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Workshopping Workshop: A Reading List

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When I think of workshop, I think of fluorescent lights and scuffed linoleum. Long tables configured into a square, beverages — iced tea, coffee, kombucha, root beer, lemonade, reusable metal water bottles — dotting the square’s perimeter. A window, maybe, where crows blur past just before the last light of day fades. Notes of a distant marching band needling their way into the room. I think of what is insisted — we need to know more about the speaker. The arguments over minutiae — does the sidewalk cover the length between her house and the gas station? The compliments, the summaries, the probing, the attention to detail, the wanting for more, the gifts of enthusiasm, the rooms where cultures of respect flourish, and those where someone tugs at a thread until any sense of community unravels.

What I mean to say is workshop is a tender ecosystem, one that connects the physical — stacks of marked paper, chalkboards, typed longform letters, uncomfortable chairs — with what often seems intangible or difficult to put into words. At its best, for me, workshop has held a kind of magic. In those spaces, I felt a sort of inner calm, a knowing that the others in the room brought their most complicated, nurturing selves to my pages and me to theirs. We demanded a lot from one another — held each other accountable for lazy moves, questioned form, encouraged experimentation — but did so with trust, and often joy.

But it wasn’t always that way. For a long time, during my undergraduate and MFA, I wrote almost compulsively about neurological illness; after losing parts of my memory, writing was not a salve, necessarily, but granted me the illusion of control, a feeling of power over my body and history that I often felt I lacked. The problem with writing about invisible illness, though, is simply that: it’s invisible. Invisible to doctors, my former Division I coach, former friends, administrators, professors, nearly anyone with authority to declare me well or unwell. It is also, due to the careful ways I choose to dress and present myself, invisible to peers. Once, in workshop, I submitted a piece about one of my neurological episodes in which I repeat the same word for hours on end, my head lolling back and forth, out of my control. In the hallway after my session was over, a peer, repeating the harm done to me by disbelieving medical professionals and so many others, quipped, “Well, I’ve never seen you do that before,” in a tone that suggested she didn’t trust the veracity of my narrative, or that she didn’t consider my illness grave enough to be worth writing about.

Different brushes with disbelief and a sundry of other insensitive questions have peppered my workshop experience over the years, both in workshop and in the halls after, but haven’t caused me any significant grief. As a white woman who passes as able-bodied when not episodic, I experience privilege in many ways. However, these questions from peers are usually rooted in deep-seated cultural misconceptions about what we perceive disability to be, and are rarely corrected by instructors, who have at times allowed the personal questions about my symptoms and condition to pass within workshop as being about “craft.”

As I move from workshop participant to workshop facilitator, I have been deeply considering exclusionary practices and systems of power — not only in workshop, but in academia as a whole — that allow for the perpetuation of harms directed toward people of color. In workshop, what, if anything, can be written on a syllabus or spoken aloud in class to ensure that each and every participant’s work is read with care? What is the role of a facilitator? What texts might be read throughout the course as a means of encouraging workshop participants to grapple with their own identities?

The vital essays curated here are not necessarily a direct answer to these questions, but they bring to light the violences engrained in workshop settings as well as offer resources for meaningful change.

1. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop (Beth Nguyen, April 3, 2019, Lit Hub)

When I asked a group of writers how they would describe their workshop experiences, responses included: crushing, nightmare, hazing ritual, test of endurance, awful, ugh. I’ve heard of students drinking before their workshops; I’ve heard of students crying in class and after it; I’ve heard of students never looking at their workshopped pieces again.

Most workshops follow the same format: the writer is silent while peers question, critique, and praise their piece. When Beth Nguyen began teaching her own, she wondered what it might mean to invite writers into the process by allowing them to speak. Nguyen ruminates on how unsilencing the workshop shifts dynamics of power, as well as offers practical examples from her courses to help others make similar beneficial change.

2. The Psychiatrist in My Writing Class and His ‘Gift’ of Hate (Rani Neutill, May 2019, Longreads)

When Rani Neutill, the only woman of color in class, submits her piece to be workshopped, a white psychiatrist responds by saying he hated her piece, and wonders aloud “when this writer learned to speak English.” Neutill examines the ways in which people of color “do not have the privilege of only showing, not telling” in their work, and questions the structure of workshop, the role of her instructor, and the multitude of ways in which the white psychiatrist inflicts harm through his treatment of both her and her work.

His commentary is laced with paternalism and condescension. It is spiked with hate and the repulsive natures of his probable desires. It undermines me. He probably does not register this. I can psychoanalyze him, but he cannot psychoanalyze himself. Such is a white man’s privilege.

3. The Optics of Opportunity (Hafizah Geter, June 19, 2019, Gay Magazine)

Among many other atrocious acts during a mysterious fellowship funded by Barnes & Noble, writing instructor Jackson Taylor uses the n-word in class. Hafizah Geter, a participant in the fellowship, not only reveals the many problematic elements about the fellowship and its origins, but also illuminates how larger systems of power continue enabling racism.

