Post-Stonecoast Apology (kind of)

In the early days of our friendship, my dear friend Carina and I would sit and compare notes on the members of the opposite sex that we found attractive. Whether it was drooling over this musician’s eyes or this actor’s ass, or on rare occasions, actually both knowing the person either of us was lusting over, one thing was immediately clear: We had nothing in common when it came to what we were attracted to in the male sex. On more occasions than not, not only did we not find the lust-object desirable, we found them down-right gross. The first few times, we would chastise the other, accusing the other of being blind or high or stupid or all three. After that, Carina simply shrugged. “At least we’ll never fight over the same man,” she’d say. That became the party line, one that we still use, fourteen years into our relationship.
I’ve come to apply this same philosophy to many interactions when it comes to me having vastly different opinions about particular experiences with my friends. It’s easier than insulting them when they rave over the newest book by the author you loathe, declining invitations to concerts of bands you think suck balls, or throwing up in your mouth when they mention trying to set you up with this “really cute” guy they work with. You just giggle off taste preference differences and no one’s feelings are hurt.
Throughout my five writing conference residencies, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with my fellow writers about mentors and workshop leaders. We are lucky enough to have published, successful, working writers mentor us, read our original text, and constructively comment to make us better. I’m always amazed when my “fabulous experience” with a particular mentor is so completely different than another writer’s, especially when I it is a writer I really admire and feel a kinship. True, you can always say it was because that student worked with the mentor another time, with another group dynamic, when the Jupiter was in retrograde. But when it is a student is in the same workshop as you and comes away from it with a polar opposite vibe, it can be, well, awkward, to say the least. There you are, spouting compliments like a volcano and they want to punch the instructor/mentor/workshop leader in the throat.
What you thought was supportive and cheerleader-esque, the other person read as rude, inconsiderate, and just plain mean. What you thought was fabulous input, the others thought was a waste of place in the Stone House. Can you just chalk that up to difference of opinion?
In all honesty, it is usually me who is the person who has had the terrible experience with the workshop leader when the others are ready to give birth to the teacher’s children. I’ll admit, I’m a stubborn Taurus, and once someone has crossed me the wrong way (justified or not) I usually don’t forgive them (even if doing so would be “appropriate,” “mature,” or “in my best interest.”) I’m a jerk when it comes to things like that, especially when it’s my graduate education and I know I’ll be paying off student loans until my daughter is 87 years old. I want the best and want to work with the best. Even if I don’t act the best myself….
Of course, there is a certain sense of justification when you find someone (or many someone’s who share your distaste (dare I say hatred) of the said instructor/mentor. I want to jump up and say, “Ha! I’m not the only one!” (even of it is the minority opinion)
Fast forward to last week, my last residency before graduating with my MFA. I was talking to other writers that I respect deeply on a personal and professional level. We were talking about a particular mentor that we had mutually worked with that I had a horrific experience with (and thus have held a grudge against) and who she had worked with and loved. As she glowed on about how she had grown as a writer as a result of working with said mentor, I had to share my not-so-positive-or-flattering opinions loudly. Afterwards, I felt badly because, well, I didn’t want it to come across as an insult to the student (just the teacher!)
How, then, do you tactfully insult someone’s opinion of something they like (a lot) without hurting them a little bit in the process?
I wish I could hold my tongue, but I can’t. I wish I could be more forgiving, but I can’t. I’m stubborn and old unchanging and set in my ways, good and bad.
I do, however, offer this nugget of reconciliation, and I hope that it is enough…
At least we’ll never fight over the same man…er, mentor…

