Hybrid Writing, Collaborating, Practicing Play, Nuts & Bolts; Or, How to Return to the “Real World” after Gambier to Grow & Evolve as a Writer
I’ll start off by giving you a sense of one writer’s detouring path, to offer it to you to take or leave as you see fit, as you think about returning to the “real world,” to those jobs, people, and other commitments–many of which are wonderful–but which, at times, may feel at odds with your writing habit. What I’d like to encourage you to think about is how these commitments can work for rather than against your writing habit–to think about creative living as much as creative writing.
Gretel Ehrlich wrote in her cinematic memoir called The Solace of Open Spaces: “The sudden changes in my life brought on the usual zany dreams: road blocks were set up where I walked barefoot with a big suitcase; national boundaries changed overnight and I was forced to take a long, arbitrary detour. The detour, of course, became the actual path; the digressions in my writing, the narrative.” I started creative writing while teaching high school. In college, I had headed more toward human rights and social service work, having participated in a delegation to gather testimonials in El Salvador at the end of their Civil War, working also in the States with battered single mothers on welfare. My background also involved serious conservatory training in music, and I remember wrestling with how or whether to bring together these and other commitments to make a meaningful life’s work. Although in college I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, so to speak, I remember clarity about three things that I could never be: 1. an investment banker, 2. a lawyer, or 3. a fiction writer. But life surprises us, if we’re open to surprises. In a roundabout way, I ended up a high school teacher, and after my first year of teaching–virtually living at the school, teaching five courses in two departments, piloting an interdisciplinary curricular program, moderating extracurriculars, yadda yadda (any high school teacher knows that routine), I realized that I needed to schedule myself a little weekly break, to carve out some time that was mine. The school was located in San Jose, California, about 45 minutes from Stanford, where some of my colleagues took night classes in Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. I looked through the catalogue to see what course might be a good diversion. It could’ve been any subject–history, music, astronomy–but one course caught my eye: “The Short Short Story.” I had no idea what that was, but it was all I had time for. So I signed up. The short and long of it: the course spun me 180 degrees in a direction that I’d never imagined.
One course led to another, then a summer workshop much like you’re doing now, which led me in my third year of teaching high school to apply to M.F.A. programs. It was a crapshoot, a lottery. The way I thought of it: if I got in, I was meant to be a writer; if not, not. By some miracle of a chance, I got accepted and decided to go to Columbia University in New York. When I arrived, I remember feeling very excited but out of place in my program, surrounded by peers who seemed to have known since they were in utero that they wanted to be writers. And who already knew a lot about writing, about workshops, about how to write a critique, about “the business.” Apart from that, given my background in music–with its gamut of forms–the strict triumvirate of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction felt unnatural. I was housed in Fiction but kept straying on my own into a kind of intuitive poetics, also appealing to New Journalistic strains that I had explored a bit in college by way of working with human rights testimonials and ethnography. One of my biggest “classrooms” was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where my student body card allowed free admittance and where I spent hours scrutinizing forms of art across history. It was a search. My search continued–as it still does–through my M.F.A., beyond my Ph.D., teaching at various colleges, working a number of odd jobs along the way, partaking in residencies at artist colonies, making geographic moves, not to mention other life situations: all of which have shaped my writing and the ways that I think about writing–not unlike Gretel Ehrlich described her “long, arbitrary detour. The detour, of course, became the actual path; the digressions in my writing, the narrative.”
Essentially, what I’ve realized is that language is our medium–not fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama–that language is material and malleable as clay or paint, that it is a living language (and for proof of this, just look in the Oxford English Dictionary for any word’s origins and evolutions, adoptions and adaptations, mutating through interactions with other languages) that we mold through craft and style into forms that are influenced by and take on characteristics of classifiable genres. These genres have long and rich traditions that, through reading, can provide us with tools to understand the languages that we’ve inherited. We can use words through their plasticity–as a plastic art (even neuroplastic, since the brain is a living organism)–that is shapable like a choreographed dance or composed song, as we appeal to the rules of grammatical usage enough to know how to break those rules when the story, poem, or essay demands it.
I have three books coming out in the year ahead: two fiction, one nonfiction, plus a poetry chapbook, and am working on a new book that’s a cultural history–which may sound like a lot, but they’re a decade in the making, cross-fertilizing with one another–my first book publications after many, many rejections along the way. I have no literary agent. A few lucky writers get catapulted to the top overnight, but for the most of us, we trudge forward at the bottom one step at a time, off the beaten track, doing this thing called writing because we can’t imagine not doing it. Over ten years ago as a high school teacher, I wouldn’t have known how to get from there to here, nor would I have known that this is what I wanted, nor if I had made this my particular goal would I likely have achieved it, because life interacts with our work, and our future depends on how we engage with our present. Again, we are engaged not only in creative writing but also in creative living“
“which brings me back to the habit of writing, how to cultivate and nourish this wild, wondrous habit. My path has involved inordinate trial and error, trying to listen to advice along the way, also learning which advice to reject, to learn my own style and to defend its experimental strains, to welcome criticism, to play with language and try to reimagine its boundaries, rather than try to write what someone else wants me to write, to sense a three-dimensional space and figure out how words can inhabit those dimensions on a two-dimensional page, packaged in an otherwise linear format: otherwise known as The Book. That’s not to say that I’ve achieved this goal, rather it is a practice–a practice, a process, as much as (if not more than) a series of products–a kind of philosophical search.
