Of course, portfolios will come in and the days leading up to Christmas will be filled with frantic grading.  But I’m enjoying the peace right now, and am reflecting on all of the good work I have read from my students this semester.

Back in August, the students entered the classroom for the first time unsure of what to expect.  Everyone knows what fiction and poetry is, but the idea of a “creative nonfiction” workshop is foreign to most of them.  Some of these students are in my class because someone recommended me to them.  Others are majors who need the course in order to move on to more advanced classes.  Others just need to get an arts elective out of the way.  Most, though, aren’t taking the class because they already have a deep and abiding love for the essay or literary journalism.

I hope that, over the course of the year, they have grown to love these forms.  Not just because I love these forms myself, but because I have seen this group of students come together and understand each other better as a result of sharing their own personal narratives.  These 18 and 19 year olds began the semester a little nervous, sometimes reluctant to allow themselves to be too exposed in their writing.  But at this point, I think that we have all become friends—or, if not friends, then very supportive colleagues.  We have shared family secrets, discussed our private anxieties, and revealed truths that we usually keep hidden when we’re in the dorms, at the bar, or in a department meeting.  We’ve established a sense of trust with each other, even though—or, perhaps, because?—we didn’t know each other 14 weeks ago.

Some of these students will go on to study English and creative writing.  Some will go on to publish their work.  Most will not.  But I hope that these students will look back on the experience of taking this class fondly, and I hope they feel like they learned useful things during our time together.  Of course, if they find that they’re able to express themselves through writing more effectively, that’s great.  But more importantly, I hope that, through reading and writing creative nonfiction, they’ve come to understand that they’re not alone in the universe.  I hope they realize that their friends, their classmates, and even their professors struggle with private stresses and anxieties.  I hope they have learned that, sometimes, we all feel isolated, or freakish, or terrified.  And I hope that they’re able to take this knowledge with them after they leave my classroom, better equipped to try to understand someone else’s point-of-view.  This, I think, is the most important reason to study creative nonfiction.

If I knew then what I know now, I imagine I might have gone into the conversation with more confidence.  Contrary to common misperceptions, English majors do not tend to spend their careers toiling away in coffee houses or bars, serving espresso or martinis to the former business majors who are actually using their more “practical” degrees to make money.  Some do, I suppose, but not the majority.  Most surveys that measure salary by college major indicate that English majors tend to make comfortable middle-class salaries—not as much as some, but considerably more than others.  Furthermore, English majors, on average, tend to report a high degree of job satisfaction.  This is important, I think.  I realize that I might have chosen a different career (or major) that might have resulted in more money in my checking account, but would I love that career as much as I love the one I have, teaching creative writing and literature?  And if not, would I love my life as much as I do?  I suspect the answer is no.

So, in hindsight, I’m glad I made the decisions I made.  Still, back then—sophomore year, 1995, I was a little nervous about what my dad would say.  It turns out I needn’t have worried.

My dad was responsible for hiring people in all sorts of capacities—reporters, editors, advertising sales representatives, circulation managers, press foremen, accountants… you name it.  He had been doing this for quite a long time, and he told me that as long as I was majoring in a discipline considered part of the traditional liberal arts, he was confident I was going to be fine.

“As an employer, I can teach an employee the job,” he said.  “What I can’t do is teach someone how to learn.”

That’s what we do, in the liberal arts—we learn how to learn.  We analyze texts.  We hone our communication skills.  We learn about cause and effect—whether it’s how the Treaty of Versailles ended the first World War but unintentionally laid the groundwork for World War II, or the role sunlight plays in a plant’s ability to survive, or how a myopic sense of materialism ultimately leads to Ivan Ilych’s death.  The liberal arts demand that the student think both carefully and deeply about any given subject, and these habits that become second-nature to the English or History major turn out to be the very skills that employers are looking for.

I’ve focused my argument supporting a liberal arts major (and an English major, specifically) on the utility of the degree on the job market, because I feel like in 2014, as students are still feeling the burden of the Great Recession, this is a huge concern.  But let’s be clear—the goal of an education isn’t just to land the perfect job (my high school U.S. History teacher once lamented to my class, “Why is it we never argue that education is worthwhile because it’s neat to know stuff?”).  My education in literature and creative writing has made me a more thoughtful, reflective person, which makes me a more responsible citizen (I’m not going to vote for a candidate whose public statements are entirely vapid or meaningless, like “Freedom isn’t free” or “We can do better” or “If [x] happens, the terrorists win”).  This education has compelled me to make sure I waste as little of my time on earth as possible (I defy you to study literature for a few years and not walk away with a knowledge of your own mortality and the ever-forward march of time).  Perhaps most importantly, I feel like my background in English has helped me become a better husband and friend.  Studying literature prevents solipsism—you can’t read “Sonny’s Blues” or “Diving into the Wreck” without considering the unique consciousness and point-of-view of another person.  I am convinced that this ability to see through someone else’s eyes, inhabit some else’s shoes, is a vital skill to have if you want to enjoy a happy life.  If I couldn’t understand where my wife is coming from in those rare moments when I do something to frustrate or anger her… well, I’d be divorced by now.