Writing and Me: In the Beginning

The first conscious memory I have of writing for pleasure and not necessity was in the second grade. It was spring, and Mrs. Vitro, my young and inexperienced twentysomething year-old teacher was attempting to bring a little creativity to our otherwise mundane Catholic school curriculum. It was spring, and that meant that all the teachers in Our Lady Star of the Sea would decorate the bulletin boards and windows with something spring-themed: impossibly colored flowers and smiling suns, Easter eggs and bunny rabbits. Jesus had died for our sins, been resurrected, and summer vacation was right around the corner.
“Okay, class,”’ she said, passing around Xeroxed sheets in the shape of a butterfly with five lines inside its wings, one for the title, four for the poem we were tasked to write, “we are going to write a poem about spring.” She then wrote, in her best teacher penmanship, a sample:
Spring
Spring is here.
Let’s all cheer.
Spring is great.
Let’s celebrate!
“Now, boys and girls, I want you to cut out your butterfly as neatly as possible.” She continued. “Write a poem about spring and then decorate it with bright colors.” The class of uniformed students uniformly copied Mrs. Vitro’s poem, maybe transposing a line or two, the daring ones or those who simply couldn’t follow directions varying the order. Then they cut the butterflies out with safety scissors and used their Crayolas to mimic butterfly designs. I did something different.
I wrote a poem about a bumble bee that loved a butterfly but shied away from expressing his true feelings because he thought she would be afraid of his stinger. I didn’t think anything of it. It was a poem about a butterfly, written in my neatest penmanship. Really, I wanted to get to the coloring, what I felt was the more fun part of the assignment. But when I brought my poem up for the teacher’s inspection, a necessary part of the assignment, she looked at me with surprise.
“Did you write this?” she asked. I thought I had done something wrong and reluctantly nodded that I had.
“Rebecca!” she said, smiling. “You can write!”
It was then, at age seven, that I realized I possessed a spark that everyone else didn’t have. I could write.
Over the rest of my elementary and high school years, I filled countless marble and spiral notebooks. I wrote plays and cast my friends in the roles. I wrote poems and stories and novellas. My mother told me that every single teacher praised my writing ability and assured her that one day I was going to be a writer. I wrote for my high school newspaper and literary arts magazine, eventually becoming editor of both. I made a ton of extra money writing other students’ college admissions essays. It was easy, and I could never understand why people struggled with it. Just write. It seemed simple enough.
Despite these accolades from my instructors and peers, the biggest validation of my writing ability came during my junior year of high school. Creative Writing was an elective for juniors and seniors only, a special course reserved for a select few. The teacher was Joe Morale, a chubby guy with thick glasses, bordering on nerdish. He wore jeans every single day. He was funny and inspiring, but he was also extremely critical. It was the first time in my life I ever got less than an A on a writing assignment. He was stingy with his praise, assuring us that he wasn’t doing us any favors by telling us we were perfect and couldn’t get any better. We improved, he told us, by learning what wasn’t working in our stories so we could make it better.
I adored him.
He introduced me to Rocky Horror and the Who’s Tommy. He wrote long comments on our assignments, asking pointed questions about character motivation, symbolism, and realistic dialogue. He was a passionate writer himself, authoring several plays that were produced by small-time local theater companies and performed in the Jewish Community Center. I always saw him as a writer first, teaching school to pay the bills. Most students were shocked – and even insulted -- by his brutal honesty. Whenever a student told him he or she wanted to be a writer, he was famous for responding, “Don’t quit your day job.” He slapped you in the face with reality: not everyone was talented, not everyone could be a writer.
