I always think it would be funny to post a first-day-of-school picture, but I usually forget to do it. I like the idea of my 31-year-old face interrupting the flow of cute little kids with Frozen backpacks or whatever that make up my whole Instagram timeline after Labour Day.
I’ve had lots of opportunities for this in my history of formal education. I took an embarrassing amount of time to finish my undergrad (was it … six years? Is that possible?), not even because I was having difficulty, but just because I didn’t want to leave. When I started my MFA program last year, part of me was exultant to be back in academic land, the comfortable home of a large part of my twenties.
The other part of me is uncomfortable with just how comfortably I slot into academic life. I can write a grant proposal! I can spit out a 5-point essay, in my sleep! I can pull out references to French post-structuralism! I can use “queer” and “trouble” as verbs!
Even though I enjoyed my undergrad degree, even though it dramatically shaped how think and exposed me to some of the things (from artwork to writers to ideas to politics) that I hold dear today, in the years since I find myself wanting to trouble the academic experience. (See, I told you!)
MFA writing programs have their historically-entrenched problems, whether that’s solidifying a system of gatekeeping in the publishing industry, perpetuating white supremacy under the guise of “craft,” or kinda-sorta-maybe acting as a tool of the FBI to spread pro-American/capitalist propaganda. In the space between applying to and accepting my offer at grad school, I found myself seeking out resources and people who would tell me, you don’t need to get an MFA to become a writer. (I think this is very true, and good advice, by the way.)
Questions were tumbling around my brain that made me wonder if I really wanted to chase institutional validation for the art I wanted to pursue. Would the system encourage a certain kind of writing from me? One that upheld a political and social status quo? Would it demand something particular of me, something I wasn’t prepared to give? Or demand nothing of me in my privilege, but force others into its shape? Would I come out of it with “MFA voice”? Would I be taking up space in an already too-white institution? Would I learn anything?
It turns out many of those questions are unanswerable, or at least have to be answered by some version of, “yes, and no.” Ultimately, though, this period of thinking-through was helpful on a personal level. I was able to figure out what I wanted to get out of an MFA, as well as what parts of my artistic practice and my writing I might need to protect from some kind of institutional inflection, and what parts of myself I needed to open up. Despite what systemic reservations that I still hold, my program in particular has been extremely helpful in shaping what kind of artist I want to be. Also, not to be all Virginia Woolf about it, but it feels like one of the few opportunities available for a writer working today to experience the “writing life” in the stereotypical sense borne by previous generations: to live simply and simply write, rather than squeezing your writing in around a full time job and/or several part-time hustles. (That is, if you are able to find a graduate program with good funding.) This past year I’ve been surrounded by many thoughtful and passionate instructors and students who are all conscious of these same concerns.
Through them and through my panicked pre-MFA reading list, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the workshop might be refigured as a site of anti-oppressive work. There has been a shift in recent years away from the “Iowa model” in which the workshopping writer is silent throughout their critique and unable to respond to feedback, as countless writers (mostly racialized and/or otherwise marginalized) churned through that system have come out the other side with extremely pertinent critiques. In my program, I’ve found that most of my instructors have instead used some variation on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process.
But this has also made me think back to my first experiences sharing my writing, in high school and during my undergraduate degree. I don’t remember ever being introduced to what you might call a workshop model; just a bunch of teenagers shifting uncomfortably in their seats while a teacher opened their palms and said, “Well, what do you think of so-and-so’s story?”
In Felicia Rose Chavez’s wonderful The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, she relays an anecdote about the pushback she received about her collaborative, writer-centred workshop framework. This came almost entirely from white, male students, who complained to her that their classmates were being “too nice,” and that they wanted their work to be ripped apart, “because they can ‘take it.’” She writes,
“They want to compete in workshop. Or, more accurately, they want to win workshop. […] I suggest that the students focus less on the workshop critique they receive and more on the prompts they provide. Did they ask pointed questions to elicit specific, insightful feedback, or were they passive, vague, sacrificial storytellers awaiting the knife? ‘Is it any good?’ these white male students tend to ask, well accustomed to instantaneous response […]. Confident in their place in the world, their effortless access to attentive ears, they balk at politeness as though it were backward: ‘I don’t want to be spoken to that way; I want callousness, the ‘Truth.’”
I felt read to filth the first time I encountered that section. As a white girl who always did well academically, I’d never had to examine my own process or goals when I was younger. In my undergrad, the only question I could think to ask about my work was: Is it any good? Back then, I felt a compulsion to write but didn’t know what I was writing about. In my English classes, I thought up theses through which to deconstruct the works I read, measuring their value against their provability, lining up arguments to further my point, just as I was taught. Then I’d type it up, check for typos, print it off, slide it across my professor’s desk and wait for an A.