The most important thing is to make sure that you study a variety of subjects, and that you pick the subject that interests and excites you most for your major.  Some people speak of college and the “real world” as if they were entirely separate things—as if college students inhabit some strange parallel dimension where they are completely shielded from responsibility and repercussions from their decisions.  This is nonsense, and it’s harmful nonsense at that.  College is, in fact, the traditional student’s entry into the real world—the decisions one makes as a student will have ramifications for the rest of her life.  She may choose the road less travelled by, or she may choose the road that others have trod before her.  It’s the act of deciding that makes all the difference.

“Why do you like this essay?” I asked one student pointedly.

“Well,” he replied, “I could… relate to it.”

“Why?”

“Because… well… we all have grandmothers.”

This is true for most of us, I suppose, but I tried to encourage my class to reflect more deeply.  While it’s true we all have grandmothers, it’s not true that we’re all this particular 20-year-old woman writing the essay, with her particular relationship with this particular grandmother.  I had an eccentric grandmother myself, but my Nana’s eccentricity manifested itself in the casual use of racial slurs and sudden angry outbursts that no one could see coming, whereas the grandmother in the essay was inclined to hoard food and drive recklessly.

The notion that a successful piece of writing (or film, or probably any art form) should be something we can “relate” to is a little problematic for me.  I agree that I want to be able to find something that I can recognize and understand as “true” when I’m experiencing art, and for that reason I enjoy reading essays that explore the world as I have known it.  But my inability to personally relate to an author or experience described in a piece of nonfiction is not necessarily the author’s fault; nor is it a “flaw” in the writing itself.  I have never suffered through a migraine, but Joan Didion’s description of her own affliction in the essay “In Bed” is still powerful and vivid.  I don’t have the experience of being a southern African American in the middle of the twentieth century, but I can still feel empathetic when Maya Angelou describes the shame and anger she felt when the white politician insulted and degraded his audience when he spoke at her 8^th grade graduation in the chapter of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings that is frequently anthologized as either “Graduation” or “Graduation in Stamps.” I’m not a lesbian, I’ve never seen an analyst, and I don’t really have much tension in my relationship with my mother, but Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? was still probably the most riveting works of nonfiction I read last year.

This is writing that I don’t relate to, but it still resonates with me, largely because these authors provide such vivid details, metaphors, scenes, and reflections.  I don’t personally know how it feels to be Didion, Angelou, or Bechdel, but because of the way they render their essays, I come to know a bit more about how they experience the world.  I walk in their shoes and see through their eyes, at least for a little bit.

That, I want my students to understand, is the power of nonfiction.  It makes another person’s experiences and perceptions vividly real to us—so real that, while we’re reading, they begin to feel like our own.  We fool ourselves—or allow ourselves to be fooled—into believing that this point of view is our own.  So this semester, and maybe from now on, I think I’m going to correct students who praise an essay for being “relatable”—and  ask them to think more carefully about how the choices an author makes can allow a total stranger’s personal experience to resonate so deeply within us.

[Photo Credit: Alison Bechdel, 2006. Photo by Loz Pycock, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]

In future blog posts, I hope to share some revision exercises, which I think are frequently overlooked when we talk about teaching creative writing (although I’d like to point out that some of the contributors to the recently-released text, Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction offer  some really cool exercises designed to help the writer who has already started to refine her writing—and many of these ideas can apply to nonfiction of any length, not just the short-short stuff).  First, though, I have to come up with some of these exercises.

Today, though, I thought I’d tell you about a class I’m teaching for the first time this semester.  I call it “The Contemporary Essay”—although I had wanted to call it “The 21^st Century Essay” at first, until I realized that a few of the pieces I wanted to teach were first published in the late 90s.  In my head, I still call it “The 21^st Century Essay,” historical publication facts be damned.

I began to think of this class several years ago, as it became apparent to me that, over the past few decades, we’ve slowly begun to build a canon of great essays, memoirs, and works of literary journalism. I’d become quite comfortable teaching the works of Joan Didion, George Orwell, James Baldwin, E.B. White, Annie Dillard, Phillip Lopate, Maya Angelou, Tobias Wolff, et al.  Comfortable to the point of complacency, I feared. Sure, I could occasionally sneak an essay by the likes of Eula Biss or Ander Monson onto the syllabus, to give my students a sense of where nonfiction seems to be headed, but I felt like I couldn’t really focus on where this genre was going until the students got an idea of where it has been.

This year, though, I’m fortunate enough to be teaching at St. Lawrence University, which has about half a dozen faculty members in the English Department with really strong backgrounds in nonfiction forms, and who teach these forms to undergraduate students in workshops that always seem to be filled to maximum capacity. I figured, “If I’m ever going to be working with students strong enough in the history of this genre to teach this class, that time is now.” So, with the enthusiastic blessing of my chair, I began to design the course.