As I pushed back against Taylor’s racism, I did so consciously held hostage by my silent white peers and their white perception and notions of respectability — who heard our objections to a racism they couldn’t muster the energy to see, and thus would not allow our concerns to hold water.

4. To Know By Heart: Workshop, Whiteness, and Rigorous Imagination of Ai (Claire Schwartz, December 25, 2015, Electric Lit)

In ruminating on a memory from workshop with Professor Elizabeth Alexander at Yale, her study of Ai’s poem, “Child Beater,” and the ways in which she and other white family members and friends are complicit in perpetuating conditions that allow for racism and violence, Claire Schwartz comes to complicated conclusions about how language connects us to acts of both harm and beauty.

But. Can you imagine hearing and not intervening in a racist joke? Can you imagine attending a university that invests in private prisons? Can you imagine being an American and never learning black history? Can you imagine studying the Holocaust without talking about Japanese internment? Can you imagine teaching a science class without Henrietta Lax, without the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, without any thought at all to whose bodies have produced your knowledge?

5. When Defending Your Writing Becomes Defending Yourself (Matthew Salesses, July 20, 2014, NPR)

I have had “good” and “bad” workshop experiences, but for me whenever race comes up, it feels, somehow, traumatic. While most issues in workshop are presented as universal to story, race can come off as a burden personal to writers of color.

Matthew Salesses reckons with the ways in which writers of color are too often expected to defend not only their work, but their selves, in workshop, and presents ways in which workshops can be constructed so that the burden falls not on writers of color, but on instructors and peers.

6. Political Revisioning: How Men Police Women’s Anger in Writing Workshops (Jen Corrigan, October 22, 2018, Bitch Magazine)

When Jen Corrigan writes about her anger for workshop, a man named Andrew responds, “I just didn’t really believe it.” Corrigan explores the ways in which women’s anger is dismissed and disbelieved, both in workshop and outside of it, historically and at present, and advocates for workshop participants to scrutinize their own belief systems and biases before entering into conversation.

At first, I wondered if I was being too sensitive. I’ve never been overly delicate about being critiqued, but I instinctually questioned my perception of Andrew’s criticism. But, really, I wasn’t upset about Andrew’s critique of my essay because he had not critiqued it at all; he had critiqued me, my anger, and the way I processed and responded to aggression from men.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Memories Dressed Up With Wishes

Illustration by Homestead

Grace Linden | Longreads | July 2019 | 8 minutes (2,211 words)

The year is 2017 in Siri Hustvedt’s seventh and most recent novel Memories of the Future, and the premise is seemingly straightforward. The novel opens with its protagonist, S.H., a 61-year-old successful author, thinking back on the year when she moved to New York City over three decades earlier. It begins, like so many other stories and dreams, with the memory of a young woman moving to New York holding fast to the hope that this was the start of her life:

Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel. When I arrived in August of 1978, he was not a character so much as a rhythmic possibility, an embryonic creature of my imagination, which I felt as a series of metrical beats that quickened and slowed with my steps as I navigated the streets of the city. I think I was hoping to discover myself in him, to prove that he and I were worthy of whatever story came our way.

The beginning, like many beginnings and like life itself, is extraordinarily ordinary. S.H. recounts how, that summer of 1978, she found a small apartment on 109th Street in the Upper West Side. She remembers outfitting her new home with two place settings in the hopes of conjuring a lover. She smoked and drank a lot of coffee at the Hungarian Bakery and tried to be the type of person who interesting things happened to or, at the very least, who got to witness interesting things happening first-hand. She was lonely but didn’t want to leave, and instead was determined to lose herself in the rhythms of the city she had long loved even before ever really knowing it. Read more…

‘My Teachers Said We Weren’t Allowed To Use Them.’

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Tobias Carroll | Longreads | July 2019 | 11 minutes (2,868 words)

Consider the semicolon. It’s beloved by some and assailed by others; in the annals of punctuation lore, no other symbol has sparked as much debate. A handful of years ago it was even the subject of a very funny parody song by The Lonely Island and Solange that poked fun at hashtag rap. (Though, in fairness to the semicolon, the song’s punchline is that it was using the semicolon incorrectly all along.) In her new book Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, Cecelia Watson ventures into the long history and usage of semicolons, and the results are tremendously enlightening.

Semicolon is a slim book, but it deftly covers a lot of ground. Watson explores the origin of the semicolon, demonstrates how it’s gone in and out of linguistic favor over the centuries, and thoughtfully explored how a host of disparate writers — including Rebecca Solnit, Irvine Welsh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. — have memorably used it in their work. Watson also explores some of the surprisingly severe impacts the semicolon has had on society, such as the semicolon in a Massachusetts law that wreaked havoc on the state’s alcohol consumption, or the way the semicolon in a judicial sentence caused one man’s life to hang in the balance.