I was petrified to turn in my final paper, a first-person narrative about where we saw writing fitting into our futures. Dare I tell him that I hoped to write someday? Dare I risk being told that I wasn’t nearly as talented as I thought? Perhaps I could instead tell him I aspired to be something more practical, a journalist who dabbled in creative writing for fun. I even wrote that if I ever did get a book published, I would dedicate it to Mrs. Vitro, the first teacher who made me feel proud of my writing.
When I got my paper back, it was uncharacteristically unmarked, without critique, except for a simple sentence at the end of the essay. It said, “Dedicate your second book to me.”
It was more validation than I could have ever hoped for, especially from Joe Morale.
In my yearbook, under his smiling picture, he wrote, “Remember that life is precious.” I thought he was referencing the chronic depression I battled and wrote about. It was during his class that I started wearing black and rimming my eyes with thick eyeliner. I listened to the Sex Pistols and The Cure and The Ramones. I wrote long, wordy opinion pieces in the school newspaper about how pointless I felt it was to live in Bayonne, New Jersey, how people who stayed in New Jersey were bound to be sucked into the cesspool of despair that clung to every mile of the Garden State Parkway. I broke the school dress code and refused to take off my sunglasses in class. I bragged when I made a new teacher cry. Saying life was precious was akin to saying, “Good morning, Star Shine, the earth says hello.” I thought he was being his sarcastic self, thumbing his nose at my lugubrious ways.
Mr. Morale died of AIDS-related complications four years after I graduated. He was 41 years old.
Coincidentally, it was during this time I stopped writing. I was an English major at USM, shedding my journalist aspirations years earlier when I realized that I didn’t like reporting and writing about facts. I didn’t know what I was going to do with a BA in English. I just knew that I liked to read, and writing academic papers about literature seemed like an easy way to earn a degree. I didn’t have time to write creatively, not when there were failed relationships to focus on and alcohol I could legally drink. I certainly didn’t have time to write after I found out I was pregnant, a result of a rebound relationship. Suddenly, with a baby in my near future, I had to focus on graduating and getting a job.
I took a creative writing class in college because it fit into my schedule and fulfilled a requirement for my major. I hadn’t written anything non-academic in years, and rekindling my lost creativity felt like the first time I ate an oyster, scary and unfamiliar. I stared at my computer screen, the cursor blinking back at me, without a single thing to say. Long gone were the days when I could make up stories, spit out pages of dialogue without hesitation, adjectives pouring from me. The class was filled with aspiring poets and prosers… I wanted to tell them all not to quit their day jobs. If I had one, I wouldn’t have quit mine.
My daughter was born, and single motherhood and full-time classes didn’t leave time for writing. What could I write about, anyway? My life was filled with diapers and breastfeeding, term papers and studying for the GRE. I was going to be practical and get a graduate degree in higher education administration. I was going to grow up, become marketable. I wanted something safe, something with benefits and paid vacation leave. Writing wasn’t going to give me any of those things, so I didn’t give it any consideration. I went forward with my life, sans writing.
I thought I was happy.
I earned an MS Ed in college administration and landed a job in upstate New York, at one of the state universities. I liked working with the students and adored my staff. For fun, one weekend, my assistant Nychey asked me if I wanted to go with her to see a psychic. It seemed harmless enough. I was 30 and hoping to move to the west coast where I could get an administrative position that allowed me to teach a few college classes. I thought I was happy even though I was single and lonely. Maybe this psychic could give me some direction. The first thing she said to me was, “There’s a man… who has passed… with dark hair and glasses…And he wants to know why … you stopped writing?”