I cheated a little bit—we spent the second week of class (the class meets for three hours every Wednesday evening) discussing some of that canonical stuff I said I wasn’t going to teach—Orwell, White, Didion, and Lopate’s introduction  to The Art of the Personal Essay. I decided, in the end, that I wasn’t comfortable starting with the present until we’d talked a little bit about the past. But beginning with the third class—last night’s class, to be precise—we’re focusing on the current scene entirely.

So, how did it go?

We wound up discussing work by Cheryl Strayed, Bob Cowser Jr., Pam Houston, Jill Talbot, and Eula Biss. The Strayed piece—“The Love of My Life”—seemed to be a particular favorite, as she writes about grief and sex in just brutally honest ways (if you’re offended by brutally honest depictions of unpleasant sex written by talented writers—and I know some people who are—don’t click on that link; otherwise, read it. It’s amazing). We also spent a long time discussing Talbot’s observations about the construction of self in the age of social media: “Everyone now,” Talbot writes, “not just writers, creates a written, published persona on a daily (hourly) basis.  Artifice abounds.”  We even wound up relating these ideas to Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s idea of self-fashioning during the early modern period

How did it go? It was awesome.

I imagine we’ve all had those moments in the classroom where the discussion went so well, where all participants seemed so engaged, that the time flew by and you felt like the discussion should really go on over beers or coffee. It was 10 p.m., and I had to be up to teach at 8:30 the other day, and I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t drink with students, but… well, it was that kind of night.  It was the kind of class that makes one glad to do this for a living.

Will we be able to keep up this type of intense engagement?  It’s hard to say, of course—I can’t predict the future. All I can tell you is what’s on the syllabus—Steven Church.  Jenny Boully.  Ira Sukrungruang.  Ryan Van Meter.  Kristen Iversen.  Akhim Yuseff Cabey.  E.J. Levy.  John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. And lots of other thought-provoking practitioners of this form.

I can’t say for sure that this class is going to be a roaring success based on how well things went last night, of course, but my feeling is that our students want to know more about the contemporary nonfiction scene. I walked into class worried that I might have trouble filling three hours; I walked out regretting that we didn’t have five hours to devote to discussing these authors and their work. So, as I usually am in pretty much all things, I find myself cautiously optimistic.

I’ll keep you updated with how things go with this class, and what I learn along the way.  In the meantime, I’ll try to think of some revision exercises. If you have some, please leave a comment.  For that matter, if you can think of an essay or writer I ought to include on the reading list for a contemporary/ 21^st century essay class, let me know in a comment.

But on this day, I walked into the room and, before I could make any type of witty remark, a student said, “Can I ask a question?”

“Sure,” I replied, settling into my seat.

“What do you do when you have writer’s block?”

As I said, I wasn’t expecting this question.  This is an intro-level class.  Writer’s block, it seems to me, is something people develop when they’re further along in their writing careers, surely.  And what’s more, I wasn’t even sure writer’s block really existed—too often, I think writers use “writer’s block” as an excuse to do something—anything—other than writing.

So I led with that observation.  “I don’t really believe in writer’s block,” I said, noticing that the entire class had stopped their side conversations and were listening to me.  “I’ve found that when I have ‘writer’s block,’ it’s usually because there’s an article I want to read in The New Yorker, or Raging Bull is on TV, or there’s beer in the fridge, or I want to hang out with my wife.  In my experience, writers claim to be ‘blocked’ when they feel like being lazy.”

An honest answer, but an unsatisfactory one.  I could tell by my student’s expression that this wasn’t helpful.  Judging by the expressions on the faces of some of her classmates, I wasn’t helping them either.

“I assume you’re asking because you feel like you’re blocked?” I asked.

“I just don’t know how to get started on my next story,” she replied.  I noticed some other students nodding, heard a few “Yeahs” too.

I was actually relieved to hear this.  A sophomore’s anxiety about getting started, intimidation by the blank screen, is a different problem than “writer’s block,” it seems to me—or at least writer’s block as I understand the term.  The idea of writer’s block sort of affirms the belief that writing is all about inspiration, being touched by the muse.  That’s the sort of belief that I want to disabuse my students of—I don’t want them thinking that there’s something mystical about writing, that it’s something they either can do or can’t, depending on the whims of some supernatural force that may or may not anoint them.  I want them to understand that writing is hard work, and sitting around waiting for the story to present itself to you so that you can transcribe it is about the best way to not be a writer that I can think of.

Having trouble getting started, though, is a different matter, I think.  Particularly when we’re talking about student writers.  I rarely have trouble getting started these days, but I remember a time—not too very long ago—that I struggled to come up with something to write about.  These days, I have the opposite problem—I’ve got a ton of ideas, and not enough time to write about them.

How did I get to this point?  I wondered to myself.  What did I do that made it easier to get started, to face down the blank screen and create art?

