I Refute You. Thus! (Kick)

Because we were all post grads starved for something to argue about, we AmeriCorps kids decided to form a reading group. We were also lazy, so we decided the pieces had to be short. So, every week we would designate someone to host and choose a story, essay, comic, or whatever. We called ourselves the Swimmers because that was the first story we read and discussed. And because we usually drank a lot.

One week, R decided to join us. R was in charge of making the warehouse more efficient and was outstandingly successful at it. He was also taking a break from an MA in philosophy at Ole Miss and since we hadn't read any philosophy yet  he volunteered to provide.

At lunch, we were sitting in the dwindling shade underneath a rusted, sheet metal structure that served as a volunteer orientation spot. Anyway, I asked, "What are you thinking for a philosophy essay?"

I admit that I didn't particularly care what he was going to choose -- I just wanted to hear him talk. R has a fantastic academic Mississippi drawl and so at lunch I would usually try to prod him into a rant so he'd keep going.

R shrugged. "I don't know. What would people like to talk about?"

"Well, your specialty was ethics, right? Why not bring up something from that?"

"Nah, I'm taking a break from that and I don't think anyone would really want to hear me talk about it because I've researched it so heavily I slide into minutia. What about you? What would you like to talk about?"

"Well, I'm really fascinated by Allan Turing's 'The Turing Test.' We could talk about that."

R gave me a horrified, baffled look. "Why would you want to talk about that?"

"Why not?" I asked, falling back on that age-old rhetorical last-stand question. "It's interesting. I think it could be fun to talk about the idea of humanness and talking about other minds."

R shook his head. "No, it's not. I find that entire debate dull and ridiculous. Why would you bother to ask if a computer can think? Of course it can't. It's a programmed machine."

"But-"

"And why bother asking if someone else has a consciousness outside of yourself. Of course they do. If they didn't, why would you bother trying to communicate with them. Go down that road too far and you end up in solipsism and you've lost the whole game."

I suddenly realized I'd brought a English major to a philosophy fight and looked for an escape route.

"Isn't that poor sportsmanship?" I asked. "Just dismissing someone's argument outright. Isn't that called straw-manning?"

"No, straw-manning is when you misconstrue someone else's argument to be weaker than it is and then tear it down. I didn't do that - I just said your argument wasn't worth my time."

"Again," I said, feebly. "Sportsmanship. What do they teach you at Ole Miss?"

R laughed. "Actually, they encourage you to do that. If you can't argue with someone then you just dismiss it outright and say, 'I'll tell you how wrong you are by ignoring you and starting at the beginning.' Bertrand Russell did it all the time."

Lunch was over. We started to retreat back to our respective offices. "So, what would you like to talk about?"

"'The Apology,'" R said, and proceeded to explain. I considered it a successful lunch break.

Reading the Signs

Recently, I made the terribly poor health decision of following the postings on a Facebook group called the MFA 2013 Draft. Basically, it's a place for MFA applicants to virtually congregate and share advice and developments about the process and, unfortunately, reading the comments is sometimes like watching the scenes from a Shakespearean comedy when Shit Goes Down. There's a slight bit of miscommunication and suddenly everyone who applied to some school has a sympathetic heart attack... like me just now.

Within moments, you can watch a discussion explode into micro-analysis of what these tell-tale signs -- like an auto-reply message burped up from the submission system -- Means. Deep down, you know it's ridiculous, but when you rest your hopes on something it's hard not to divine secrets from bureaucracy.

I promised myself I wouldn't look and every day I break it. I have a problem, I know.

It is, however, interesting to see how my thought process and behavior has changed under such anxiety. For some reason I'll find myself playing video games instead of writing and think to myself, "Ah, but if I write more, maybe that will tip the Karmic scales in my favor and while I am writing some professor from X university will feel compelled to call me at that moment to inform me that I've been accepted." This seems irrationally reasonable.

But it gets worse. Now I've started to feel bad about not writing thank you notes or not starting to do my taxes and an itchy suspicion begins to take hold that my slacking off is diminishing my chances of getting into grad school. This, I believe, is why people believe in magic. I'm starting to develop the equivalent mental ticks of the baseball coach who rattles the bats to shake out a home run. People wonder why I carry a notebook around with me everywhere -- I should just start telling them I'm bewitched.

Suffering

During my first nonfiction class, my teacher told us a story. When she was eighteen she entered and won a place in a one-time workshop with a prestigious author whose name I don't remember. When it was her turn before the firing squad, the distinguished author ripped her and her work to shreds. The way she described it this was not at all in keeping with normal workshop decorum of constructive criticism. He made her cry.

