This post picks up where Part 11 left, exploring the writing workshop with Joe, AKA Professor Joseph K. Dr. Jules had managed to break my confidence. I also felt lost as a writer.
A young writer faces many challenges. The main challenge (which the others fall under) is the issue of material. Many young writers have not had much life experience, yet they absolutely want to write. No doubt they burn with energy and desire to create something and say something, to show others how they see things. Some have incredibly fertile imaginations, while others don’t. Many writers fall between the two. As a result, there is much experimenting to find one’s voice. One story form is tried after another, narrators change persons, characters become gay (or something else to make them interesting), attempts at cleverness are tried, and writers attempt to write in literary language. And a young writer is often not grounded to withstand other influences.
In the workshop, these influences are praise and criticism. It’s easy for a writer to become sloppy with her writing if she gets praise and little else. She may keep going, making the same crucial error after crucial error, because no one points it out to her. Praise is definitely a confidence booster, but it can also cause an ego trip. Criticism is an often misunderstood word. Criticism can (and often) comes across as tearing someone down. It’s associated with maliciousness and there is often malice by people who employ criticism in this manner. Ideally, criticism for the writer should be constructive, to help them make their works better. A good critic has an idea of what the writer is trying to say and addresses it.
I often received praise from Joe in the beginning. He praised me for my scholarship, my comments in class, and for my creativity in during the first half of the limbo year. It definitely raised my confidence. I’ve never been a good literary scholar. I wasn’t bad; I often received B+’s in literature courses and sometimes I had those moments where I wrote or said something highly original in those classes. Perhaps I wasn’t skilled in the language of literary analysis, I didn’t read the texts hard enough, or a combination of both. There was one case in undergraduate school where we had an essay quiz on Othello. I read the act, but a classmate came in and hadn’t. I gave her a synopsis of the act and then we took our quizzes. I got a B and she got an A. It was through sheer imagination she got through the quiz, and it made me wonder if some “A” students in literature were better at talking their way through it. Given this, I had managed to impress Joe in his literature courses. I always knew I was higher in the creative side, but had little confidence. Often, my fellow students did not get what I was trying to do with the stuff I presented in workshops. Sometimes the teacher didn’t get it either. Joe seemed to grasp what I was about when I first presented a story to him. Or did Joe simply form an idea that he had about me?
So, when I presented the work that amended my portfolio, Joe had high praise for it. He even presented careful line edits. But this seemed to decline as the semester progressed. Joe never even sent me an in absentia response for the second story (reviewed by the class while he was away for a reading). When Gillian and I did an e-mail exchange using the personas of Edie Sedgwick and Valerie Solanis, he gave me a mixed response – I got Solanis’s obsessiveness but lacked the panache. His response to my third story was lukewarm. As I mentioned in the previous post, I did not take it well.
It was difficult to hear other writers get praised at this time, especially Harlan, Jill, and Dr. Jules. They weren’t great, but it seemed important to stroke these novices. Sometimes, this form of positive reinforcement can lead to disappointment. Joe praised the work of someone in a previous workshop and she sent it to the journal for consideration. I read the story, but I really didn’t like it. Since she knew Joe, I passed it on to him and he rejected it. I don’t know how she took it, but it certainly must have been a shock. Joe did give me helpful comments, but I don’t think I was really listening. Instead, I fought within myself about being jealous for cheap praise.
I mentioned in the previous post that Dr. Jules’s comments destroyed me. If a writer has little confidence, then it is possible to let the mean comments of others get to them. In one of his moments of wisdom, Joe told me that I shouldn’t worry about what others think of me. In Bonnie Friedman’s Writing Past Dark, she mentions a Chinese proverb that says if one worries about someone’s approval, then they are their prisoner. It’s easy to let the Dr. Jules of the world take us prisoner. Then there are people less malevolent than Dr. Jules, the peers of the workshop. If the story is written to meet their approval, then it ceases to be a story. It’s a stripped down version of the story. Regardless of how the criticism is delivered, a writer needs to be careful. A thick skin helps. But the ability to see if it is useful or useless criticism is more important.
It was hard for me to listen, to filter out what was helpful. It was also difficult for me to stay focused. I was busy commuting to an east county community college for a tutoring gig, doing whatever was needed with Professor K’s journal, and doing work for “Madness In Literature” seminar. There was no real time to develop studio habits. I was successful with a literary experiment, but how could I keep it up, once it demanded that I continue the story?
I think this is where the decline started. I don’t think I was being served as a writer. I was busy serving Joe. I knew Jackson was getting served and he was becoming friends with Joe. I felt I had to work to get Joe’s approval. Jackson didn’t. Or perhaps he was serving Joe by being in his orbit. I remember feeling resentful at one point, but swallowed it. Like any poision, the resentment would not go away. It was deep inside and it would only be a matter of time before I was aware of it again. But that was months away.
At the end of the semester, Tomas asked me to e-mail everyone to announce his graduation party. Holly sent me an interesting response. She joked that it seemed that Joe was farming out my services and that there should be a labor union set up for me. I chuckled, but a year later, I wished there was a union to mediate between Joe and me. And a year after that, I would help Stevie do the groundwork for a graduate student workers’ union at the University.
To be continued…
Tags: creative non-fiction, graduate school, If You Want To Go To Grad School, workplace issues
