Anthropomorphosis

today's mood

Today I sent six queries for Plan 9 publicity and a few followups to agents as well. I've done as little of this work as I possibly can over the past year, but today, suddenly, I had the energy to do it. I also slept well two nights in a row after not sleeping well for several weeks on end. 

I'm not going to say that all of this was because I spent time with horses on three of the last five days, but that certainly made a difference. 

It's very strange to learn something fundamental about yourself well into adulthood. In my case, it's that I like animals. I didn't spend any time with animals when I was young (other than small pets like hamsters - I do not like rodents, I've learned), and only in the last few years have I discovered how much I love being with horses and dogs and, when I have access to immediate hand-washing and laundry, cats too. Time with animals has the capacity to turn my mental health around, which is a genuine surprise. 

The time with horses was spent at a ranch about an hour north of me. I'm going to try to go there once a week until I can't anymore. The difference in horsemanship between this (western/endurance riding, starting wild horses under saddle) and the stable I worked at for 18 months (dressage) is so profound that the only similarity is the existence of horses. The disparity, the feeling of starting over, led me into a bunch of panicky questions about what I'm even doing with myself and my time, what the years past 40 are going to look like for me, what this is all for. How do I do this? How do I continue it? 

My brother-in-law is a highly strategic person (on the outside - what do I know about his insides?). He planned his life really well, from college on, and now he's living it. That sounds satisfying, and yet seems impossible for me to do. I admire it but am perplexed by it. What if life changes in a way not accounted for by his plan? What if he discovers he badly wants something unstrategic? 

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Today, my second book finally appeared on Amazon, even though it's not yet available to order on Amazon. Baby steps. 

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Making plans for a three-city visit back east in March: central Virginia, Philadelphia, NYC. Hope I'll see you there. More details as I know them. 

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EDIT TO SECTION BELOW: holy crap, I already blogged about this, five years ago. I said some of the same things then that I said below, but I was not as nice about it then. Shame on me for not looking more carefully at my own past words. 

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Recently I had cause to remember and link to this essay. In reading it again, I found that I wasn't just remembering it for the reason I linked to it, which is this passage: "And I will say, too, that he was a man obsessed. While the rest of us were screwing around with our crushes and debating whether or not to use our middle initial when published, he was writing. I mean really writing, all the time, sometimes a rumored fourteen hours a day." 

The "he" is Joshua Ferris, who hit a grand slam with his debut novel, Then We Came to the End. He was lucky, but here is proof that he also worked extraordinarily hard. There is no one way to be a successful writer, especially because "success" bears such a range of meanings. But most assuredly, you are more likely to find whatever kind of success you want if you put your head down and write than if you engage with Writer Drama (which is...significant). 

The passage didn't teach me this lesson, but it did crystallize it: you can talk about writing, you can have sex about writing, you can dramaturge about writing, but the only way you will publish is by actually, literally, provably writing. 

But again, upon reread, this article opened up a bunch more avenues for me to think about. 

• On the way things get magnified in a small, absurd environment like an MFA program: "It would be years before I realized that almost none of it, at least what had happened in workshop, mattered at all." 
  
  
• On room at the table: "We are entirely different writers and, as such, weren’t competing at all. I would tell myself that his success had no bearing on whether or not I would have any, and dwelling on it only amounted to a shitload of wasted time." 
  
  
• On hard truths: "I’ve been forced to come to grips with what all writers must face at some point: No one — and I mean no one — except for you, and maybe your mother, cares if you write." 
  
  
• On what's required of a male writer vs. what's required of a female writer post-MFA: "A few years later his novel came out [...] and he was lauded as the Second Coming of Franzen. What was I doing during this time? [...] Taking care of my sister during her bout with cancer." 
  
  
• On the toxicity of the standard MFA workshop: "It was so terrible, Geoffrey so unnecessarily unkind, that if it had happened to me, I would have been in the fetal position in the corner of the room after the first fifteen minutes." 
  
  
• On why MFAs are a terrible idea for people who haven't developed enough integrity of self to compartmentalize work and relationships, as they're too young, with too little life experience: "...but then you hang out, you drink, you make out, you realize you are competing with one another for the prize of attention and praise and connections and publication, you have inappropriate crushes on people who are not available but act like they are, and yes, hello, all of that taints your views of other people’s work." 

I don't agree with everything Mims says in this piece. But it's an extraordinarily useful essay to dissect and consider, whether you think MFAs are good or bad, whether you think spite is a useful driver of hard work or not, whether you think it's fine to mix sex with writing workshop or not. I think this essay should be required reading for anyone applying to an MFA program. 

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I'm working my way through BoJack Horseman (which is extraordinary). I do not think it's related that I've found a new horse place to spend time, but it sure is fun that they're happening together. 

Real Question: Is Workshop Always Stupid?

Yesterday I had the good fortune to need this article as a reference to a friend who was asking my opinion of MFA programs. Give that article a read if you haven't read it, or even if you haven't read it in a while. I'll wait.

Back? Okay. I love that article. Four years later, I still think of it a few times a month. For a variety of reasons.