I talked about sitting down at the computer, without distraction, and just pushing ahead.  Forcing yourself to get started and trusting that you’ll discover what the piece is about as you go along—even if that means eventually going back and seriously revising (or even completely trashing) those first few sentences (or paragraphs) after you’ve figured out what you’re doing.  I told them about a former classmate of mine, who always started with what he thought was the most interesting moment or idea in his story or essay, even if it belonged at the end of the piece, and who then would go back and write the beginning if he needed to.  I talked about my experience in screenwriting classes, which taught me the value of working from an outline sometimes—sometimes, it’s easier to begin a journey when you have a map in front of you.

Most importantly, I think the key to finding inspiration, I told my students, is in paying attention to the world we live in.  I don’t just mean go to the mall and people watch—although sometimes that works.  I mean taking the time to notice the stuff you frequently overlook in your day-to-day life.  Look at the trees that line the sidewalk you travel every day to get from your dorm to the dining hall.  Listen to the sounds that surround you—birds calling to each other from across the quad, laughter coming from someone’s open window, the faint sound of “All Along the Watchtower” coming from one of the fraternity houses down the street.

I like to regard much of my life as research for a hypothetical essay or story—that way, everything I do can be considered “productive” in some way, even if it’s just drinking a glass of wine with my wife in our porch swing—who’s to say I’m not going to write about this experience?  When you regard your actions and interactions as potential material, I told my students, it’s downright impossible to find yourself “blocked.”

This seemed to make sense to them, but I feel like this is something that I want to revisit with them as we get closer to the end of the semester.  I’d be interesting in hearing from readers of this blog: How you deal with the issue, either with your students or in your own writing?

I’ve been thinking a lot about 18-year-old Bradley these past few weeks.  Part of me almost expects to run into him, walking across the quad or coming out of the dining hall.  Part of me feels like I already have run into him—or run into his doppelganger from 2012, at any rate.  I’m teaching two creative writing classes and one literature class this semester, and these students are—for the most part—really enthusiastic about what they’re reading and writing.  I’ve taught thoughtful and ambitious students before, of course, but never so many at one time.  So it’s been an exhilarating experience.

One thing I’ve noticed about the undergraduate writers I’m teaching this semester is that many of them seem savvier about things like publishing opportunities and grad school programs than I was when I studied here.  I’ll be giving a talk later this semester to the students who work on the campus literary magazine, and one thing that the student who organized the talk told me they’d definitely be interested in hearing about was how I got editors to pay attention to my work, and what advice I have to give about getting creative work published.

On the one hand, I admire these students for their work ethic and foresight.  It didn’t really occur to me until my senior year that I might try to publish some of the stories and essays I’d been writing, and even then, I didn’t actually bother buying envelopes or printing out the stuff I had on my hard drive.  Playing Mortal Kombat on my roommate’s Sega Genesis seemed like a much more productive use of my time.  These students know about literary magazines and are familiar with small presses, and I think that’s really cool.  They know stuff about their contemporary literature scene that I didn’t know about mine when I graduated 13 years ago.  I’m pleased to see that—it suggests a dedication to reading and knowing good creative work, and who knows?  Such knowledge among the younger generation might be enough to save our literary culture.

At the same time, though, I worry a little bit about this focus on publishing.  I’m concerned that the students have sort of picked up on and internalized the “publish or perish” mentality that their professors are working under.  If you want to call yourself a writer, this mentality insists, you’ve got to get stuff published.  Submit to a magazine.  Send query letters to agents.  Most importantly, write the kind of stuff that other people want to read.

Of course, it’s important for student writers to be mindful of audience, but I fear that this focus on publishing and “getting the work out there” could be bad for their development.  We don’t get too many opportunities in life to just do what we want to do, to “chase our muse”, if you want to be all writer-ly and precious about it.  When I think back at my own undergraduate writing, most of it was probably pretty terrible, but it was still stuff I was excited about, and it represented my very best attempts at articulating stuff that mattered to me.  I wrote a short story about a barfly whose lost love—dead for decades—returned to him one dark and stormy night.  I wrote a screenplay about love and jealousy and murder.  I wrote a play that absolutely wasn’t about my break-up with my college girlfriend the summer before our senior year (okay—it kinda was; don’t tell her, though).  I wrote an essay about feeling humbled when I saw the Aurora Borealis on the university’s golf course late one night.  I wrote a comic book script about an amnesiac superhero who wound up owning a comic book store in upstate New York.  I wrote several poorly-conceived performance art pieces.  The less said about them, the better.

I doubt I’m ever going to revisit these pieces, or write anything like the again.  Although I have been dabbling in fiction lately, I remain pretty committed to creative nonfiction forms—particularly the essay.  But I’m glad I had the experience of spending those years trying out different things, experimenting with style while searching for my own voice.  I’m afraid if I had known that what I was working on—and pouring a ton of effort into—was ultimately “un-publishable,” I might not have bothered.  And that would have been terrible for my writing.

I finished my undergraduate career at St. Lawrence during the summer of 1999, after taking some time off due to health problems.  I spent a lot of that summer hanging out and talking with Bob Cowser, who at the time was a young new creative nonfiction professor and who, over the years, has become a close friend and valued mentor.  By that point, I’d seen enough of the world beyond college that I knew I had to think more seriously about the future if I wanted to be a writer.  One afternoon, after he had given me some positive feedback on an essay I’d shown him, I asked, “Do you have any thoughts on where I should send it?”