Before turning to a collaborative invitation that I’d like to share with you, I wish to speak first about how to let your current workshop become a practice that lasts beyond the bounds of this week. You likely are discussing many of these ideas in your workshops already, but they can’t be stressed enough. It’s not enough to want to write or to think about writing, but cultivating the practice and attending to the practicality of how to support your writing habit. The following are only a few ideas, things that I wish that someone had told me a decade ago:
1. Form a writing group: You’re meeting so many people this week and beginning conversations that need not terminate at week’s end. If you find a kindred spirit or spirits whose work you can critique and vice versa, keep in touch and start an electronic exchange of work. Or when you return home, look for a local writing group, or find something online. However your writing community materializes, nurture it. Serve as a resource for one another: critiquing work, assigning exercises, sharing literary journals, attending or organizing readings. Additionally, such groups can lead to interesting collaborations with other writers, artists, musicians, any number of possibilities.
2. Exercise your writing muscles: Just like an athlete in training, you need to stay fit and motivate yourself to write–nothing profound, just sit down and do it. Everyone lives by a different schedule and routine, so it would be awful for me to stand here and dictate that you should write at this time of day, for this amount of time, what have you. Reflect upon your schedule, your physical space, your personal circumstances and constraints. Don’t bemoan what seem to be limits, just work creatively with them. Find the time in your day most conducive to writing. Start small, even ten minutes, if that’s all the time you have. Fill up a blank page with gibberish, if need be, just so you get in the act. Figure out how to trick yourself into generating new work, give yourself assignments or exercises, read voraciously and scrutinize how different writers work their magic, gather these techniques into your technical toolbox, as you think about your own fledgling projects. Work at your own pace, be flexible, don’t worry if you fall off the bandwagon for a time, just figure out a way to exercise your writing muscles with some regularity. Most writers are not writers only; famously, William Carlos Williams wrote many of his poems on his medical prescription pads. As you reflect upon the habits of your life and your writing habits: figure out how to meld them in creative ways, to reflect on what works for you and what doesn’t, and adapt accordingly. Adaptation is key, because life changes, and you want and often need to be open to those changes.
3. Make a writing space for yourself: Even if your space can’t be “a room of your own,” like Virginia Woolf urged, designate a writing space for yourself. Apart from these years in Gambier, for much of my writing life I’ve lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my husband, where my writing desk doubles as our dining room table, as well as a roof over our guests’ inflatable mattress–a situation to which I’ll return very soon. Ideal? No. Workable? Absolutely.
4. Explore traditional & untraditional education: By being here at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, you’ve already found a way to expand your writing. Come back next year, seek out local workshops, or if you want a more sustained immersion or teaching credentials, consider residential or low-residency MFA programs. The thing about writing is that there are many paths into this profession, either vocationally or avocationally, so you can find the one that works for you–whether your constraints are geographic, financial, personal, any or all of the above.
5. Educate yourself about the literary community: Although it would be wonderful to be able to give you a quick-and-dirty summary of the system, it’s not a system. There are many kinds of writing, and many writing worlds, and you have to do the homework about where your writing fits, about publication venues and resources, about grants and residency programs, about questions you don’t even know to ask. Go to a local university library or good independent bookstore and look at literary journals. Make it a regular activity. Get a sense of variant styles, missions, and submission guidelines, both from established print journals and newer online ventures. Hone in on venues that you admire and that seem suitable for your work. Don’t submit or apply to things blindly, only after you’ve done the legwork. And participate in and support the literary community however you can. Attend local readings, subscribe to a literary journal, volunteer to read slush for a local journal that you admire“ there are a number of places to start. Subscribe to The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers, if you don’t already. Beyond articles about craft, publishing, and authors, these trade magazines are repositories for lists of journals, deadlines, contests, conferences, all kinds of resources. Poets & Writers also maintains a wonderful online database of literary journals and magazines. Other good organizations to know about are the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, or AWP, with its annual conference with ballroom-sized bookfair; CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses; and the Alliance of Artists Communities, to name a few.
