May I have several hours of your time?

Would you mind reading this poem and letting me know what you think?

What about this essay? This chapbook? This epic? This novel trilogy?

Writers often get hit up for advice. Writers who teach are especially targeted for this. We know the look—the hopeful smile when a student approaches us with a sheaf of papers and a request.

I used to sport that same smile. I remember asking every professor I had to read my work. They didn’t even have to be English professors. As an undergraduate, I was looking for praise. As a grad student, I wanted affirmation and further challenges. A lot of good people gave me a lot of good time—time they could have spent doing many other things.

And that’s really the issue. When we ask fellow writers to devote time to our work, we are tacitly asking them to devote a little less time to their own. This is something that instructors have to come up with strategies to deal with, or the demands can be overwhelming. But this is also something that all practicing writers need to think about—how to contribute to their community without taking too much time away from our own creative production.

When writers receive a request for feedback, refusing can make them appear unkind. What a requestor may not realize is how many people make the same ask, and how much time it takes to really do justice to a piece of writing—to read, to comment, to discuss. And obviously, quiet time is precious, particularly to writers who work or have families. 

Time spent with another writer’s early drafts is time a writer is not writing her own. It is also lost reading time, and by this I mean time devoted to reading finished, polished, published work—something that is impossible to stay on top of, although this is a task that every writer must try to do.

When the requestor is a good friend, we almost always make time. When the person is a friendly acquaintance, we usually find time for them, too. But often, the people who are asking for our effort—sometimes hours of it—are near strangers to us. As we progress in our writing careers, these people may be actual strangers, people who know us only from the page. 

We often hear stories of literary figures from the past who wrote to their idols for support. Major writers nurtured their protege pen pals, sometimes for a whole lifetime. There is precedent for the request, precedent for the generosity offered in return—in fact, many of our best-loved writers are people we know because a volunteer mentor held their hand in the early going.

I recently taught an introductory writing class with an aspiring fantasy novelist on the roster. The guy was prolific and dealt in every genre. Every week included a new request for feedback—a new story or novel chapter, a new essay or poem.

I am not a professor at this student’s university; I am an adjunct English instructor, the lowest-ranking and lowest-paid instructional staff member at the institution. I get about $2,800 before taxes to teach that student’s class, a cohort of twenty-four who write up to three drafts of five essays. I read and comment on their work, and I also plan for classes, have meetings, spend time on e-mailing and record-keeping, and more. I figured out that I make about $15 per hour before taxes, with no benefits, for the work I do. The student probably doesn’t understand that I’m not in one of those cushy professorships that conservative lawmakers always deride. I’m the working poor—like many adjunct instructors, undercompensated for my expertise.

I think it’s fair to say that I have more than the average amount of affection for my students, and I have unusually strong zeal for my subject matter. I don’t refuse a Composition I student who comes to me with evidence of his similar passion in his hand. So many of the goals of the class can be addressed through their creative work—matters like audience awareness, grammar and mechanics, development. 

What I have noticed throughout my teaching career is that students consider this kind of feedback to be part of an instructor’s job description. They don’t hesitate to ask, and they see it as evidence of their commitment to the subject they teach.

And they are right. A writing student who goes the extra mile—the extra marathon—to draft a novel is a very special person who has earned some extra attention.

As writers, I think we should be cautious about asking each other for time and feedback. I also think we should exercise a few strategies to protect our time when people we don’t know well ask for our assistance with their work. Here are some ideas we can do to keep other people’s writing from interfering with our own:

Set a target. A good community member gives back, and helping other writers in this way is an exercise in literary citizenship. So we might decide that we’re going to work with a certain number of writers—one a month, one a year, six over the summer, etc. Any ask received after that should be encouraged to try getting on our schedule the following year.

Set a price. If writers value our input, they may be willing to pay for it. We might try setting a price for our services as a way of safeguarding our time. If a mentoring relationship develops, we can rethink the money part.

Set a schedule. Can we afford to give the first Monday of every month to other writers? Let the requestor wait until then, and stick to that plan; don’t let the project carry over or linger, but instead do what you can in the time you allocate.

Schedule ourselves first. This is not what we learned in church, but it’s important to be a little selfish with our writing time. For a request that comes while we’re working on a project, we can simply say that we’re focused on that project, and that the writer should ask again in a few weeks or months. If we do say this and the writer remembers to follow through, we should think about making time for them.

Find a faster way. If a writer hands us a novel, there is nothing that says we have to read a whole novel. We can give feedback on the opening few pages instead. When we’re handed a poetry collection, we don’t need to give close readings to all of the poems; we can instead look at something like the way form operates over the course of the book.