On Bird by Bird...

I know that makes me a terrible person, or at least a terrible writing student, to admit this: but I did not expect to enjoy a book on craft. True, it is a fact that I love words and writing and reading so much that I decided that being a single mom and a full time teacher and already having a Masters degree was not enough and I needed an MFA. I did so because I wanted to write, and silly me, I didn’t really consider the very real possibility that there would be some scholarly writing involved, some readings dedicated completely to the process of writing. Perhaps I should have read the Stonecoast manual closer.
It was not my intention to start my first annotation assignment by reading Anne Lamott. Honestly, I had not heard of her before, another example of what a horrible writing student I actually am. But, as fate would have it, the first book that arrived at my local library was Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
Again, I had no intention of enjoying it. None at all.
When I opened the book, the first thing I noticed was a four by four piece of white paper that a child had crudely drawn a picture of Eloise, a children’s book character about a six year old girl who lives on the top floor of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Heroine Eloise was a girl who was unafraid of challenges and adventure, and so I decided that this was a sign by the literary goddesses that Eloise would be my guide into this brave new world of writing. Eloise was my guide through the text and I used the photo that, undoubtedly, one of the artist’s parents had used too, as a bookmark. Together, she and I would travel through the Lamott’s five worlds: Writing, The Writing Frame of Mind, Help Along the Way, Publication – and Other Reasons to Write, and The Last Class. It is always important to have a guide when starting a new journey and she was mine.
I don’t know why I assumed that Lamott was this stuffy, scholarly, Emily Dickinson-like woman, but I did. Surely, Eloise assures me, I wouldn’t choose to live in a book like that. Trust me. So I did, and before I even got through the introduction, I wanted to call Lamott up on the phone and hang out for a few hours. The writing was (is) gorgeous, but that wasn’t why I liked it. I felt like she understood every little thing I was going through: the elation of writing that perfect sentence, the fear that everything you write is utter crap, worrying about money, and the jealousy of other’s success. I felt like she was talking directly to me. I told you so, Eloise told me.
In the first section on Writing, the absolute most powerful lesson I learned was the concept of the Shitty First Draft. SFD is something that I fight with regularly. I often ask myself why it is so difficult to sit down and write when I love writing and when I am constantly writing in my head. Why is it when it’s time to actually put the brilliant story that has taken shape in my mind on paper, it comes out to be this lame, poorly written, ridiculous ball of vanity? Why is it that once on paper I look at my baby and think, “ew, you were so much prettier before you were born”? I struggle with this so often, that I usually (unfortunately) decide that it’s better to simply keep the baby inside of me where it is fabulous and perfect and brilliant.
Of course, then no one gets to appreciate it but me, and, let’s be honest, then it really isn’t writing, is it? It’s just thinking. Perhaps someday, Apple will invent a device you can plug into the USB port of your mind and you can just think your stories and they will be typed onto the little device in perfect form. Until that day comes, I have no choice but to write it down. Lamott assures her readers – and really, isn’t she only talking to me? – that it’s okay to birth that ugly baby, put it down on paper, just write it into existence. Yes, it is going to be ugly – it’s supposed to be ugly! – but then you can pretty it up, add things, take things away, and yes, perhaps even erase it entirely, but at least it’s out there in the world. I am no longer afraid of SFD.
In The Writing Frame of Mind, Lamott introduced me to the radio station that I have been listening to since I was 7 years old and started writing creatively: KFKD. You know that station, every artist has listened to it nonstop for their entire creative life. It’s that station that reminds you again and again that everything you ever have or ever will create is utter garbage and perhaps you should get a nice, safe job in a bank. (Of course, the banking industry is kind of in the toilet right now, so maybe this writing thing is the safer option right now… hmmm). Either way, it’s that constantly playing station that assures you Murphy’s Law is very much in effect and nothing will go right ever and so it’s stupid to even try. Instead, Lamott reminds us to go with the flow of the river of life, and of our creativity, to allow for temporary setbacks and fears and life getting in the way. None of those are reasons to stop writing. KFKD can be mesmerizing in its grotesqueness, and it’s easy to get so used to listening to it that you believe every word it plays. Don’t listen, Eloise wisely told me. I promised her I’d at least try.
