the actual writing) is the opportunity to learn from master writers, the second most wonderful aspect of the KR Writers Workshop is to tackle the assignments and the discussions alongside emerging writing talents in the form of Kenyon’s Peter Taylor Fellows program. KR brings emerging contemporary writers into each workshop, assigning fellows by genre, and allowing them to write with the other workshop participants while also offering assistance to the instructors. In my first three years at the KR Writers Workshop, I felt exhilarated and challenged writing alongside these fine, published writers who often had the same heartaches and tragedies that I had when they were alone in their rooms composing their tomes. It’s nice to know you’re not the only one who sits, staring out at the sky; or crumpling paper into small balls; or beating your head against the keys of your laptop; or considering the best moment to pick the lint off the back of the hair dryer when you’re trying to perfect a line, compose a paragraph–heck, just get a good word on the page that doesn’t sound lame. This year’s Peter Taylor Fellows were writers with varied experiences and multiple approaches to the practice of being working writers: Geeta Kothari; David Goodwillie; Jordan Mott; Todd Kaneko; Vivian Wagner; Derek Mong; all of them offered the same bit of advice to budding writers when asked a particular question.
It never fails that someone (usually me–’cause I always somehow think writing can get done without actually writing. Duh.) will be sitting around in conversation with one of the fellows– who has just been published or won some fantastic fellowship or award and has that shiny newness of “ooh!” about them–and ask that same old, particular question: So, how do you do it? The answer is always the same, no matter whom I’ve asked, and each year I ask every KR Workshop Instructor and fellow. Their answers vary slightly, but at the core is always this: stay in the room. Rebecca McClanahan shared that once during a dreadful case of writer’s block she actually typed out an entire chapter of War and Peace in order to keep to her writing schedule–because writing schedules are that important; P.F. Kluge said that he sits down each day, writes out his pages in longhand in his spiral notebooks, and when he gets to the end of his assigned pages, he stops–even if it’s in the middle of a sentence; David Baker offered last year that he often writes in “spurts” rather than every day, but he reads a book of poetry every day–and that for him, such reading is part of the work of a poet; finally, Ron Carlson is famous for saying “the writer is the guy who sits in the chair.” So, it was no wonder that the fellows selected for this year’s KR Writers Workshop had the same advice–you just sit down and you write it. That’s it. No magic bullet. Just write it. Fellow David Goodwillie was an especially excellent example of the importance of just doing it. After hanging around with writers who actually sit down and write, you start to think–hey, a poem a day ain’t so difficult after all.
Kirsten Ogden is a former Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow in Poetry and a summer instructor for the Kenyon Review Young Writers Program. She directs the writing program at the University of La Verne in Los Angeles, California where she also serves as an Area Coordinator for the California Poets in the Schools and edits the literary journal Prism Review.