1st BOOKS: Reading and Writing with Friends

Robin Black’s debut novel, Life Drawing, is an Indie Next pick for August, and on the long list for the Flaherty-Dunnun First Novel Prize. Claire Messud calls it “at once quiet and memorable.” Robin’s story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. Her stories and essays can be found on The Rumpus, O. Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. And if you are giving any thought to MFA programs, this post is for you. – Meg

By the time I applied to the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, I was just shy of forty-one years old and had been writing, after a long, long hiatus, for a little under two years. I decided on an MFA because I very much wanted to learn more craft – for which I’d discovered a strange love. All talk about such things as narrative distance and point of view felt like my native language to me. I couldn’t get enough.

But there was something else as well, what I still call the Wizard of Oz syndrome. I wanted the professional stamp. (If you have a Diploma, you must be a Writer!) I had been home with my kids since having my first at twenty-five, and I had come to recognize the dismissive way in which my claim to be writing was met by almost everyone. It was a dismissal that came with the unspoken words materializing in the air: “Oh, how sweet. You’re a wife and mother, and now you’re trying to write.” They might as well have pat me on the head.

And the biggest problem with that reaction was that I half believed the attitude behind it myself. It was incredibly hard to take myself seriously, especially as the rejections for my early stories began to arrive. And arrive. And arrive.

I didn’t stop writing though, even with my doubts. I was writing all the time – and I do mean all the time. My husband and I would go out for dinner and he’d catch me drifting away: “Are you writing?” he’d ask; and the guilty answer was invariably “Yes.” So, I was putting in the time, working away, but I just couldn’t imagine the path that would emerge connecting me, sitting at my desk making up stories that journals would reject, to me, as one of those august and seemingly god-like creatures: An Author.

Whatever the path, though, I thought some structure would help. Structure and a little institutional back-up for the identity I was trying to achieve.

On the first day of the program, a late June day in 2003, I woke up in Asheville, North Carolina, checked out of the B&B where I’d spent a couple of nights, and drove the fifteen or so miles out to Warren Wilson College. The campus was breathtakingly beautiful, a real working farm, and an old one with enormous gnarled trees dotting the backs of the fields, all stretched out in front of distant mountain views. I couldn’t remember ever being more moved by a landscape – or ever being as excited to be part of a place.

As I approached the buildings, I started to see what looked like giant yellow sticky notes posted everywhere, scrawled with the letters MFA, and then arrows. Then MFA Parking, and a final arrow.

I parked. I sat looking out at the campus, the portion in front of me, a formal garden, a manicured emerald lawn. I took a deep breath, got out of the car, turned to enter the building that was festooned with balloons and a few more MFA signs, took maybe five steps, spun around, got back in my car, turned on the engine, and drove away.

It was one of the strangest and in some ways one of the most honest moments of my life. This panic I felt. This sudden tear in the fabric of my resolution and my confidence. An absolutely pure emotion, leading to the logical next act.

I drove over the roads I had just been on, but in the opposite direction, and, in a true mental haze, I followed signs for a Museum – or maybe just a store – of Appalachian Folk Art. I parked, and went in, with no hesitation, no return to my car this time. No problem! I was good at being an observer and a consumer. What I was struggling with was. . .

I honestly didn’t know. I couldn’t sort it through. As I looked at the quilts, and a collection of finely honed wooden hats, I ticked off the anxieties I might be feeling – social, professional, missing my family; but nothing resonated. My panic had lacked any content.

Fight or Flight? It had felt that primal; and I had chosen flight.

The clock was ticking though, the afternoon nearing its deadline for checking in; and I had to either go back, or give up and drive the twelve hours home. There was no middle ground between facing down whatever fear I’d felt and giving into it. No middle ground, and really no choice. For all I had tried to turn back, in reality there was no turning back. There was only moving forward. And I knew it.

When I remember that day now, when I see myself in the car again, driving past those same fields another time, following the arrows, finding some parking, and this time walking into the building, into a new era of my life, there’s a twist. Though I know that it was pure panic I felt that first time, it doesn’t always seem like that now. In my mind, in my memory it often feels more like a kind of tribute I paid to the momentous nature of what I was about to do. As if I returned to my car to give myself just a little more time to be the me I knew so well, before stepping into a completely mysterious role.

But whatever it was I felt, panic or awe, within hours, I was immersed, surrounded by other writers, and on the path that I needed to be on, the one I hadn’t been able to imagine, not always a smooth or easy one, but the right one for me. – Robin

Please tell friends...

