You have to defend before it looks like you have anything to defend.

[Kire]

Alternate subject line (for DUer's): "You really shouldn’t be living for a reaction all the time."

I Go to AWP

by Kay Ryan

A Lifetime Of Preferring Not To

I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers conferences. It’s been a point of honor: the whole cooperative workshopping thing, not for me. I have never taken a creative writing class, I have never taught a creative writing class, and I have never gone, and will never go, to anything like AWP*, I have often said.

Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side. It took her years to do a pocketful. You just know she doesn’t go to art conferences. Certainly not zillion-strong international ones, giant wheeling circuses of panel discussions.

It Was Easier Than I Thought

I was invited to attend as an outsider, and to write a piece for Poetry. I could go but retain my alienation. This was so doable. Of course, in truth I could only do this now, when I am quite old. If I were young and hadn’t published anything, it would be different. Now, even if my sense of self is threatened, shouldn’t I already have used most of it up? How much more can there be left? Maybe I would never have been influenced, as I feared I would, but to this day I believe I needed to guard against something, even if that something was imaginary. I needed to protect something valuable. The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about. You’ll note a feral protectiveness—a wariness, a mistrust. But the important point is that this mistrust is the outside of the place that has to be kept empty for the slow development of self-trust. You have to defend before it looks like you have anything to defend. But if you don’t do it too early, it’s too late.

One must truly HOLD A SPACE for oneself. All things conspire to close up this space. Everything about AWP has always struck me as closing the space.

<snip>

Tomorrow morning at the AWP bookfair a young writer will be able to meet everybody, editors, publishers, all in one place. They’ll all be sitting there behind their piles of books and journals. The hopeful young writer could have conversations, exchange email addresses, hand them manuscripts. Next month if he sent an editor some work he could start his email with, “I’m following up on our conversation at last month’s AWP bookfair.... ” It kind of makes me sick to think about.

On the other hand, maybe there will be free keychains.

More: http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0705/comment_171211.html

[petgoat]

1. "Have to?" You don't have to. You may choose to.

I too was afraid of workshops and writers' programs, partly because I
was afraid I was a phony and thought they were just one step removed
from hanging around cafes in a beret smoking a pipe (not that there's
anything wrong with that!)

You have to know what the possibilities are before you can be artistic.
You have to recognize the choices you're making. Otherwise you may
follow what you think is your heart but is really only your limitations
and your naivetee. My cousin, a trained musician, used to play in a
commercial but creative band with another musician who was a
natural--very talented, but untrained. The other guy was not capable of
recognizing that he kept writing the same song over and over and over
again. Since they were in different keys, and had different chords,
he thought they were different songs. He couldn't recongnize their
essential sameness.

[Kire]

2. au contraire

to be artistic is to be creative, which means you are always creating new possibilities

different keys + different chords = sameness?

for shame

[petgoat]

3. "to be artistic is to be creative...creating new possibilities"

Right, which is exactly my point. My cousin's friend was simply
recreating the same song without realizing it. He was being less
creative than he could have been because he let inconsequential
differences feed the illusion that he was being more creative than he
was.

A literary example would be if I wrote a story about a love triangle
among Bob and Bertha and Bill set in New York City, then another about
a love triangle among Yves and Yolanda and Yuri set on a farm in
Nebraska, and then another about Gilda and Gerald and Gunther set in a
nursing home in Tampa and not realize I'm writing the same story over
and over again and I'm not being as free as I should be. I can even
spin it and have the female impinging on a homosexual relationship
between two males, or involve professional alliances and jealousies
(among aircraft engineers, among lawyers, among politicians, among
worm farmers) rather than romantic ones--but until I recognize that
it's all the same story, I can't take control of the options--or
choose the best ones.

Ken Kesey once characterized his novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest" as "a simple Christ tale set in a nut house." I don't know if
he was aware of that when he was writing it, but if he wasn't I bet he
wished he had been. The awareness would allow him to work with the
parallels, avoid the embarassments of clumsy and unwanted ones, and
strengthen the ones that "worked" best.

I'm not saying artistic isolation and naivete are a bad thing
necessarily. It's a choice you make, and one I made myself because I
was afraid of having my gifts blunted by misguiding, of being molded
too soon into other people's theoretical constructs, of turning myself
into a third-rate clone of a writer I admired instead of becoming
myself. You can waste a lot of time though, following your own star,
if you don't know that others in the past have blazed quite a trail on
that very same star. Another musician commented after leading a
songwriter's workshop that his very talented students had "discovered
fire--which is a good thing, but not a new thing," and he was getting
tired of watching over the same discoveries year after year.

There are risks in going it alone, and risks in going it with help.
Perhaps the gravest risk in seeking artistic sophistication is that
as Raymond Chandler says "ultimately you'll find you know everything
about writing and find you have nothing to say" or that you'll fall
under the influence of someone like that--a type that seens to abound
in the workshop and academic environments.