After the class, the distinguished writer took my teacher aside and told her, "For the next three years, don't write a word. Go to Terrell County, Texas and get a job as a waitress. After three years, you'll have enough material to be a good writer."

Then she said, "Bull. Shit." Writing is about craft. And no one has the right to tell you what to do with your life or make a value judgement on your experience. That's why Lee Gutkind's article "The MFA in Creative Nonfiction: What to Consider Before Applying" in the most recent edition of Poets and Writers pissed me off.

In the article, Gutkind writes that the most important criterion a potential applicant should consider is "How much have you suffered--or experienced?" He elaborates, "I'm not contending here that young people can't write with power and beauty or that they haven't suffered. But it's often better to join the Peace Corps, take a job driving a taxi, or interact with a different culture before studying writing on a master's degree level."

Flannery O'Conner said something to the effect that if you make it through childhood then you've got enough material to write. All of our experiences, everything, is inherently interesting.

There's a scene from Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation that I particularly love, when Kaufman's meta-character sits in a screen writing class and asks the instructor, Robert McKee, how you write about the everyday world since it's mostly boring and nothing happens. McKee responds, "Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day... Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love. People lose it..."

Our everyday experience is a plenitude of bizarre wonders and miracles.

But this isn't what irks me about the "you need to suffer" philosophy of nonfiction writing. For one, this fetishizes and glorifies trauma. I think this can lead artists, young artists especially, to make stupid decisions -- I've met many who did. At worst, I think this devalues thoughts and experiences that aren't about this sexy suffering.

Chuck Palahniuk has a great essay in Stranger Than Fiction called "You Are Here" which criticizes the popular tendency to write about personal trauma. It's an ineffective and perverse form of exorcism. I'm not sure I agree with Chuck -- there's nothing wrong with writing as therapy -- but when you rest your life on life as story, trying to strong arm your memories into a thing that gives meaning to your suffering, you may need reevaluate your methods. Everyone has suffered. Telling the world is not a universal cure-all.

And that, I think, is what really bothers me about Gutkind's criterion of suffering. We're all filled with a wealth of material and memories, but not everyone who wants to attend a nonfiction writing program wants to write about themselves. There are whole galaxies of writing that fall under the category of "nonfiction." Just because the memoir and the personal essay are popular right now doesn't mean everyone wants to write them. What about those of us who want to write journalism, criticism, science articles, and social commentary and want to come at it from a different angle than the traditional disciplines?

What about those of us who just want to learn how to write more effectively about the facts? What if you just want to know how to best tell a true story, regardless if it's about suffering or not?

Material

This morning before he left, my roommate, the Viking, told me he and his fellow plant biology grad students were talking about plant volatiles. Volatiles are chemicals secreted by a plant when they are stressed -- like when a caterpillar is eating it. The chemical alerts helpful predators in the area to the plant's predicament, so a bird might come along and eat the offending caterpillar.

"So," the Viking said. "That smell of freshly cut grass is actually the cacophony of your lawn screaming in pain."

The things you learn when living with guy who reads biology textbooks for fun.

#

Last year I applied for six grad schools and was declined by all. After the initial embarrassment passed, I told a few friends and family and everyone said some variation on, "You know, you don't have to go to grad school to be a writer." This is no great comfort to me.

I'm a writer because I write. I don't expect two or three years of a grad program is going to transform me into a bestseller or award winning author. After I'm done, I'll probably find a job as a technical writer and that would suit me fine. In fact, that's basic the plan. I love writing and I'm not particular about form or content. I enjoy composing grants about as much as I enjoy writing stories.

Now I understand why people say they attend MFA programs to have more time to write. I worked full-time as an AmeriCorps member and now I have secured full-time employment again in St. Paul. Free time is precious. Writing time, even more so.

I'm far away from my workshop network. They're scattered throughout the country and world. The people whose opinions matter most to me have lives and have little opportunity to meet up at some mutually convenient location for a writing session or workshop.

After spending years toying with the idea, I have yet to actually try my hand at teaching. I have no idea whether or not I would be good at it, but I at least want to try. There's something deeply appealing about it, to me. Living in New Orleans, I helped put together and typically led a reading group called the Swimmers, which was the highlight of my week. I wasn't teaching -- we were peers -- but I got a kick out of guiding discussions and making notes to bring up particular subjects and I found that, after spending five years in literary analysis classes and workshops, I'm not half bad at it.