“Why?” he asked.

I was surprised.  By that point, I knew I was going on to grad school.  And I knew that if I wanted to be a Real Writer, I would need to publish stuff.

“You’re 23-years-old,” he told me.  “You have your entire life and career ahead of you.  Right now, you don’t need to worry about publishing—you need to worry about honing your craft and becoming a better writer.  Seriously, man—give it two years.  Start sending stuff out when you’re 25.  In the meantime, work on getting better.  You probably could start publishing now in smaller magazines—you’re good enough.  But if you wait and continue to get better, you can make sure that, years from now, you can be proud of every publication you list on your CV.”

At the time, that advice kind of stung.  In hindsight, though, I think it’s the most valuable advice Bob could have possibly given.  The truth is, I’m glad some of those early attempts didn’t wind up published for all the world to see.  They were important for my development, but they weren’t fully-formed pieces that I could really take pride in.  As it happened, I didn’t really start publishing until I was 27, but the stuff I’ve published since then has been stuff that I’m pleased to call my own.

I think, when I talk to those student writers in November, I’ll tell them about cover letters, and reading the magazines they want to send stuff to, and all that.  But I’m also going to give them the same advice Bob gave me.  “Slow down.  Try different things.  Write like you have another 50 or 60 years to worry about publishing.  The work that results may not be brilliant, and it may not be publishable, but you’ll have learned something about your own style, and the voice you find might be your own.”

What advice do you have for student writers anxious to get started with their careers setting the world on fire with their prose or verse?

1.  Brevity. Edited by Dinty W. Moore, Brevity is an excellent online magazine of brief nonfiction, from some of the best writers in the field.  From Brevity’s description:

“For more than a decade now, Brevity has published well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form, along with craft essays and book reviews. Though still committed to the mission of publishing new writers, Brevity has enjoyed an embarrassment of recent riches, including the work of two Pulitzer prize finalists, numerous NEA fellows, Pushcart winners, Best American authors, and writers from India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, and Japan. Authors published in Brevity include Sherman Alexie, Lia Purpura, Terese Svoboda, John Calderazzo, Steven Barthelme, Mark Yakich, Ander Monson, Caitlin Horrocks, Jon Pineda, Brenda Miller, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Robin Behn, Abby Frucht, Barbara Hurd, Bret Lott, Ira Sukrungruang, Rigoberto González, Judith Kitchen, Michael Martone, and Diana Hume George.”

Work from Brevity has been anthologized and reprinted in venues including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Utne Reader, the Short Takes anthology, the Best Creative Nonfiction anthology from W.W. Norton, and many recent writing textbooks.

2. Brevity Blog.  For news and commentary about the form, nothing beats Brevity magazine’s blog, which is updated frequently.  Any time there’s a debate in the world of creative nonfiction, you can count on some smart blog posts from a variety of contributors.

3. Creative Nonfiction. There’s a temptation to call Creative Nonfiction “the magazine that started it all.”  That’s not entirely accurate—people were writing this type of stuff for centuries before Lee Gutkind founded this magazine almost twenty years ago.  Still, it’s impossible to understate the impact this magazine has had on our genre.  Their website has a pretty generous selection of online reprints of pieces that originally appeared in the print magazine. From their “About” page:

“Creative Nonfiction was the first and is still the largest literary magazine to publish, exclusively and on a regular basis, high quality nonfiction prose. The journal has consistently featured prominent authors from the United States and around the world and has helped launch the careers of some of the genre’s most exciting emerging writers, as well as helping establish the creative nonfiction genre as a worthy academic pursuit.”

4. Quotidiana.  This collection of classical essays available through public domain is curated by essayist Patrick Madden.  He writes:

“Quotidiana, from the word quotidian, is a website dedicated to the essay. Quotidiana includes my writing and teaching portfolios, an online workshop community for me and my fellow O. U. Bobcats, a set of conference papers and annotated bibliographies, a collection of interviews with some of my favorite contemporary essayists, a selection of the ‘Essayest American Essays,’ from recent years, and, most importantly and most substantially, an anthology of hundreds of classical essays, all published before 1923, all partakers of the ruminative, associative, idea-driven form that predates and surpasses the current ‘creative nonfiction’ trendy stuff. Although most of these essays are available online elsewhere, some are not, and already Quotidiana is one of the biggest online anthologies of classical essays anywhere.”

5. Sweet: A Literary Confection.  I keep thinking of Sweet —which was founded and is edited by Ira Sukrungruang, Katherine Riegel, and K.C. Wolfe—as “that new online magazine of poetry and creative nonfiction.”  It’s not really new at all—it’s been around for years.  And in those years, they’ve published some great works by the likes of Joe Bonomo, Lee Martin, Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Maureen Stanton, Nicole Walker, and many others.  About their magazine and themselves, Sweet’s editors write:

“There’s a reason ‘sweet’ has come to mean ‘awesome’ in slang. It comes back to the mouth, to pleasure. We don’t believe pleasure has to be light, as our issues show. But we also don’t want readers to go away thinking, ‘That was really hearty’ or ‘What a healthy collection!’ We want you to think, ‘Mmmm, sweeeeet.’ We want you to find something here that you need, something perhaps not as practical as a potato, but just as vital.”

