As far as I can remember, I’ve never cried during a writing workshop. Unless you count the summer arts camp I attended as a teenager, I can’t recall being in a workshop where someone else cried, either. But I’ve heard plenty of stories from others. There’s the writer trying to hold in tears as others delivered harsh critiques, the writer whose voice trembled hard while reading his own work aloud, and the writer who grew agitated in the face of criticism and started arguing with her peers. One of my friends reported back from a workshop recently in which the man receiving a critique simply stood up in the middle of the discussion and walked out of the room, never to return.
Just because I’ve never cried during a critique doesn’t mean I’m a stranger to how emotionally complex and fraught some workshop experiences can be. It depends on many factors—the writer’s state of mind, the work she submitted, how much she knows and trusts her workshop colleagues, the tone of the room, the instructor’s level of authority and care, and on and on. I don’t think anyone who cries in workshop should be judged harshly, and I hope other writers feel the same.
In fact, I dare anyone with a heart and a decent sense of empathy not to feel for Sophie Lucido Johnson, who described her emotionally draining experience during a graduate school critique in “Critique Week.” Sophie, who is a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (and the editor of Neutrons/Protons, which I read for), was meant to present her work before a panel of professors and artists, but her day got off to a disastrous start. She was still feeling the effects from an illness, she slept through her alarm, and she was late to the critique. As one of the panelists criticized her work, things started to fall apart:
And as he was talking I started crying a little. I was writing in my notebook; I tried to play it off like I was just sniffling because I was so sick, you know, I had an ear infection, after all. And then I started to cry more. And then I started to sob, and I could feel it like a train, that I couldn’t stop it; it was impossible to stop it.
It only got worse:
I sobbed uncontrollably and I couldn’t stop and I had to leave the room . . . I didn’t want this man to see me cry. I didn’t want any of those people to see me cry . . . I wanted to be the kind of person to leave a brutal critique and say, “I got a lot out of that; that was really helpful.” Instead I was crying loudly in the hallway. Pitiful.
What struck me about Sophie’s account is how she wished she could absorb a tough critique with removed professionalism rather than revealing her raw, honest state of mind. When we create art, it’s usually born from the latter, not the former, and yet we expect ourselves to turn that off when it comes time to absorb feedback.
Backbone
While thinking about crying and the writing workshop, I spoke to my friend Lauren Boulton, who was a member of my MFA cohort on the poetry side. Lauren told me that she cried a few times during the MFA—not while her poems were being critiqued, but rather when she read certain poems out loud during class. The experience was no less frustrating, particularly since an emotional reaction can derail the critique process.
“My reaction to so many different emotions—sadness, anger, fear—is often tearful. And tears come with a built-in shame that just makes everything worse,” Lauren said. “In workshop, it was especially disappointing because I always prefer honest and even harsh criticism—but when you cry, it’s your body betraying that wish. It’s hard for workshoppers to be honest when someone is vulnerable.”
After one workshop in which she cried, Lauren’s professor gave her a gift—and some perspective:
“The next time [my professor] saw me, she told me how important it was to write the things that move us personally, especially if they are subjects that are difficult to speak aloud,” Lauren said. “She gave me a pen shaped like a backbone (the chiropractor’s daughter in me is resisting saying “vertebral column”), which is honestly one of my favorite possessions. I keep it in a basket in my kitchen and pull it out when I need a reminder to be brave in my writing.”
As for Sophie, one of the panelists sought her out when she was sobbing in the hallway so he could tell her this: “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s good to feel things. It means you are alive. So many people in this world are dead.”
Sophie went on to post a follow-up the next day, which detailed how the worst day of her life became the best following the outpouring of support she received. She also acknowledged that it simply felt good to write an honest account of what happened during her critique.
“Writing feels really good,” she said. “Why do I keep telling myself it has to be anything more than it is?”