And, of course, I miss the academic environment. My job is intellectually challenging, I read all the time and write often. But there's a difference between having a personal library and easy access to an academic one, between a great Friday-night discussion on politics and literature and a class on contemporary world literature, between committing yourself to a life of learning and having the title "student." Well, here I'm being melodramatic. If you want an intellectual life you can live one.

So, no, I don't want to go to grad school to be a writer. I want to attend an MFA program because it would be a luxury. Because I've got unfinished business. Because I still hold out this small hope that I could teach and devote my working life to my passions: writing and talking about books with bibliophiles and writers.

#

New Orleans was a big city by my Iowan standards, but I've never lived in a place where I couldn't rely on my own two feet for getting around on a daily basis. It's still weird to me the ownership people feel over their bus routes. I was talking with a neighbor the other day who told me, "The 21A used to be my bus."

Three weeks ago, my first day at work, I took the 21A at 6:00AM (way too damn early, it turned out) and sat a few seats away from a woman hustling shots from a plastic bottle of gin. The other day, I sat across the row from a young woman telling a man, "I'm the most eligible bachelorette in town! I don't have diseases. I don't shoot up. I've got an apartment. Maybe if you factor in that I'm pregnant, I'm less desirable, but some people don't care."

LW told me a few days ago, "When I first got here, I used to hide behind a book when the crazies on the bus started acting up. Now I just watch and I'm amused. You should get some good material out of this."

More more things

And a Brief Note on Things, Weddings, and Where the Hell I Am in Life...

1.) Reading The Lorax as an adult is a far more emotional and political experience than I ever imagined.

2.) An exchange at today's wedding, "It's been years since I've seen him." "Yeah, what happened to him?" "He got divorced."

3.) A few days ago I resolved to make it my mission this year to stop Worrying. Most likely I'll elaborate on this in the future. But suffice to say for now that this decision will take a few weeks or months to implement.

4.) Today I witnessed one my childhood friends, Mindy, getting married to her high school sweetheart. It was wonderful. However, my favorite part of the wedding was watching and listening to my parents dance and socialize with their college friends. To my college friends: I look forward to your future children's weddings.

5.) Got a job. Got an apartment. Working on getting a car.

6.) Charter schools are complicated.

7.) Words fall through me.

8.) I'm going to apply for grad school again this year. This will be interesting.

9.) Sorry this post isn't particularly fun. It's past midnight and I'm rather tired after the wedding. Tomorrow: Ren Fest. Tonight: Sleep.

Fin.

No! I Refuse! I… I… I’m Going to Grad School!

Honestly, I never quite understood the Urgency of the desire to go to grad school is until I got an eight-to-five Job.

Maybe I just haven’t learned the knack of living with such intractable constraints. But, I honestly can’t figure out how other people balance work and family and hobbies all in 24 hours.

That is the greatest obstacle to Resolutions.

Usually, resolving to do things is easy. I could promise to do anything. But suddenly I have limitations. And my job has brought out the cynic and pessimist in me. Suddenly, I rarely think about aspirations and dreams so much as processes and the clearly attainable.

Since becoming a grant writer, I have become obsessed with budgets and strategic plans.

But, I will not let that stop me now. I shall make promises and keep them this year because, really, it’s the End of the World, and so I need to make this one count.

Anyway, the aspirations are divided up into writing goals and life goals, because that’s the only distinction I make on a day-to-day basis.

Writing Goals:

1.  Keep writing at least once a week in Scribbler’s Doorless Room. Make at least one post every month about writing. Do a book review every two months. That sounds manageable.

2.  At some point, write a story/essay/play/poem every day for a week and post it in Scribbler’s Doorless Room. If that works, go for a month. If that works, keep going until exhaustion takes hold.

3.  Write one new story/essay/play/poem and revise one old story/essay/play/poem every month.

4.  Submit my “finished” plays to more competitions.

5.  Film “The Fear of”.

Life Goals:

1.  Be a better grant writer and copywriter. … And figure out what that means. Getting more money, I suppose. That works for me.

2.  Get into grad school. Or reapply.

3.  Or get a Fulbright. Or reapply.

4.  Or get a job teaching English abroad. Or reapply.

5.  Or get a salaried job writing copy or grants. Or reapply.

6.  Or get a job with AmeriCorps and do good work.

7.  Read at least a book a week.

8.  Laugh and smile more often, so as to confuse my enemies.