Recommend other outlets. It’s good to have at hand a list of favorite coaches, local workshops, or online services that you can suggest to give the writer the help they need.

Say yes—mindfully. Although strangers and acquaintances are hard to accommodate, I actually love reading the work of my writing friends. Occasionally, I find that I’m so busy with my work and family life that this kind of extra project can fall by the wayside, even though I have the will to do it. Lately I have started to set deadlines for myself for those writers I agree to work with. I put deadlines for feedback on my calendar, and I ask each friend to give me a nudge if I forget. 

Say no. Some of us struggle with this, but it’s OK to refuse requests of our time and attention, and we don’t even have to give a reason. As writers, we need to protect our creative time, and it’s very poor form to miss a standing appointment with our muse. If we are serious about what it is we do, we have to put our writing first.

.

The individual and the workshop

Workshops vary a lot—good or bad, helpful or not, weird or really weird.

It’s the natural effect of getting a dozen creative people together. Something off the wall is bound to happen. When you’re lucky, the off-the-wall stuff comes from a fellow workshopper instead of the leader. I have not been particularly lucky in this regard.

I once had a workshop leader who outlawed a color—to wit, “indigo.” Indigo was not permitted in a poem in this person’s class. Of course, I hadn’t considered writing about indigo until there was a moratorium on it, but then every poem seemed to require the night sky.

A friend tells me about a fiction workshop question proffered by the leader: “What if all the men were women and the women were men?” We sometimes joke about that when we’re talking about creative work; it’s just a choice bit of silliness, a joke that never stops being funny. Like a ban on “indigo,” it’s pointless, but it makes us smile.

Within workshops, there were always more than a few clichés from other participants. Here are some classic examples:

·      This has been done. Once we unlock “This has been done” as a workshop criticism, we find that everything has been done. Poets have always talked about things like love and loss and beauty—yawn.

·      Show, don’t tell. As advice goes, this has its place. It’s better, generally, to have an image instead of a lot of blah-de-blah. But more seasoned writers know that there is a place for exposition in a poem, story, or essay, and that there can be such a thing as too much showing. That’s when you tell.

·      I don’t feel it. Isn’t that an odd comment to make to someone regarding a piece of writing? It’s more a commentary on the reader’s capacity to feel than it is on the quality of writing. And I guess it’s a good idea to be properly wary of any comment starting with “I.” It shows where the reader’s attention is, when it should be on the work and the writer at hand.

·      That would never happen in real life. Some of the weirdest things have happened in my real life. I once found a human eyeball in a field. Our planet is endlessly strange, and that’s most of what makes me want to stay on it.

·      Write what you know. Or you could, you know, use your imagination to figure out something new. It would be terrible to be limited to what we know when we enter into a world of imagination.

·      This needs a few more drafts. Of course it does; that’s why it’s in a workshop. People don’t bring their polished work to a bunch of peers for advice, or if they do, they shouldn’t.

One of the most problematic things that happen in workshops is that our fellow writers begin to rewrite our work. I see some value in a straight-up assessment of what works and what doesn’t, but I have a problem with specific advice about how to rewrite a piece.

As I recently told a friend, I don’t need feedback that says, “The narwhal in stanza three should be a nurse shark.” Obviously, I’m keeping my damned narwhal. Have you seen those things?

To take the point further, my narwhal can’t really be switched out with a nurse shark, because the narwhal is in service to the vision of the piece in a way that only it can be. Its selection was never arbitrary. The fact of the matter is that the narwhal poem may be a complete disaster, but making it a nurse shark poem doesn’t help, and that big of a switch to the vision means that it’s no longer what I wanted it to be. It’s not my narwhal poem.

The way I see it, I came up with the narwhal, and I sink or swim with it. The nurse shark didn’t come from me, so I can’t accept it offered up on a silver platter in a workshop. It’s not my poem when I do.

A workshopper can point out clunky words or phrases, maybe suggest replacements for me to consider; it is also useful to point out a passage that falls flat or an image that doesn’t work. The suggestion of bizarre additions that aren’t the product of my own imagination is never going to work for me, though, if I haven’t specifically invited a larger collaboration than workshop feedback.

A piece of writing, and particularly a poem, is the product, ideally, of sustained, private thought. If we’re comedy writers for a late-night show, we might have a lot of luck sitting around a table and spitting out ideas that aren’t our property anyway and then seeing what we can do with them as a team. But that’s not what a workshop is, unless it’s a very unusual workshop. And, heck, I’d enjoy trying an experiment like that—something totally collaborative, where all participants put their heads together to make a shared new thing. But until I’m lucky enough to sit in a workshop like that, I’m probably going to focus on my own writing—and maybe I need the help of a dozen people who aren’t me, but I don’t really want it, and I’m not going to accept it if it’s offered.