6. Once you’ve done the legwork, go the extra step and submit: When you finish a piece that you’re proud of, send it out! It took me years to start doing this. The most you have to lose is a thin envelope with a photocopied impersonal slip or formulaic email rejection. Don’t be discouraged by rejections. Also, when writing a cover letter, think of the lesson of the “short short” story: less is more. Mention that you’ve studied here at Kenyon, other relevant writing, education, or publication experience, but don’t pad the space. If you enjoyed a recent piece published in their journal, perhaps add that, but let the editors get to the meat of your submission. Three students in our KR workshop last summer, led by Dinty Moore, had pieces that they wrote in the workshop accepted for publication in the months thereafter–just because they sent them out. If you care about a piece and have spent the time writing, editing, and polishing it, don’t bury it–and shoot high! Send it to journals that you admire.
7. Write in multiple genres: Even if you’re not in a formal program or group, you can educate yourself by expanding your writing practice. Even if only as exercise, try writing outside your genre. If you’re a fiction writer, write a play; even the attempt can help improve your sense of dialogue, like writing poetry can hone your sense of sound, image, lineation, pace, space. To echo: think of language as your medium. The more ways that you try to understand the capacities of language, the more that your writing will benefit. Also, if you find yourself stuck in a project, work on another project to get ideas of different approaches that may enliven what might seem deflated. Beyond the exercise of writing in multiple genres, you might make a goal for yourself to try to publish something in each genre: a story, a poem, an essay, a book review, an interview, etc. Each genre has its own internal mechanics, as well as its own submission and publication strategies. By putting yourself through varied motions across genres, you can educate yourself as a writer.
8. Last but not least, PLAY: Back when I was a high school teacher, in my first semester, I attended a professional development seminar and learned one of the best teaching lessons of my life. The session was led by a seasoned high school teacher who spent one day each year visiting a first grade classroom. He said there was something about that age when students still yearned to go to school, chafing at the bit by their front doors with their small backpacks and mismatched socks, because they couldn’t wait to get to school. School was fun. He saw that level of enthusiasm decline with each subsequent grade level and wanted to remind himself to keep that element of play alive in his high school classroom. As a writer, since you are often your own teacher, be sure to keep the element of play alive when you write. (And I’m guessing you felt a little bit like those first graders when you were packing earlier this week to come here.)
To reiterate, randomly: try new things, take risks, write in other genres, be open to criticism and vulnerability, make errors, learn about other art forms, consider language not as precious but plastic, appeal to other art forms, read in other disciplines, review or study a foreign language, learn to love editing as much as writing, engage in creative living throughout your creative writing, be bold and brave to follow wherever your writing takes you, to be open to change, so your writing moves beyond simple self-expression to what composer John Cage described as “self-alteration.”
I’ll close with an invitation to play. There is no “right” way to do this. In the time that remains, I’d like to tell you a little about my collaborative project, related to my novel that is forthcoming this Fall entitled Galerie de Difformit??, or the Gallery of Deformity. The novel is structured as an art catalogue, with choose-your-own-adventure directives, intermarrying genres, typographies, and images to act as a body that “deforms” via the active and passive ways that it is read by any given reader. While the book will be published as a regular old book, its creation and decreation takes on a larger life, as that published book-object grows out of the past, present, and future of the book, posited in traditional and new technologies. Stage One of the collaboration is ongoing and invites people to materially deform the book’s so-called “Exhibits” (prose poems that fit more or less on a page), and those images helped to deform the forthcoming book and also are featured in a growing online gallery. As you can see from the thumbnails at the head and foot of one side of the handout, “deformations” have occurred through a range of materials: from paint to photography to yarn, ice to video to sound, to name a few. Stage Two is just being launched: a series of collaborative chapbooks that will fit inside the published book. Stage Three will begin after the book’s publication, when artists will be enlisted to deform the published book-object into objets d’art, to travel to small galleries and college campuses in the tradition of an antiquated freak show. Additionally, the published book includes a number of instructions for individual alteration.
People in the Kenyon community have collaborated on this project: among others, Tyler Meier deformed an “Exhibit,” which is included in the online Galerie and in the book; Ellen Sheffield did this and also involved her book arts class in deforming “Exhibits” into a fabulous collection of altered books, which became an actual exhibit in Kenyon’s Special Collections, thanks to Ethan Henderson; Libby Panhorst, a rising junior, is editing a chapbook of those altered books to be electronically archived online, to fit inside the published book; Claudia Esslinger helped to make a beautiful antitrailer for the book, which I’ll show momentarily; and I even was lucky enough to work with a local beekeeper, Jason Bennett, whose bees (under the auspices of the Screen Actors Guild for the Order of Hymenoptera) will be making an appearance in the not-so-distant future. There are many offshoots of the project and many ways to become involved. I very much hope that you will accept this invitation and participate in the deformation of the Galerie de Difformit??, whatever your artistic or non-artistic bent. And please feel free to share the invitation!