I talked with Watson about the origins of her book, the role typography played in it, and how semicolons can improve your dating life. (No, really!) An edited version of our conversation follows. Read more…

Searching for The Sundays

Hayley Madden / AP

David Obuchowski | Longreads | July 2019 | 35 minutes (6,336 words)

 

What makes a band your favorite band? Is it the quality of their songs? Is it their politics? Is it because they pioneered a certain sound? An emotional association? I don’t know. Any of those are valid reasons for crowning a band as your favorite.

For most of my life, starting in high school through my 30s, the Smiths were my favorite band. And to be sure, I still love the Smiths. But a few years ago, I came to a simple and somehow comforting realization: My favorite band is the Sundays.

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Pot Luck

Juan Camilo Bernal / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Livia Gershon | Longreads | July 2019 | 8 minutes (1,983 words)

Last month, shareholders of Canopy Growth, the world’s biggest cannabis company, agreed to a proposed merger with Acreage Holdings, the largest weed business in the United States. The deal, worth $3.4 billion, will take effect if and when the drug becomes legal at the federal level in the U.S., creating a massive international player in a rapidly expanding, newly legal industry. Meanwhile, as The Intercept reported, Fate Winslow, a homeless black man who sold $20 of weed in 2008, remains in prison on a life sentence, under Louisiana’s three-strikes law. Winslow is confined to a dorm with more than 80 other prisoners, double-bunked with no air conditioning in the heat of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

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An Ocean Away From the Sanctuary of Manhattan, Signs of Peaceful Coexistence

Photo by Jon Tyson, Photo Illustration by Homestead

Candy Schulman | Longreads | July 2019 | 10 minutes (2,622 words)

I could practically see Morocco from Frigiliana, where I was feasting on tapas in an Andalusian hill town known as a Pueblo Blanco. I was puzzled by the label on a bottle of La Axarca Malagueña, a locally crafted beer. Aligned in one row was a Jewish star, a Christian cross, and a Muslim crescent.

I asked the owner of this tiny restaurant, an expat from the Netherlands who taught kundalini yoga on a nearby beach, to translate the label’s contents.

“Every August we host the Festival de las Tres Culturas, she explained. “We celebrate the coexistence of all three cultures and traditions.” She boasted that Frigiliana’s population of 3,000 swells to 35,000, with food, music, and dancing.

I wondered if Spanish festivals celebrating peaceful coexistence were rooted in guilt for the past, or hope for the future. As a native New Yorker, I strolled through one of the largest melting pots in the world every time I left my apartment. Three cultures and traditions? That was nothing compared to the range of skin colors and mellifluous languages on just one E train subway car from Manhattan to Queens; one-third of the borough’s residents were born outside of the United States, hailing from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, India, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Italy, and other countries.
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In a World Full of Cruelty and Injustice, Becoming a Mother Anyway

LAPI / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Eliza Margarita Bates | Longreads | July 2019 | 26 minutes (6,506 words)

“How are you doing, emotionally?” the nurse asks. Her name is Yanna and she has given me her cell phone number so I can call her any time I need anything. Her voice is young and gentle. She knows everything about me — my illnesses, physical and psychiatric, my dosages of prednisone and Paxil, my weight. It’s all in my chart.

“I’m OK,” I say, not really knowing.

I’m in a drugged haze. I can’t stand up all the way, so I am leaning on Jacob, hunchbacked, as Yanna guides us to the elevator. I swipe my wristband to make the elevator come and we ride it down one floor. I follow the procedure outlined in a video that plays on loop for washing my hands, up to the elbow, slowly, slowly, before going through the double doors. When I walk into the room, I am confused. Glass boxes are scattered about, beeping, arranged seemingly without order or symmetry, but with enough space in between to allow for privacy. It takes me a moment to I realize that in each of the boxes, under wires and flashing monitors, is a baby. I start sobbing. Jacob holds my elbow to keep me upright. Yanna rushes over with a tissue, and then leads us to our own glass box.

***

At Auschwitz there is a snack bar, a vending machine, and sort of bookstore/gift shop where they sell postcards. It is a total mindfuck.

Here, you can see tourists taking photos of the former gas chambers; here, a mountain of eye glasses removed from the faces of children, mothers, grandparents, and the jerk who lived down the street before one and all were sent to die together in the gas chambers. And, here, a little way away, you can purchase a candy bar or a stale, shrink-wrapped pastry to munch on while you browse books on Nazi doctors performing experiments on disabled children.

Or you can buy a postcard. “Hey, Ma. Thought you might like this picture of a death camp. It made me think of you and, you know, being Jewish.”