Creating an environment of friendly and well-intentioned critique is difficult in any creative writing classroom, but it’s particularly difficult in a creative nonfiction classroom.  As writers, we’re frequently defensive when it comes to our work, but as creative nonfiction writers, we sometimes wind up feeling defensive about our experiences and ideas as well.  Once, as a student in a workshop, I had to listen as a classmate explained that she didn’t like the piece I had written because the “narrator” was so whiney and self-absorbed.  And while I like to think that I have thick skin … come on.  That hurt.

I try to be particularly conscious of the student author’s feelings and protectiveness of her work even as I ask my students to talk specifically about what isn’t working in a piece.  Still, even with my attempts at sensitivity, some students are stressed out and even hurt by the entire workshop experience.  Who can blame them? They’ve just revealed themselves—exposed their realest, innermost selves—without the safety net of a fictional narrator or poetic speaker, and now they’re getting criticized for their efforts.  That can be disheartening, even infuriating.

A couple weeks ago, my book—this manuscript I’ve been working on, in various forms, for over five years now—was rejected by a publisher.  Again.  As most working writers know, rejection is just part of the process.  You read the nicely-phrased note, sigh to yourself, then get back on your laptop and find the next contest or university press to send the thing to.  You nod to yourself, silently wish the editors who rejected you good luck with their future endeavors, and then get back to work.

At least, that’s how I think it’s supposed to happen.  The truth is, that’s not how it works for me.  Instead, I give out this little gasp.  Then I pace around the room a little bit.  Then I announce—either to my wife or, if she’s not home, one of the cats—“I don’t know why I continue to operate under the delusion that I’m a writer.”  My wife, for her part, knows to let me say this out loud, to get it out of my system.  And the cats seem to know the same thing—they seldom interrupt my pity parties.

Keep in mind, I’m a fairly successful writer (“For the type of loser who doesn’t even have a book,” Mopey Me adds with a frown).  I’ve published over two dozen essays, reviews, and interviews in some of the best magazines and journals in my field.  I say this not to brag, but to point out that I have no reason to feel like a loser when something I write—from the shortest essay to the book manuscript itself—is not accepted for publication.  But I do.

Inevitably, I get over it.  I take a couple of days, but then return to the manuscript in order to decide, “Was it them, or is it me?”  Sometimes, I make changes.  Sometimes—like this most recent time—I conclude, “You know, I think this is ready as it is.”  And I send the thing back out again.  Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not.  The point is, I essay.

But the larger point is that I understand personally the frustration and disappointment when a piece of writing is received less enthusiastically than its author might like.  My students’ sadness (or anger) at a workshop discussion may not be exactly the same as my own response to a rejection, but it’s darn close, I think.  That’s important to keep in mind—too often I get frustrated by my students’ frustration.  “I’m trying to help you!” I think to myself.  But it’s useful to remember that they’ve poured as much as themselves into their assignments as I have into my book.

Lately, I’ve taken to telling my students what I’m working on, and when the work gets rejected—or accepted.  I want them to understand that the occasional disappointment is inevitably part of this process, but that if they persevere, they might know the joy that comes with realizing they have succeeded in reaching—and moving—their audience.

Any other tips on how to deal with student frustrations in the writing workshop?  For that matter, any advice for me on how to deal with my own bouts of self-loathing that inevitably accompany rejection?

William Bradley: What would you say is the most challenging thing about teaching creative nonfiction?

Maureen Stanton: I’d say that the most challenging aspect of teaching CNF is to help students write works that readers will care about, and to understand that it’s not enough to just relate a story—after all, everyone has a story but why should readers choose to read this piece of writing among all the options available?  This is not something that I emphasize too much with undergraduates, who are just trying their hands at the genre and gaining practical writing skills, and who generally aren’t ambitious about publishing their work or even thinking about publishing.  But with graduate students, it’s difficult to raise this subject because mentioning the “Why should I or anyone care?” question feels like a personal criticism, or at least is sounds harsh.  I should add that I don’t express this thought in those blunt terms exactly —“Why should I care what happened to you?”—because that is destructive and difficult criticism to hear about one’s own work.  But it is the central question of creative nonfiction, especially memoir, and sometimes it is the only question left to ask in an otherwise accomplished piece of writing.  The good news is that there are many ways to make any individual essay or memoir reach beyond being a well-written conveyance of an experience, even though dealing with the “who cares” aspect may also be the most difficult thing to learn as well as to teach.

William Bradley: That idea of asking students to think about why their readers should care about the events and ideas they write about calls to mind Natalia Rachel Singer’s essay “Nonfiction in First Person, Without Apology,” where she says that the question facing the nonfiction writer isn’t “Who cares?” but “Why do you care?”  I’ve cribbed that line in class, “Why do you care about this?  I can’t care until you show me why it matters so much.”  I think sometimes students enter the nonfiction workshop thinking that their personal stories will be compelling simply because they matter so much to them.

