The following began as a conversation on Twitter initiated by this tweet by Emma Bolden, which opened up a larger conversation about the writing life, workshop experiences, and how we deal with our own mental health as writers and as teachers concerned with the well-being of our students. I myself never found a workshop experience that was truly fruitful until I joined CantoMundo as Poetry Fellow in 2013; the founders, fellows and organizers not only energized and emboldened me as a poet but also as a one who teaches and seeks to foster voices in non-toxic environments. I’m grateful here to Sarah Fonseca, Jarvis Slacks, Carl Marcum, Emma Bolden and Anthony Frame for sharing their thoughts, candidly. I hope this roundtable sparks more conversations in our communities about the high and lows of writing, workshopping and publishing. –Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni: Did your undergraduate and/or graduate school program provide the support you needed while you were in it?
Sarah Fonseca: I never completed my BA in Creative Writing; this might be a testament to the scarce funding for promising or committed liberal arts students at my particular university, never mind throughout the country. I hit a point where I was actively writing and publishing, despite only being able to afford three credit hours a semester. It made sense to leave.
It’s taken a few years to own this, but I don’t regret giving up on academic decoration. A number of my undergraduate peers from more stable financial situations–boasting two college-educated parents, middle class roots, no money-driven academic withdrawals on their transcripts–matriculated directly into top-ranked MFA programs. It’s been oddly validating to witness them exit academia and grapple with job searching, freelance hustling, and our pugilist economy: systems that I had to explore prematurely because school was not supporting me in this particular way.
However, the creative writing workshops I was able to enroll in (and remain in!) during undergrad were invaluable; I still regularly draw from them when my own writing hits a rough patch. Emma Bolden, who was actually a professor of mine at Georgia Southern, was really great at cherry-picking supplementary readings. I recall a particular semester where she introduced us to Eula Biss, John D’Agata Scott McClanahan, and Jesmyn Ward in one fell swoop. Between those ostensibly different takes on nonfiction and the corresponding workshops, I got a decent idea of what MFA life should look and feel like. Even if I wasn’t able to deliver, I appreciated it when my professors demanded a lot of me. I don’t have the usual piece of framed parchment to prove it, but I did grow as a writer.
Jarvis Slacks: I think my undergraduate program gave me the support I needed as a young writer. It allowed me to understand what being a writer was and it prepared me for the difficult task of trying to find a way to feed myself as I wrote. My graduate school program gave me the support as a writer, not as a person. Graduate school pushed me to write creative, powerful work that could gain the attention of an agent. Graduate school didn’t prepare me for what might happen if I didn’t get published. Success was the only option for graduate school, which does make sense. You are paying a great deal of money. Graduate school should help you figure out a way to, one day, recoup that cost. However, in many ways, graduate school failed to help me understand how I was supposed to live my life if I didn’t succeed in my writing ambitions.
Anthony Frame: This is a tough one for me to answer. I left my three-year MFA program after just one year and the decision to leave was made probably half way through that year. So, I’m very hesitant to criticize my graduate program or those who worked there for any lack of support they may have given me during and after my time there. I’d expect nothing else from them than to focus on the students who wanted to be there.
I think my undergraduate program offered as much support as an undergraduate program can offer. They advised me through my time there and through the process of applying for graduate school. My undergraduate mentor, Rane Arroyo, though, definitely went above and beyond in this regard. He was always there for me, whether to answer my questions or to offer advice on navigating academia or just to lend an open and sympathetic ear. He did this during my undergraduate years and well after – we were still having long, serious electronic conversations up to the time of his passing. And when I decided to leave my MFA, he was the one who reminded me that an MFA is one stepping stone (among many possible stepping stones) toward a specific goal (teaching in academia) and that, if I felt my path was going to be different, then I should follow the path that was best for me. As he told me at that time, “If you feel an ache, run for the ark”, something I still apply to my decisions today.
Emma Bolden: I’m lucky: both programs were incredibly supportive. I struggled with health problems and was in medically-induced menopause for the majority of my BLA and MFA programs, which didn’t help my depression. Neither did my feelings of inadequacy: I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t deserve to be there. It was tremendously difficult for me to open up — admittedly, it’s even hard now — but I felt comfortable enough with my professors to have some difficult but ultimately helpful conversations.