Of course, I buy a postcard. How could I not? I buy three, actually. I don’t send them. I tuck them into the spine of a notebook and misplace them after my return. I buy the one with a photo of the arch that says, “Arbeit macht frei,” work will set you free. The other two, I don’t remember. I think one is of gas barrels, and another may be of starving survivors after the camp is liberated.

I hadn’t planned on going to Auschwitz. Too dark and depressing. And there so many other genocides and atrocities to learn about closer to home. But then the election happens just a couple weeks before we leave for the trip and, like buying the postcards, it seems like something I can’t not do while in Poland. I have to see where all of this could be headed.

My husband Jacob is performing at a jazz festival in a town called Bielsko-Biala. I join him there so we can take advantage of the free hotel and free ticket to Europe. I don’t see much of the town because our hotel is on the outskirts and the bone-chilling November air doesn’t inspire exploration. We are less than 45 minutes from Auschwitz.

The hotel has a casino on the second floor, a glass elevator, and a mirrored lobby. To the left of the elevator there is a restaurant and bar. In the restaurant, along with the rest of the band Jacob is touring with, we drink vodka and eat borsch on our first day in Poland. We can’t stop nervously making Nazi jokes. We all feel a little on edge being here, where the largest population of Ashkenazi Jews once lived, the site of Hitler’s most efficient genocide.

“Excuse me, waiter,” one of the Jewish band members says, after a couple rounds of vodka, raising his arm up in a mock Nazi solute, then pulling it down with his other hand. We titter and drink. The Polish waiter has his back to us and thankfully doesn’t see.

Jacob is in rehearsal all the next day. I am left alone with nothing to do. So I go to Auschwitz.
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How Do You Move Past a Dad?

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | July 2019 | 9 minutes (2,492 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

Golden Age antihero plots were inextricably tied to marriage and the family. Women were often written as villains, antagonists to their husbands who were humanized by the way they loved and provided for their families, no matter the means. Parenthood in particular fulfilled another key requirement for the success of an antihero show: the perfect balance of power and powerlessness the antihero had to maintain in order to retain our sympathy. There is nothing quite like parenting children to make a person feel like a superhero one moment and dust in the wind the next.
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‘I Surprise Myself With This Refusal To Let Go’: Kate Zambreno on the ‘Ghostly Correspondence’

Illustration Ver Sacrum, 1901, Number 4: "Duchess and Footboy" by Kolo Moser for the poem "Vorfruehling" (Early Spring) by Rainer Maria Rilke. (Imagno/Getty Image & Harper Perennial)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,601 words)

 

Since the 2009 publication of her first novel O Fallen Angel, Kate Zambreno has had one of the most fascinating careers in American letters. Her work has included harrowing explorations of alienation (Green Girl) and evocative forays into literary and cultural history (Heroines). The year 2019 has brought with it two new books from Zambreno: Appendix Project: Talks and Essays, an addendum to Book of Mutter, her 2017 collection of writing on grief; and Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing, which places a series of short autobiographical fictions in the same volume as several longer works of nonfiction, mainly art and literary criticism. The bifurcated structure of Screen Tests hints at something profound and disorienting about the not-so-clear dividing line between narrative and reality: many of the short fictions, or “screen tests” à la Andy Warhol, in the book’s first half feature real people — Zambreno herself, as well as writers and artists ranging from Amal Clooney to Susan Sontag. The screen tests grapple with their subjects’ work while addressing questions of identity and community and continuity; the critical essays in the book’s second half seem to echo themes that emerged in the screen tests. That the lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurred here is precisely the point.

Zambreno’s work offers readers an intellectually rigorous experience alongside the thrill of discovery. She has several other books in the works which will also explore fiction and nonfiction in equal measure. Her next novel, Drifts, will be released in 2020, and she’s working on a book about writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, To Write as if Already Dead. Zambreno talked with me earlier this month about Screen Tests, the challenges and pleasures of writing about visual art, reading the same books over and over again, and satirizing her own role as a “minor author.” The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. Read more…

The First Book

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2019 | 38 minutes (10,294 words)

For me the low point came two months after publication, at a playground a few blocks from my house. I sobbed on the phone with my sister, eking out incomprehensible sentences about my career this, my life expectations that, writing this, the publishing industry that, until finally my sister said, “Maybe you should look for a different job?” and I realized the jig was up — I was doomed to keep doing this ridiculous and often seemingly pointless thing.

A few weeks before this, I’d received my first letters from readers telling me how much they’d loved and needed the book, and I’d had another sister-to-sister phone call — just as wrought with emotion — in which I raved about all the deeper meaning and purpose of this milestone and how it wasn’t about the sales and the metrics but about what mattered blah blah blah. I ping-ponged like this for awhile, alternately aglow and despondent, hopeful and wretched, until finally I just started writing again and got on with it.

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