Another lesson (more of a life lesson than writing one for me) that was in this particular section was about jealousy. Oh I am a very, very jealous person. I do not want to be a jealous person, I don’t like jealous people, it doesn’t feel good to be on either end of the jealousy – why do I do it? I guess the first reason would be that it is a natural and universal, though somewhat disheartening, emotion. The second would be that when it comes to our art, ego gets in the way big time, especially when you know your writing is ten trillion times better than the fabulously rich and published and popular friend of yours. I loved that Lamott gave us permission to be jealous – some people are rewarded in this world who we think are less deserving that we are – but that the important thing to remember is to not let that jealousy stop us from going forward. I’m working on that.
Help Along the Way reinforced some practices I’ve already made a part of my writing life. I already have a little notebook that I carry around with me to jot down lines and ideas and bits of dialog that I overhear. I consider Stonecoast my writers group that gives me unbiased, honest, sometimes brutal, but always helpful feedback on my writing. And I already have some friends, both writers and non writers, who will read my drafts (shitty and otherwise) and give me real critiques about what works and what doesn’t even work a little bit. (I count you in this category, Cait!)
The last sections in BbB were on publication and the advice she gives to her last class of students, and this was the one that scared me the most. Like all artists, I want my work to be published and accepted and praised and loved… and if it landed me a guest spot on Oprah and made me a ton of money and got a lifetime book deal, well, that would be okay with me too. But the truth is, I have no idea whether any of that will ever happen. I’ve never sent anything out for publication. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Lamott reminded me that even if my work gets published, there is no guarantee that any of that other stuff will happen. No one may like it, critics may crucify me for it, and Oprah may never call. I feel like I’m setting myself up for a lot of rejection and sadness and hard feelings. Then why do you still want it? Eloise asked me, always the devil’s advocate. And my answer? Because, like Lamott says, writing makes me feel less isolated. It doesn’t take away the bad things that happened, but somehow it helps to share them. I write because I can’t not write! (How’s that for an English teacher purposely using a double negative?) I write because I have all these stories and insights and just plain stuff going on in my brain and if I don’t get them out of there and on paper, well, I just may explode.
I may never call up a gardening expert and ask him to help me design the setting for my book. I don’t write that way. I need to write about what I know and see and feel and think. Lamott gave me permission to do that, and I like knowing that perhaps, someday, I will. I may never write a present or get over being jealous of other writers’ successes or carry around index cards. But you could, Eloise reminded me. Yes, yes I could.
BbB is due back to the library in a few weeks, and I will dutifully return it so others can enjoy it (and because I don’t want any late fees). I have seriously thought about keeping my little Eloise drawing so she can continue to guide me through this sometimes scary MFA process. But she doesn’t want me to. I know she has other work, and so I will tuck her back into the pages and I will send her back. I am both thrilled and saddened by this idea.
Despite my false starts and negative outlook, I very much enjoyed this book on craft. I plan on ordering the rest of Lamott’s books because I genuinely enjoy her voice and her style. I am confident that I would appreciate what she has to say. I may even write her a letter. I wonder if she’s on Facebook.
I used to have this fantasy that I would walk into a café in San Francisco and my three favorite authors SARK, Starhawk, and Amy Tan would all be sitting around a table sipping chai frappes and say, “Oh, we’ve been waiting for you and are so glad you’ve finally joined us!” I still have that fantasy, as silly as it seems. Only now, Anne Lamott is sitting there with them.
I can’t wait to tell her all about Eloise.

The Bends

They all warned me, but I didn't believe it.

I had attended similar events back when it was the Stonecoast Writers Conference in the '90s. I remembered how cool it was, the sense of community, and then the goodbyes when it was over. Sure, it was fun and all, and definitely worth attending again, but there was no way I felt unprepared for this residency (now that it was an MFA program). In fact, I was prepared to be anxious to leave and get back to my real life where I have a fabulous kid and a fabulous job and fabulous friends. Why on earth would I have difficulty leaving frozen Maine in January?

Was I ever wrong.

The truth was that today, four days after I came home, I feel so disoriented, so removed from my life, that I am literally counting the days until July 9 when I can return. I want to hang out with writers, published and those who will be soon. I want to talk about art and literature and smile all the time. I want to eat organic food from O'Naturals and end every other conversation with, "so say we all."

I wish someone hadn't only warned me, but had prepared me, about the difficulty of returning to my "real" life, my non-SC life. I wish someone would teach me how to adjust as painlessly as possible back into my real life...