1) What the writer reveals about herself. At the time the article was new, the Observer blog said more or less what I have to say about what the writer reveals about herself in the course of the article. But it was said much more unkindly than I would have said it. Some of what the writer revealed was deliberate, but a whole lot of it was not. In brief: you're not over it, girlfriend.

Pictured: Joshua Ferris with workshoppee

2) The nature of the MFA. Evidently, the MFA is not just two years of protected time and space for writing. It's also a hotbed of drinking and sex and gossip and petty power struggles. Yulgh. There are other ways to do it, of course - namely, the way Ferris evidently did it.

...he was a man obsessed. While the rest of us were screwing around with our crushes and debating whether or not to use our middle initial when published, he was writing. I mean really writing, all the time, sometimes a rumored fourteen hours a day.

The connection between Ferris staying away from happy hours and Ferris landing a huge book deal with his first novel seems to have been lost on the writer. She notes that "[h]e cared more about his own writing than he did about me - than any of us, really - and wanted only to achieve his goal of becoming a successful writer" but she doesn't seem to realize that's why he achieved the goal. Not because he was a blessed golden boy all along, but because he wrote while everyone else was playing Spin the Bottle. Instead of crying in and about workshop, he fucking worked.

3) Workshop is stupid. Either Ferris didn't articulate it very well, or the writer couldn't see far enough past her own experience to understand, but workshop is pointless if your writing is better than your peers' and this article presents that plainly.

“Well, she needs the criticism,” Josh said earnestly. “I’d love that kind of a workshop. I’d welcome that kind of feedback.” 

This from the golden boy whose stories had been universally praised, lauded even, who’d never had one negative thing said about his writing.

Yeah! Which means he never had a chance to grow as a writer in the workshop environment! He hasn't gotten the help that being eviscerated in workshop actually is. That's what he meant when he said he'd love it. He wants to grow. 

However, the writer is simultaneously too sensitive and too thick to appreciate evisceration. She takes it personally and argues back. (This is not a good strategy.) But she also fails to comprehend that it's all to the betterment of her writing, and that she needs to be as hard on her work as the eviscerators her creative writing professors and peers are. 

To recap: workshop is not helping Ferris, who is too advanced for the class to be able to tear him up, and workshop is not helping the writer, who is too immature to use what she's given. So who is workshop helping? 

[cricket] 

[cricket] 

4) School is school, not the world. 

As we left the workshop, a friend said, “You were totally vindicated. Totally.” 

“Yep,” I said - and then it was over. The moment and then graduate school. It would be years before I realized that almost none of it, at least what had happened in workshop, mattered at all.

Indeed. What matters is whether you can get in your chair and do the work. Which Ferris did. 

4a) The MFA is maybe sort of terrible. Not just because of #2, or because it's full of workshops and see #3, but because:

Maybe the first workshop, when you all don’t know one another so well, but then you hang out, you drink, you make out, you realize you are competing with one another for the prize of attention and praise and connections and publication, you have inappropriate crushes on people who are not available but act like they are, and yes, hello, all of that taints your views of other people’s work.

Let's unpack. a) Hanging out, drinking, making out, and inappropriate crushes are pretty dumb reasons to spend two years in graduate school. You're wasting resources: professors' time, writers' time, your time; universities' money, your money; your liver, your talent, your lovesick heart. b) Competition for attention is an alluring race, but running that race over and over is not a mature way to move through the world. Grow up. c) Connections and publication, on the other hand, are limited and practical resources, but if you really think that shouldering other people aside and brown-nosing for access to them will not be seen through like a window by the people with the connections, you are an idiot. Write well. "Write so blazingly good that you can't be framed."

And most importantly d) don't buy in to the social bullshit and you won't get bias in the way people workshop you. If they come at you with bias anyway, that's not helpful feedback, and the person is a crummy workshopper with bad karma if they let personal bias shape discussion of the work.

This whole paragraph comes out of immaturity. If this is the environment of an MFA program as well-regarded as Irvine's, why the hell would I want to get an MFA?

5) Yes, there's a difference between men writing and women writing. Or, there's a difference between decent people and relentless people. Or both. 

What was I doing during this time? Cocktailing. Vaguely writing, working on a story collection that would go absolutely nowhere.  Taking care of my sister during her bout with cancer. 

Time shunted from writing into caring for her sister: I seriously doubt that Ferris, or Updike or Steinbeck or Pound, would remove himself from his career in letters in order to care for a family member who needed him. But then, I doubt that Rebecca West or Katherine Mansfield would have, either. Maybe this is one of those cases of gender tendencies making the situation look sexist and unfair, while the non-gendered differences between kinds of people lessen the reality of that sexism and unfairness a little bit. Because "vaguely writing" is not the way Ferris was writing in grad school. And it wasn't the way Karen Russell wrote in grad school, either, I'd bet. And if you can't do better than write vaguely in grad school, you won't be able to do it out in the world, either. That I know for sure.

6) To sum up: write without regard to others if you actually want to be a writer. Don't invest much in workshop, one way or the other. Don't waste energy hating people who don't notice you because they're living their lives. And behave well enough to your fellows in grad school that they won't write bitchy articles about you later.