For me, a workshop is one of the best ways to get a quick sense of how work is being received by an audience. It’s also a nice setting to make small repairs, which is when it functions most as its name would suggest. In an automotive workshop, I might gap my spark plugs or change my air filter or tighten my timing belt, but if I came in with a silver 2000 Volkswagen Golf with a dent in the driver’s side, I expect to drive out in it—although maybe without the dent, if I’m lucky.

Because if I’m driving out in a new Lexus, the chances are good that I stole it from someone. The title is not in my name.

Going home again

I suppose a lot of us who make our art in private feed a fantasy of public acclaim.

Maybe I’m not alone in picturing myself giving the commencement address at my old high school, or maybe showing up on the news in some triumphant way, so that everyone in my hometown would explain how they knew me or repeat that cool thing I said that one time.

Truth is, I haven’t lived in my hometown since 1987, and I don’t know anyone there. It’s strange; as a child, I could enter any business, and I would know three-quarters of the people I saw. But I just visited my hometown over this past weekend, and I didn’t know anyone—not a single person I encountered anywhere, aside from family.

There will never be a triumphal return, and anyway, the fantasy is not a serious one. I had a bad reputation in high school, and it was a frantic, peaceless time for me—marching band, clubs, classes, friends, boyfriends, something going on every night. With my blond hair, I was widely considered “ditzy” or bubble-headed, and I seldom got credit for my intellect. I’ve never missed high school, and those were not, in fact, the best years of my life.

Over the weekend, I traveled to Gallipolis, Ohio, where I grew up. I drove twelve hours one way and landed at my dear mother’s door. Make no mistake, the trip home was worth it; I got to enjoy my mom and two of my three siblings, and I was glad I went.

But on Saturday, I had planned a poetry workshop and reading from my new full-length collection at the French Art Colony, my hometown’s gallery and art space. I had promoted this event heavily online, and the local media, such as they are, were alerted.

And when 10:30 a.m. rolled around and the workshop was to begin, I had to face a grim fact: Nobody had come.

So much for triumphal returns. Mine amounted to sitting in an elegant dining room of this historic home-turned-museum and grading composition papers while I waited for the second event, a 1 p.m. reading. I couldn’t exactly leave; someone might have shown up with an urgent need to become a sonneteer. You can’t, in good conscience, leave someone like that hanging. You just can’t.

My sister Brenda, pretty much the nicest person I know, showed up before both events to arrange little finger foods on trays. Before the workshop-that-wasn’t, she had arranged little brownies on a tray, and when she came back, this time with my brother, Don, the tray was nearly empty, somehow. (Ghosts?) And I was alone.

They didn’t let on how sad this was. Instead, they both put themselves to work, arranging cheese and crackers and other sad things on sad trays for the sad empty room.

And then, wonder of wonders, two people showed up! My Facebook friends, Kelly Sundberg and Shane Stricker, drove almost an hour from Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University, to Gallipolis, home of … my mom. People who weren’t related to me not only came to the reading, but they made real effort to get there. They acted like it wasn’t sad, and that made it a lot less sad, really.

And then, additional wonder of wonders, another friend showed up. This was John Jackson, a fellow graduate of the Gallia Academy High School Class of 1987. “I’ll bet you’re surprised to see me here,” John said, and I was. I hadn’t seen him in nearly thirty years, and he was never a big poetry person, to my recollection. What’s more, we’re just about as far apart as two people can get, politically speaking, and we vex each other with some regularity on social media. An example: a glance at his Facebook feed reveals posts objecting to political action taken by pro athletes against police violence, and my own page shows full-throated support for their controversial actions and their message. That’s just the difference between John and me, but we continue to like (and tolerate!) each other.

So that was the scene. Around the table with me were my brother and sister, not poetry lovers by nature, but readers and thinkers who are wise to my bullshit and my airs. And there were two extremely talented writers, Kelly and Shane, who know my Facebook persona and are solidly part of the contemporary literary world. And there was John, a smart, soulful guy and a good egg, who came just to support someone he thinks is crazy about half the time.

And there was cheese. Plenty of cheese.

I read more than a dozen poems, and between them, I tried to find things to say that would be illuminating to this mixed group. And we had dialogue between poems. The group was small enough that I heard that occasional comment (“I liked that one,” that kind of thing) and we had little conversations about the work and life in general.

I read one poem, and John, a musician, was reminded of a favorite song of his, by the band Tesla. He recited a verse, and was so moved that he misted up in the telling. (Not into poetry, he’d told me—could have fooled me, John!)

It ended up being kind of beautiful, actually. I’ll treasure the memory of exactly ten hands clapping. They were ten precious hands—as good as a stadium, for my money.