There was one creative writing class available in my English program, and when I took it, I was somehow simultaneously terrified-slash-nervous and completely snobby. I couldn’t identify what my stories were about or why I was writing them or what I was really trying to say. But, I thought, I could tell they were better than some of my classmates’. I was fully insufferable.
I operated just like the dudes in Felicia Rose Chavez’s example, bringing my little excerpts to class and waiting to hear whether what I’d written was good or bad. I had no internal measure, no stylistic drive, I just wanted approval. I could tell I was parroting the style and subject matter of authors I loved, but I couldn’t identify why those particular styles appealed to me, and I never questioned my inherent assumptions about what kinds of people and situations literary short stories were supposed to be about. (I remember submitting for class a short story in the first-person perspective of a sad man whose wife had recently left him, who pined over her and then sadly unloaded the dishwasher but didn’t know where anything went. I was like eighteen, had never been in a relationship, and lived in my parents’ house.)
I find that within my cohort we talk a lot about pedagogy, not only because we all care about these kinds of tensions but also because teaching, learning, and grading creative work can be a strange, futile exercise. Sometimes people who aren’t writers ask me, how can you grade something so subjective? I think it’s actually not that complicated to grade writing; you can define the technical parameters on which you’re grading the work, and then see if it meets them. More pressing is the question, should you grade something so creative? Should you define those parameters at all, risk flattening something so intimate and expansive into something measured against some futile metric? The fact is, grading has never been the same as learning, despite what I thought as an 18-year-old collecting GPA points like a little gremlin.
A favourite writer of mine, Daniel Lavery, recently wrote in his newsletter:
“I was the sort of child who hated being asked to think more than I loved being praised. On subjects that came easily to me I was tractable, even precocious, attentive, diligent, and eager. All other subjects I avoided. Some of them I dismissed as unimportant, when what I really meant was I found them difficult, and I found everything that was not immediately and intuitively easy to be difficult.”
As a young person, I did conflate learning with being graded; I adopted the idea that being asked to think at all was being measured. My thoughts didn’t matter unless I could express them coherently, in a way that would impress others. What was difficult was rarely worth doing because I would be bad at it, and there was no point in doing something you were bad at, except to “become better,” and quickly.
All this is to say, this past year I’ve been learning (and unlearning) a lot—about myself, and my work, about what I really want to say and why and how. Puncturing the myth that work should either solicit backflip-level praise or the “harsh truth” of ruthless critique and nothing of value in between. Genuinely thinking through the purpose of putting something out into the world. And I have honestly no idea what my GPA is. 📚
Writing news
I don’t have many writing updates to share as I get back into the rhythm of school. But I have recently joined the River Street Writing community, which promotes small-press Canadian literature, as a book reviewer! Give them a follow online (I may or may not pop up soon as a featured reviewer …)
Book Corner
Some of my favourite things I’ve read lately:
Just to stay on theme … I recently devoured Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans, and, well, all grad students and most of twitter found dead. That’s mostly a joke—the novel is really imagistic and has a spectacular, subtle emotional quality, and I loved the multiplicity of voices and the nuance brought to difficult relationships by examining them from all sides. But also I darkly chuckled through all the poetry-workshop scenes.
In my favourite genre of academic, Being Extremely Academic About Supposedly Minor and/or Silly Subjects, Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke is a great entry. Her intensely researched book traces the human butt through historical, social, and representational implications, from Sarah Baartman to BBLs. Highly recommend.
I read this a few months ago, but I’m still thinking through Sarah Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind. There is also some great, snarky-yet-cuttingly-perceptive discussion of MFAs amid the general scathing Schulman commentary.
And also, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I have nothing to say about it except: *dreamy sigh.*
Other Links
After all that talk about writing workshops, I feel I should mention the lovely Firefly Creative Writing Studio, where I’ve been taking workshops on and off since 2017. It is the best! It was through classes there that I really learned how nourishing and fruitful a writing workshop can be.
Some more foundational reading on this and related subjects if you’re interested: Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World; Viet Thanh Nguyen’s New York Times piece from a couple years ago; Tajja Isen’s essay “Tiny White People Took Over my Brain,” which lives rent-free in my brain; basically everything the wonderful Alicia Elliott writes, including this interview in Room magazine!
I’ve had a long simmering fascination with beekeeping and the possibilities around preventing pollinator decline, so I was fascinated to read this New Yorker story about natural beekeepers.
I’ve listened to the podcast The Retrievals twice through already, and I keep thinking about it. The subject matter is heavy, but the story and its central meditation on women’s pain is fascinating. I love the care with which Susan Burton approaches the topic.
And on another note entirely: has everyone seen Bottoms?? I really only want to talk about Bottoms.
These had ended up in my “clutter” - these are far from clutter! Well done Jo!