One of the most important things you learn from the criticism you get
in workshops is that a lot of the criticism is not relevant. Someone
wants you to be more like Hemingway; someone else wants you to be more
like Faulkner. You learn that there's no right and wrong--there are
just choices, and what "works". Maybe I like stories about wounded
mercenaries crossing hundreds of miles of jungle and you like stories
about ingenues sipping Earl Gray and contemplating their imperfect
relationships. Exposure to reactions from people of varying taste
gives you a wider view of what is possible, and what the
options are--and ultimately more permission to like what you like.

The difference between art and artifice is an old old debate, and
ultimately I'm not arguing either side. I'm really just saying:
recognize your options, your choices, and their consequences. And get
to work! Life is short!

[Kire]

4. saturation is a killer

you want your cousin's friend to stop doing what he's doing, but maybe what he's doing is a lot bigger than the pieces that you see. surely all those stories aren't identical with different names. this cousin's friend of yours is a myth. people are going to be telling that story of his at his funeral. fondly. if he takes your advice now, they'll have nothing to talk about.

[petgoat]

5. Oh, I've made you mad.

Nothing personal. The truth is, I'm just a contrary sort of guy and I
took your post as a take-off point for clarifying some of my own
thought. If you had posted about the great benefits of going to ten
writer's seminars a year I would have argued for spending months alone
in the woods.

If somebody says "smoke pot, it's the key to the universe," I'd argue
"who needs pot?" And if somebody said "never ever ever smoke pot" I'd
say some people find it very helpful.

Your post seems to be arguing for extreme subjectivism, and in arguing
for more objectivism I'm really arguing for a balance--because you
need to dig deep into your soul to find what it is you want to say,
but if you don't keep in mind the necessity of communicating clearly
and vividly to other people it's easy to spend years rooting around in
there and find that what you've struggled to say is of interest only
to yourself.

And that's okay, if that's how you want to spend your time.

The balance is like the balance in rock band music. A lot of the
rockers like avant garde stuff like Stockhausen and Varese and
Schoenberg--and they could draw on those styles and people would
love it as long as the kept on. As long as people could dance, then
however crazy the music got people would still enjoy it. But they
were never going to pay money to listen to Stockhausen or Varese
without the beat.

I'm thinking fiction is like that: the beat is the story. And as long
as you stick to the story you can do anything you want with the
language or the setting or the characters, but the reader can't lose
the story.

[Kire]

6. I'm defending.

I tend to get mad when people tell me I'm wasting my time.

[petgoat]

7. I don't think I presumed to tell you that you were wasting your time. I

think I said the great danger of the solitude route is that one may
waste his or her time, and specified some of the ways it can happen:
unwittingly reinventing what's already been done better, preoccupation
with themes and events that are of interest only to the writer, too
many years devoted to a magnum opus that might better be finished up
or even set aside so you can move on to something more worthy of you.

Only you can decide if you're wasting your time, or if you're falling
into one one these (or some other--perhaps even completely original)
traps.

There are dangers also to seeking out teachers who can articulate
great sparkly theories but don't seem to be able to do themselves
what they claim they can teach you, to spending too much time with
mutually-admiring peers, to imitating this year's literary fashion.

The nature of the danger and the rewards depends on your own values
and the reasons you write: some seek celebrity, some wish to
immortalize some event that was significant to them, some are
compulsive scribblers, some want an excuse to hang out in junkie-ville
and hop freight trains, some write to clarify their thoughts and
perceptions, some to sublimate aggression, some because the blank page
is their only friend and their psychotherapist and lover, some
because they think they might make a million bucks without leaving
their apartments....

Only you can decide if something is a waste of time. But maybe the
real question is whether you're choosing the most effective way to
reach your goals.

[Kire]

8. thanks

truce?

[petgoat]

9. Truce? I didn't realize we had hostilities. But then, I'm sorry, my

internet manners come from public debating boards about 9/11, the stolen
election of 2004, and Bush v. Gore.

The first thread I got majorly involved in was locked by the moderator
(it appears that the other guy got banned) so I guess my rough edges
are showing here.

I'm sorry you feel it necessary to call a truce on your own thread. I
will try to present my views less pugnaciously in the future.

[Kire]

10. it's always the other guy, huh?

I'm a lounge lizard. I like Skid Row.

[petgoat]

11. " I like Skid Row."

Given that tomorrow is "Mothers' Day" you should have a gas.

[Kire]

12. huh?

[petgoat]

13. "Mothers' Day" is the first business day of the month; the day all the

gov't checks arrive. It's a big day for the illegal drug business, and
a day when a lot of crazy things happen on the poor side of town.