Which leads me to my next question: People have accused young people today of being more narcissistic than previous generations, using social media to record the minutia of their daily lives as if they’re being followed as closely as Kanye or Rihanna.  I don’t know if I think my students are more narcissistic than I was at 19, but I definitely think that our current students have grown up with this technology that sort of promotes the idea of revealing the self—or some aspect of the self—in a public forum.  Do you think that the type of “exhibitionism” encouraged by social media might have impact on student work written for a creative nonfiction class?

Maureen Stanton: That’s a really interesting question, about which I think the jury is still out. But I can see it going both ways. Creative nonfiction is a genre that draws from the individual’s experiences, thoughts, musings, imaginations, emotions, etc.  So the notion that the “self” as appropriate and rich for exploration, and to some extent, performance, would be perhaps more acceptable to this generation raised on self-exposure through social media.

As a creative nonfiction writer, at the beginning of my career I often felt a need to apologize for writing about myself or my life (and tried to suppressed that urge to apologize so as not to buy into any sense that such an endeavor is lesser, or suspect in any way; obviously it’s not but there has been that stigma).  So a positive result of social media exhibitionism might be the removal of any stigma about seeking and/or using the self as a source for art.  The negative result would stem from the fact that social media communication is so shallow, almost the antithesis of good memoir or essay writing, which requires going deep, waiting, mulling, meditating and discovering wisdom to share.  I think the short answer is that the desire to share stories and exhibit your life is a useful and interesting impulse (like my mother talking across the laundry line, so to speak, with other neighborhood mothers), and can help build a sense of community and communion, but social media may be too expeditious, too self-conscious of performance and hierarchy (or other unrelated–to-art goals) to yield deeper meaning and connectedness in the way that great essays and memoirs can.

William Bradley: I was thinking about the idea of persona in an essay, or developing one’s voice, and how some of the students I’ve become “friends” with on Facebook or who I follow on Twitter seem to unconsciously (I think) develop their own online identities—I had a student who was always very shy and retiring in all of my interactions with him, but to see his Twitter account, you’d think he was James Bond or John Shaft, what with all the talk of his own sexual prowess.  How much do you focus on developing the student’s voice and persona in a creative nonfiction class?  Do you have any strategies or assignments that are useful for this purpose?  Does your approach differ in an undergraduate vs. graduate workshop?

Maureen Stanton: That’s a really interesting observation about the performance of the self on social media, with the protection of impersonal communication, or messages tailored to a particular audience—your hip friends. Since I’m not “friends” on Facebook with too many of my undergraduates, I haven’t experienced anyone demonstrating a split personality that way.  As far as helping students develop voice or persona, I don’t set out to teach students this skill, per se, at least I haven’t yet. (This is making me think I should develop some “voice” exercises.)  With undergraduates, the focus is still on the mechanics, the basics of the genre, so something as subtle and potentially tricky to master as “voice” hasn’t been my focus. I think that my comments on their essays probably alert them to sections where the writing has successfully created a distinct voice or a mood or tone (which can suggest a persona or voice). Or the opposite: they are trying too hard to establish a voice and it’s clearly not their own; they are imitating Kerouac or Agee or David Foster Wallace, or trying too hard to be funny or cute or revealing, but it’s obvious that it’s not authentic. I applaud the effort to try out someone else’s voice, as you can learn through mimesis and experimentation, as long as you discover, recognize, develop or return to your own voice or persona.

Graduate students seem to have it under control; they know who they are, and they have distinct voices that I can see and hear in their writing.

William Bradley:  You’ve been teaching for a few years now—if I’m not mistaken, you started teaching at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the fall of 2005 (I remember, because I was on the search committee that interviewed you at MLA less than two weeks before my wedding).  If you had advice to give to someone just starting her career teaching creative nonfiction—maybe even the Maureen Stanton of seven years ago—what would it be?

Maureen Stanton: Yes, I began teaching in 2005 at University of Missouri, and I’ve learned a lot through mistakes, mostly issues particular to the odd task of “critiquing someone’s life.”  Perhaps my mistakes will be helpful to new teachers.  For teaching undergraduates, I’d say that it is important to talk to students about what is appropriate to present to workshop right at the beginning of the course, when reviewing the syllabus.  I hadn’t really made this clear enough, but then I had a student who wrote about her attempted suicide that was still too fresh. (She withdrew from the university later that term due to depression.) Prior to that, I had thought that any subject was fine to write about. I didn’t want to be too restrictive or controlling, but after that, I realized that while it might have been therapeutic for her to write about her experience, it was not a great idea to share it in the workshop.  The subject was too tender and awkward for the group. They handled it really well, but nobody felt like they could actually provide literary criticism of this piece, so why bring it to a workshop? In future classes, I was very clear about what is appropriate and useful to bring to workshop.   That single experience with the student who was suffering from depression was a moment when I truly felt I’d let the class down, and that student, too, by putting everyone in an awkward position.