I had four surgeries over the course of my undergraduate career, and the faculty worked with me so I wouldn’t fall behind. I think that Sarah Lawrence’s don program (kind of like an advisor on steroids) and conference system is an excellent model for keeping tabs with students’ mental and physical health. We checked in with our professors and dons frequently, and even if we just talked about, say, my paper on neutron stars, that connection made me feel supported. In graduate school, my feelings of inadequacy grew; I often felt like I didn’t fit in. But no matter how alienated I felt, I knew the faculty were there for me. I knew that I could talk to any of them, even if I didn’t study with them.
RB: What do you believe makes for a fruitful workshop experience?
EB: I think that when we think of the term “workshop,” we tend to think of it in terms of finished work that’s ready to be shopped around. When we instead move through the workshop process as the process of working, when we allow the process of building and creating and changing itself into the room, it opens up the way one looks at one’s work: not as a finished product that must be checked for faults but as a dynamic structure in the middle of the process of creation.
I went to an arts school from 8th-12th grade, and our writing workshops were intense. We looked at a poem like a piece of marble and focused on what needed to be chipped away. Often, the class concluded that only a line or two was worth saving (and, in some cases, a phrase or two). The critiques were rough, but they were accurate, and I often wonder if I would’ve stuck with writing as long as I have without it. By the time I graduated, I didn’t just have thick skin. I practically had a turtle shell. I’d also learned how to separate the self from the poem, like a kind of temporary anesthesia through which I could see when even my dearest darlings needed to be removed for the health of the poem as a whole.
This surgical workshop method has its benefits, but as I grew as a student of language, I became more open to the idea of the workshop as a place that opens possibilities in the work rather than closing them. The best workshops, in my experience, address parts of the poem that weren’t fully living, but they also address moments in which a wider, wilder possible world could be seen. I call these “windows”: luminous and liminal places in which the text feels different, as though the language may, with attention, widen into the sublime.
AF: The best workshops I’ve been in had less to do with the specifics of the poem being presented (though, certainly, the poem under discussion is important) and more to do with the larger goals and implications of the poet’s work as a whole. In this type of workshop, the poem under discussion becomes a conduit for looking at what the poet is trying to do and how they are trying to do that. There’s definitely value in looking at the small details of a specific poem, the unique strengths and unique weaknesses of that particular creative specimen, but I think that a workshop is more valuable when it offers methods that can be applied beyond the workshop and beyond the specific poem that is under the microscope. What can the poet learn about their process and about their methods by looking at this particular poem and by looking at it within the context of the other work they have shared?
JS: A good workshop will help you read your writing and anticipate the questions or the problems that a reader might see when they look at your work. I think that, once you get that ability, once you become objective towards your words, you should be able to spend less time in workshop and more time actually revising. A workshop doesn’t really function as a support system. It’s more like a bootcamp, breaking you down and rebuilding you. The rebuilding, however, is a self-imposed duty. I understand why many young writers need workshop. We, as a community, should help young writers understand when to let it go.
RB: What advice do wish you had earlier in your life as poet and/or writer? What guidance do you hold dear?
JS: I wish that my teachers spent more time teaching me to be a writer for my entire life. Typically, we look at our writing as a short-term goal. I am going to write this story or this book. I am then going to send it to an agent. That agent will try and get it published so I can make money. I wish I was taught that I am a writer and that I write. My goal is to write. My goal is not to get published and make money. If I do, great. If I don’t, fine. Publishing our work takes up the majority of our time, energy, thought, our very purpose. For a writer, there is no higher goal than to get something published. Instead, our most important task should be to write. I’m not sure why this is. We are tasked with giving our works to others so that they will give us their acceptance, praise, fame and fortune. Publishers, instead, should be spending an enormous amount of time looking for us, trying to find us at colleges, universities, conferences and coffee shops. We create brilliant worlds and formulate the most beautiful sentences. Then we gather up our suitcases and go door-to-door, begging people to read our words.
The best writing of our time isn’t being published because it won’t sell to a mass audience. That fact is a travesty that everyone in the writing community should be deeply ashamed of. This is mostly the fault of our capitalistic society. Capitalism’s evils are imbedded into writing culture. My words aren’t meant to be an indictment on our community. I do wish we would talk about this more.
