What I Do and Don't Miss about Writing Workshops

For anyone who is unfamiliar, let me provide a quick-and-dirty version of the writing MFA (which stands for Master of Fine Arts): 

In most graduate creative writing programs, you can focus on either fiction (me), poetry, or creative nonfiction. The MFa is a terminal degree and has been for many decades - meaning that universities that require you to have an advanced degree for a teaching job will hire you if you have an MFA - but increasingly popular is the creative PhD, which exists at about 35 schools in the country. 

At the core of these programs is the writing workshop. Although you take other classes, mainly in literature, you spend about half of your time in workshops. These classes are small - usually 10-12 people - and while they include discussion of published work, the most important element is discussion of one another's work. 

The best way I can think to describe the writing workshop is as an acquired taste. An acquired taste that you still only like sometimes. And that you easily find nauseating once you've been away from it for any amount of time. 

I'm about two years post-workshop (having graduated two years ago next month), and in the shower the other day (where I, of course, do my best thinking) I was musing about the workshop experience: what am I glad to be done with? what do I miss, even if just a little? 

Sitting through a workshop of your writing is about one of the most soul-draining things I can think of. (But it does not even come close to law school.) You must remain silent while your classmates criticize, challenge, misinterpret, misunderstand, and attempt to change every last aspect of your work (sometimes, it seems, down to the name of the author). 

At the very end, you are permitted to ask a question or two; of course what you really want to do is mount a WWIII-size defense of your work and then launch a nutso offensive - flame throwers, UZIs, the whole shebang - about what careless readers your classmates are, how they're ideas don't make sense, how they're so stupid and clueless b/c they "just don't get what" you're trying to do. Etc. etc. 

Everyone has a bad workshop at some point or other, and it's not a pretty sight. Believe me, I've been there. 

That said, a workshop isn't always like that and, even when it is, sometimes something can be salvaged from the steaming wreck. 

When your work is critiqued week after week, your skin becomes thicker. It never get thick enough that criticisms don't hurt at all, but after a while you learn to filter and separate out much of the nonsense. You decide whose comments matter and whose don't. Writers whose work you respect, who are good readers, thoughtful, meticulous, open readers - these are the people you listen to. The other commentary, well, you do your best to toss it out the window.

If you can do this - keep what counts and forget the rest of it - you find that you've gotten a rare opportunity. There you sit, with people who have paid attention to your work and taken it seriously; who have the vocabulary to think and talk about creative writing; who have the skills to envision how your piece could become stronger, fuller, more powerful - there you sit, and all eyes are on your writing. It's not a perfect system, and it's always a crapshoot, but sometimes things don't turn out so bad. 

And, every now and again, you might just get a comment like this from your prof: 

"Your sentences are nearly perfect. They read like Anne Tyler's." 

As someone who values the language of writing above all else, I didn't mind reading that one little bit.

Reminder: I am a writer

Sometimes it's easy to forget that. Sometimes it's easy to not be - to just, well, stop doing what I love, which is writing fiction, and feel completely disconnected from it. 

Me and good ol' fic-ti-oni, we've got a love-hate relationship one-third of the time, and the other two-thirds we're like cousins who live on two different continents and every now and again one of us (me) thinks either fondly or snarl-ly about the other (who does not think and, therefore, does not think about me) in a sort of far-off way. Like, I remember that one time when . . . 

Grad school is draining, and it's hard to keep the creative writing going when all your mental energy's being sucked up by writing critical nonsense, but I don't need an excuse even half as good as that; I'd spend most of my time not-writing even if I weren't slaving away. It's what I do all summer while I sit on my hiney. In fact, I'm so good at not-writing that one might accurately label me a fiction not writer. 

But alas. This is supposed to be a happy post. And it will be. As of now. 

Okay, so I usually use a computer - but 
this just looks so much nicer! 

Last week, a writing professor at my school asked if I wanted to read in the department's reading series next year. It's not some big thing - usually just Pittsburgh writers or lit. professors who write creative stuff on the side, that sort of thing - but it made me feel really, well, good. And excited. 