Yesterday, the day after my twelve-hour return trek, I was unloading some things from the trunk of my car just outside my house, and I heard a voice.

“I really liked your poetry reading the other night,” a man said.

I experienced a temporary disconnect. This wasn’t Brenda, Don, Kelly, Shane, or John. But no, the stranger was referring a reading I’d had here in Springfield, Missouri, at Missouri State University. There had been a good-sized crowd, and I didn’t know everyone present. This person must have been in the room.

I thanked him. “That means so much,” I said. And it did. And it still does.

Poetry isn’t the movies. It isn’t arena rock. Lines seldom wend around the block for a poet. But sometimes you connect, in ways you would never predict. And sometimes someone claps—sometimes someone speaks up to let you know you made an impact.

I’ll take it. That’s more than enough glory for me.

In Search of Namaste

People have a lot of negative things to say about the creative writing workshop culture, the worst of which is that all of the writers who go through an MFA or doctoral creative writing program end up writing the same poem or story.

They don’t.

There is also the stereotype of the sniping, competitive workshop, where everyone is engaged in fierce one-upmanship.

I haven’t seen it.

But I do have a complaint about workshop culture. I never really liked all of the nonstop workshopping.

Here’s the thing: by the second workshop session, you can almost predict the responses from each member of a cohort whom you will work with for two or three years. Reader A doesn’t think you pushed the poem far enough. Reader B wants you to experiment with form. Reader C thinks you should be more open-ended. And it’s quite possible that you will receive variations on these responses from this particular cast of characters for every poem you turn in, forever.

Luckily, everyone is quick to point out that they really like your X, but. The “Xbut” comment dominates the workshop, really—there is a smattering of faint praise for a surface feature, and then an explanation of how a reader wants to see more of whatever it is she wants to see more of.

When I teach a workshop, I advise against the Xbut comment. In fact, I advise against “like” statements at all. I’ve never understood why anyone thinks that a personal preference is relevant to a conversation of craft. It’s a first step to gaining a sense of what is working and what is not, of course, but at the graduate level, the conversation needs to go further—and it even needs to start in a further-along place.

“Like” is an unhelpful word, and it’s generally an unexamined one. A negative criticism (and one probably based on personal aesthetic preference) is coming, and the Xbut comment softens it. It’s a kind of workshop foreplay, but as foreplay goes, it’s insufficient. To push the comparison, the Xbut statement is the clumsy boob-squeeze to the coitus of the discussion.

In a workshop, the conversation seldom turns to the most basic element of a piece of writing, and that is what idea is being communicated. We might explore the rhetorical structure of a poem (and this, though welcome and useful, happens seldom), but we generally fail to acknowledge what a poet is trying to say—which is too bad, since most poems rise from some urgency within the poet.

Unfortunately, the workshop can infect the rest of a writer’s life, if we let it. Poems are judged to be good or not by readers, publishable or not by editors, but I find that poems are very seldom heard.

In my daily life, I tend to greet people with a friendly “Hey.” Were I a speaker of Zulu, I would have a completely different greeting: “Sawubona,” which means “I see you” or “I recognize the humanity in you.” The Sanskrit-derived word “Namaste” also means “I see you,” or, more specifically, “My spirit recognizes your spirit.”

Doesn’t the typical workshop offer a sort of good-natured “Hey”? And in writing a poem, aren’t we instead looking for a “Sawubona” or a “Namaste”? This may sound a little bit old fashioned, but I write poems in part to express something I’m feeling. That’s always the starting point. I’m aiming for art, but it’s rooted deep in my spirit, and more than anything else, I have something I’m trying to say—something I’d like for you to hear. I don’t even care particularly if you like the little artifact of the poem. We all like different things. As accomplished as his poems are, I never cared much for Ezra Pound. I have tried, though, to hear him out.

One way I’ve recovered from the oddity of the workshop is to share little poems on social media from time to time. What is most gratifying to me is when someone who isn’t a regular reader of poetry connects with my work. Here’s a poem I wrote in church on Sunday and posted after the service:

Mary of Bethany

In church today a woman

rubbed the bald spot of the man

she loved, and did it all the way

through the message, the offering

and meditation. I know.

I opened my eyes to check.

And isn’t that God, touching us

where we’re most exposed,

loving even our emptiness,

all those places soft with down.

I don’t necessarily consider this little poem to be high art, but I was trying to communicate something I felt, and it turned out that a lot of my acquaintances, poets or otherwise, churchy types or not, connected with those ten lines. We all have a few fuzzy places; we want that caress.

            What’s more, we want to be heard, seen—recognized. Good or bad, like or not, most poems are a human being’s best attempt to tell you something urgent. We’re listening for the namaste.