The best guidance I ever received was from a colleague I went to graduate school with. He told me to only pay attention to workshop feedback from the people who didn’t mark up the copies. The heavier the mark-ups, the better the workshop feedback.
SF: I wish someone would’ve stressed the importance of bringing up problems as they arise rather than delaying outreach and communication. Paired with the stigmatization of mental illness, working poor pride makes asking an editor or teacher for an extension a hell of a chore. My family is rife with people who didn’t ask for help until they were crying out in absolute agony, so it’s a tradition I carried with me into academic life and only corrected once it began costing me opportunities.
AF: I wish there had been more of an emphasis on how it’s okay to take your time. That you don’t have to be a success by 21. That, if you don’t win the Yale Younger Poets Award, or a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, or if you don’t get the NEA on your first try (if you don’t get into an MFA on your first try), etc… that’s okay. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or a failure or that your career is over (before it began).
And I’m probably most grateful for the advice from Rane Arroyo that there are many paths toward a writing career (which is separate from a teaching career). He said this before I left academia and he reemphasized it after I left. He constantly reminded me/us that every experience, every path was valid and, if you want to be a writer, then just use whatever path you are on to further your writing – and, this is probably the most important thing, that all of the career stuff will work itself out so long as you are focused on your writing. “Trying to make a career before you are a writer and you’ll find yourself constantly running in circles,” he used to tell us. And, as he told me specifically, regarding my job as an exterminator, “It’s work that is too hard for humans, but think of all the poems that’ll be all yours!”
I’m also very grateful for this bit of guidance from Allison Hedge Coke, my mentor during the year I was working on my MFA: “There’s room in this world for every voice. Someone else’s success is not at the expense of yours. Don’t let your success be at the expense of others.” This has helped me stay positive towards my work and towards others’ work when I see the wonderful success of other writers. It also helps me to try to be conscious of how I approach the publication part of my writing – how to do my best to be a conscious and ethical member of the writing community.
EB: My grandmother was my confirmation sponsor, and she wrote a letter for my confirmation retreat. In that letter, she wrote: “Only do what you feel you can handle comfortably, and don’t take on too much (Always stop and smell the roses). Along the way, have a little fun in life. This will help you get over the hurdles and make life easier.”
I never got the chance to thank her for that letter because I never got the chance to talk to her again. She died the day after I received it. Her advice, however, has been in the back of my head ever since. For a very long time, I didn’t realize that this advice applied to all parts of my life — especially my writing. So I wish I could tell that to my younger self: calm down. Go your own way at your own pace. Let beautiful things be beautiful, and take the time to see them.
(Poet Carl Marcum chose to share the following as an answer to the question.)
Epistle to My Grad-School Self
Hey Menso,
Quit thinking you’re special. No eres. Quit thinking that you are your oppressor, quit thinking you don’t belong amidst them. Wear their skin like Xipe Totec—mingle like hands in air, follow the scent of blood to the source, keep your blade as sharp as your words. Just because they let you sit at the table and talk, don’t think they take you as seriously as they take themselves. Learn how to stand up for yourself on each desert ridge and take that landscape with you in that place you call home; if you always make this landscape interior, you will never feel displaced in cities of glass and stone, never lose your way in the foreign forests for long, never confuse the repeated white faces for kin, for kind. Remember how when you were in kindergarten, how then the kids wouldn’t let you in their playground because you are Mexican and Catholic—both somehow less offensive than how much you look like them. Know that the stars in the sky are the same as they ever were. Remember how to use a compass. Remember how to construct a sentence. Always serve your sentence completely. Just because you’re silent, doesn’t mean you’re not a wreck waiting for metal. Remember your name, remember it is the one your mother gave you to protect you against the bluest eyes. Even as you master the tongue, you master another. Sometimes they let you in the club because you’re handsome. Sometimes because you’re smart. Sometimes because you pronounce so beautifully into their ears those rolled erres. Remember your passport. Remember to speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. You will sometimes wonder how you made your way into their company. You are always both, and neither. No dura la dura. El hombre prevenido vale por dos.
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on writing, the workshop experience and mental health.