It's not too often that somebody who actually writes and publishes fiction gives a darn about mine. He's never read my stuff - though he's offered to, which is really cool - so for all he knows (and all I know), I'm terrible. But the fact that he took me and all that darn MFA hard work serious reminded me that I am a writer. And it got me re-siked (def. not a real word) for working on that novel I've been fiddling with for not a short amount of time. 

To be a writer, all you need to do, I remembered, is write. It's not about how many pages you produce, it's not about if the piece gets published, it's not about what other people think about your work.

It's about writing. Pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, brain bouncing along. And that's a kind of freeing thing to think about.

Some Final Thoughts on the Super Bowl

"Final?" you might well ask; "but you didn't have any initial thoughts on the Super Bowl . . ." Au contraire, my friend. 

I've had quite a few thoughts on the Super Bowl, but none in a spirit festive enough to share. But today, thinking about a quip from one of my students (a Pittsburgher and Steelers fan herself, she rooted for Green Bay) - which was an intensified version of a sentiment Brad shared post-loss on game night - I decided that since festivity is not in order, my un-festive thoughts are appropriate. 

This lack of festivity is not due to the obvious - the fact that the Steelers lost (or that they looked simply awful in Texas). Instead, it's due to my lack of, well, giving a crap that the Steelers lost (and that they looked awful in Texas). My student, for her part, is glad the Steelers lost. She feels - and I'm inclined to agree - that some kind of cosmic injustice would have been perpetrated had Roethlisberger gone from behaving badly, getting caught and "punished" for behaving badly, onto winning the Super Bowl the same season and being a major hero. (She wasn't quite as succinct, nor did she use the words "cosmic justice," but as a teacher of English, I make it my duty to find the gems hidden amidst the clunkiness.) Now Brad didn't go so far as to say that he's glad; but for the first time in the decade I've known him, a serious Steelers loss didn't hurt him the way getting a football to the gut hurts (and, believe me, I know - it fricking hurts). 

But I don't want to rehash how Ben is a jerk and deserved to lose, etc. etc. - people are probably doing that all over my great city. Instead I want to talk about how his ridiculousness killed the story of football for me. We want our "heroes" to have a flaw, sure, but not the flaw of being a sexual assaulter. By being someone I would rather forget and quite frankly hate to look at, Ben made me ambivalent about the biggest game in my favorite sport. He's not Hamlet or Oedipus (I'm overlooking the problematics of the whole "murder" thing); he's just a dirtball we pay a lot of money to watch. (Note that this is not coming from some hatred of professional atheletes making a lot of money. I'm a firm believer in if-you-don't-want-them-to-get-paid-obscene-amounts-of-money-then-stop-doing-the-things-that-enable-them-to-make-obscene-amounts-of-money. And I, for one, am not going to stop watching the NFL.) 

Perhaps I've got Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss on my mind. If cockfighting is a central component of Balinese culture, then the NFL is a central component of ours. And, being a good structuralist (which I am NOT in reality), I expect my football to have the proper elements; and one of those - a HUGE one of those - is a compelling quarterback/team leader/inspirational figure. Someone to get behind. When that's missing, the story falls apart. None of the other elements - even an "aging star with killer toughness and down-to-earth charm" (read:  Hines Ward) and a "young coach with a feel-good family story" (read:  Mike Tomlin) can relate to each other in a way that makes sense, that coheres, that creates the comprehensible structure that is an NFL team worth cheering for. 

At least not for me. 

Admittedly, my grasp of structuralism sucks. That's me and lit. theory for you. But my contention remains firm:  he killed the Super Bowl by killing the story that structures it. And of course I would think of things in terms of stories. Fiction MFA - duh . . . . 

(It should be mentioned here that I have loathed him for years - long before the scandals, long before the official hate party commenced. He's a crybaby and a drama queen, though in a unique, non-primadonna way. I just want that on the record.) 

As for the post title, these are my final thoughts b/c 1.  I'm sick of talking/hearing about it even though, quite interestingly, I haven't talked/heard much about it at all, and 2.  it's really, truly not worth any further discussion. See the abovementioned reasons.