Tracy Guzeman guest posted here when her debut novel, The Gravity of Birds, released last summer. It releases in paperback the same day The Wednesday Daughters does – next Tuesday! – so I’m rerunning her post to celebrate. When you visit your favorite bookstore next week, please look for us both! - Meg

People have asked me what I was doing when I found out my novel was going to be published. I have to confess, that moment has become a pleasant blur. Most likely I was trying to get up from the floor, since I promptly fell out of my chair once I got off the phone with my agent. Quite honestly, I hadn’t expected it to happen.

When it comes to the fortunes, outcomes and successes of friends, I am an absolute optimist. I’m convinced the best things will happen for them, and I’m thrilled when I’m right. It’s only when it comes to myself that my attitude becomes more pragmatic. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the Midwest, where the threat of tornadoes required families to have disaster plans at the ready. Maybe I took the Girl Scout motto a little too seriously: “Be prepared.” But no one ever fills in the obvious blank. You aren’t instructed to be prepared for the best; instead, you’re meant to anticipate the worst. That’s the outcome you need to prepare for.

For a long time, that was how I approached my writing. Realistically, getting anything published is difficult. There was no shortage of people anxious to share why it almost never happens: publishing is in a state of flux; it’s difficult to find an agent; bookstores are closing their doors; people don’t take the time to read anymore—they’re too busy catching up on all those television shows they didn’t have time to watch during the week. I had to admit this all sounded logical.

And besides that, the odds were not in my favor. I’d been writing for as long as I could remember. There was nothing I enjoyed doing more. You might think someone with such strong feelings would decide to major in English, get an MFA, intern at a literary magazine, start to publish short stories, gather accolades, move on to a novel. But right out of the gate, I headed in the opposite direction. Fiction writing was wonderful as a creative outlet, but as a vocation? Things didn’t look promising. After an honest self-assessment, I was forced to eliminate even those related occupations that might have helped augment a likely meager writing income. Lacking the quality of patience (and more patience), I couldn’t envision myself as an English teacher. I didn’t have the impartiality, the discipline, or the stomach for journalism, unable to make it through even a standard Hallmark commercial without tearing up. And technical writing seemed to require an affinity for left-brain thinking, a hemisphere I wasn’t sure I possessed. So I majored in landscape architecture. (See previous comment re: “left-brain thinking” and ask, “What were you…?”) All of which meant I was lacking in connections, experience, and training.

But strangely enough, optimism muscled its way into the room. In spite of all the reasons I probably should have, I never abandoned writing, because all the logic in the world doesn’t count for much when you’re doing something you love. I accepted the idea that getting published was unlikely, and found that removing it from the equation was incredibly freeing. Since I was only writing to please myself, I could experiment wildly with structure and form and voice. I created characters I liked, who were sometimes unlikeable, and did despicable things. I knew, that if nothing else, the stories I was weaving together were the stories I wanted to tell. And adhering still to that familiar motto, I focused my energies on working to become a better writer. Be prepared.

I sent stories out sporadically; I entered some contests. I was mentally ready to receive rejections, so when form emails arrived in my inbox, I scanned them, deleted them, then sent the same story out to the next several magazines on my list. I received some positive feedback. My focus remained on working to get better, on finding ways to spend more time doing what I loved. Be prepared. Some of my short fiction found a home. And then, it happened. An agent wanted to represent me. An editor wanted to buy my novel.

So it’s a Cinderella story. Only it’s not. (No slippers involved, unless the bedroom variety count.) It’s tenacity, kismet, serendipity, dumb luck, good timing, a blessing, a fluke, a fortunate confluence of the fates. I’m practically Seabiscuit. Regardless of what you attribute it to, it’s not supposed to happen. But it did. Somehow, my novel got published.

Maybe there is no missing end to that instruction. Maybe the best advice really is “be prepared.” Period. Perhaps that makes me an optimist after all. – Tracy

Please tell friends...