For teaching graduate students, I sort of caved in a bit to what they wanted to do in the course (not much reading, no exercises), because I remember that I wanted that sort of studio approach to a workshop. I knew my topic and my project and I just wanted to be left alone to work on it and then get comments.  So I became sensitive to this criticism in the evaluations at the end of the term. But in hindsight, I think it is useful and appropriate to have rigorous reading and exercises in a graduate workshop. Graduate students can be too comfortable in a groove with their writing (especially if they’ve had some publishing success) and be less willing to break out of that comfort/competence zone.  I do recall hating exercises in workshops in my M.F.A. program, but I have to admit that all the exercises I did turned into published essays, gave me new techniques, and generated new material. At the time, I didn’t appreciate this connection.  And what is sometimes hard to grasp is that in graduate school, you have time to read rich, difficult, challenging books. Once you get a job with a full teaching load, I think it becomes much more difficult to find the time for self-selected reading beyond reading the books on your syllabi.

At the time, I believe Bellamy was most well-known for his fiction, but Literary Luxuries is a great nonfiction book that I think any writer—regardless of genre—would do well to check out.  It is equal parts memoir, personal essay, craft guide, and survey of the literary landscape of the late twentieth century.

One of the chapters in the book—a craft essay titled “The Autobiographical Trap”—should be of particular interest to nonfiction writers.  The essay’s target audience is fiction writers, but I think the lessons he imparts are important for nonfiction writers to hear as well.

“When one writes from life and memory,” Bellamy writes, “there is always a tendency to become so involved emotionally with the material that the work becomes ‘too thin’ or anorexic.  The least suggestion (the slimmest outline or reminder) of the traumatic events you wish to write about causes the floodgates of emotion to open up for you … So it is not difficult at all to persuade yourself that the floodgates will open up for the reader as well.”  There’s danger in making such an assumption, though—our readers don’t have our experiences, haven’t perceived the world as we have, and those suggestions, outlines, and reminders that resonate so much with us need to be developed and described in more detail if they are to resonate with the reader.  As Bellamy explains, “This means a careful and full rendering of the action, the motivations, and the expository details that are so familiar to the writer that they are easy to overlook.”

This, I think, is often the most difficult lesson to teach nonfiction students.  The piece concerned with a particularly vicious fight with Mom simply doesn’t have the same impact if we don’t get the details—not only of what was said during the argument—but also what the relationship is normally like, when not in crisis-mode.  “Well, she’s my mom,” the student replies.  “I love her.”  Well, of course—but what does that mean?  I love my mom too, though I don’t lie down next to her in her bed to talk about everything that has been going on in my life, the way my wife lies down next to hers when we go to visit.  The love my mom and I share is more rooted in sarcasm and irony.  If I’m to write of the relationship in a more upsetting, less-normal state, I need to be sure to establish what the normal state is before I can expect my reader to understand the gravity of this change.

I also like Bellamy’s observation that “It is a sorry fact that life does not often work in perfect story or novel form.”    Bellamy, of course, is advising fiction students to discard the autobiographical in order to write a better story, but I think this is an important for lesson for people committed to writing about real life, too.  Students raised on fictional narratives—novels, movies, soap operas, reality television—have sometimes internalized the inverted check mark approach to writing.  There needs to be an introduction, a series of complications leading to a climax and epiphany, and then resolution.

As Bellamy points out—and as I try to emphasize to my students—life isn’t really structured like that, and in our efforts to turn life into literature, we want to avoid simplifying our experiences and thoughts so that they might fit some preconceived idea of “what a piece of creative writing should look like.”

I could probably sit here and retype the wise things Bellamy says in this book for thousands and thousands of words, but I suspect the kind folks at Bits might frown upon that—this blog is supposed to be devoted to my ideas about writing nonfiction, and not ideas I’ve plagiarized from people smarter than me.  But I guess you can tell that I really like this book, just as I’ve liked many books published by the University of Missouri Press over the years (if you’re into essays, check out Ned Stuckey-French’s The American Essay in the American Century; I’ve heard good things about E.J. Levy’s new book Amazons: A Love Story, too, and plan to read it later this summer).  I’m sad to see the press closing.  I understand that at a time when Americans are having trouble paying their mortgages and feeding their kids, an academic press seems pretty opulent, but I also think that Bellamy’s words about our culture—first published in 1995—are even more relevant today, as he notes that ours “is a time badly in need of the redeeming powers of the imagination and of great writing—all the literary sorts of luxuries that we simply can’t do without.”

I don’t want to end this blog post on a depressing or elegiac note, so I’ll ask you, gentle reader, how you deal with the autobiographical trap when writing nonfiction—if, indeed, you’ve ever been caught in this trap yourself.  Is this something you’re conscious of while drafting a piece?  Something to watch out for in the editing or revising stages?  Do you have any advice you give to your students about making their experiences and ideas as vivid on the page as they are in their minds?