Julia Fierro is the author of Cutting Teeth, which was included in Library Journal’s “Spring Best Debuts” and on “Most Anticipated Books of 2014″ lists by HuffPost Books, The Millions, Flavorwire, Brooklyn Magazine and Marie Claire. She also founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop; what started as eight writers meeting in her Brooklyn kitchen has grown into a creative home for over 2000 writers. She is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop … and you’ll hear a bit more of that in her wonderful post. Enjoy! - Meg

When I introduce myself to students at writer’s conferences and literary events, and in the writing workshops at The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop I founded in 2002, I make sure to mention that while Cutting Teeth is my first published novel, it is not the first novel I wrote. Or tried to write, I often add. When I tell the story of how I became a writer, I make sure to include the seven years I spent not writing. Even after all I’ve accomplished, I still feel ashamed of those years spent not writing. Not so much because I didn’t publish in time with my expectations, or write consistently, but because I was so cruel to myself, so impatient, beating myself up daily for not writing. I avoided my students’ requests when they invited me to read with them at the many Sackett Street readings I hosted to celebrate their hard work. I practically lied about the various “projects” I claimed I was working on when I was stuck in a state of paralysis, unable to write for years at a time. I used the F word to describe myself often—failure—until my husband banned it from our apartment. But that didn’t stop me from feeling like one.

While I know that we are all insecure, especially those of us who risk rejection and misunderstanding by sending our perspective out into the world through our creativity, I still find myself envying writers who are, at least, able to appear confident. Until recently, I relied solely on an external sort of confidence—the flush of accomplishment when my work was praised in class, the thrill of winning a writing contest. My first taste of this kind of confidence was when I was accepted into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop when I was 23, an acceptance that allowed me to give myself the permission to think of myself as a Writer with a capital W. For all the talk and recent debate on “to get an MFA” or not, Iowa gave my insecure 23-year-old self the chance to imagine a new story for my life, and I still wonder if I would’ve been able to take that risk in believing myself as a Writer if I hadn’t gone to Iowa. For two years, I’d not only be allowed to talk about reading books, I’d also begin to investigate how to write them, a passion that would transform into the method I’d use in the earliest years of The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.

At Iowa I was surrounded with writers for the first time in my life. I was a blank slate and absorbed craft like a sponge. I had written little, and read even less. I was that annoying eager student in workshop, the one who talked too much, and was too enthusiastic on just about everything. My classmates, despite being just as young as I was, had been writing for many years, were comfortable with the terminology of craft, and were so well-read that I spent almost every afternoon at the library and left with armfuls of contemporary authors I’d never heard of. These were the first writers I’d known. I was raised in a family where the definition of “work” was not synonymous with creativity. And so I adopted the lofty expectations of my Iowa classmates. I would publish before I was thirty years old! I would get a two-book deal! I’d sell film rights and head off on a book tour around the world!

I wrote my first novel at twenty-four (way too young) in 6 months (way too fast), and revised for only another few months (and way too sloppy). I signed with an agent, one of many who came to the Workshop to recruit young writers. After I graduated (my teachers said they had high hopes for me!), I moved to Brooklyn, found a low-paying adjunct teaching position, and my book went out to publishers. It was then rejected again and again for almost a year. But it’s really for the best, I told people (and myself). It wasn’t a very good book, I said. And while this part is true—I’d only been writing for a few years, after all—that truth didn’t lessen the sting. With every pass from another editor, my acceptance at Iowa, the praise I’d experienced there, and the hope my teachers had in me, started to feel like a fluke. The confidence I’d pieced together while earning my MFA suddenly felt like temporary scaffolding. It fell down.

It took seven years worth of teaching hard-working Sackett Street writers—each and every one a model for me as I worked to rebuild my faith in myself as a writer—before I returned to writing with solid commitment. And when I did sit down in front of my computer, I was a better writer. A better person. I needed that time off to grow. I needed to learn how to write.

I imagine it would be wiser professionally notto mention those years I spent not writing, years I spent doubting myself so fully that it was torture to pound out a page. But who else is going to tell that story? Many of the successful published writers I hear talk on panels at conferences make it sound as if they are writing machines, as if they haven’t taken a day off from writing in years. Part of my success as a writer was not writing. If I hadn’t spent all those years teaching and reading and editing the work of other writers, I am certain I wouldn’t be the writer, and person, I am today. There are infinite ways to be a writer with a capital W, just as there are infinite ways to tell a story. After so many years of writing and not writing, of failing and succeeding, the best advice I can give my students (and myself) is a reminder that there are many definitions of success. My favorite definition of success as a writer is one I heard at the annual Slice Literary Conference, from author and writing teacher Fiona Maazel, “Success in publishing means being able to publish a next book.” That’s my story for now. – Julia

Please tell friends...