“From your human perspective, you often believe that you must work hard to overcome obstacles and satisfy shortages and solve the problems that are before you; but often, in that attitude or approach, you work against yourself without realizing it. Attention to obstacles makes them bigger and more stubborn; attention to shortages makes them bigger and prolongs them—and attention to a problem prevents any immediate resolution or solution.” (Abraham-Hicks)
I had prepared some notes for a follow-up piece about the shame girl in the forest being alternately conceived of as a blockage or stagnation, as in, of Qi: a density that ought to be a lightness or porosity.
I remember in the MFA workshop I used to get finger-wagged at for indeterminacy. For example, above: a porosity? Make it “the porosity”. Be discriminating. This advice, given as an order, and without explanation, struck me as presumptuous. Whenever did I indicate that the noun in question was supposed to refer to ‘the’ singular thing of its kind? Why ignore other ostensible porosities? To be told to make my one-of-many The Only One to me betrayed a certain insecurity. Are we not safe with others of our kind? Are we not able to imagine our readers with a capacity for focus that can simultaneously hold the possibility of another one of whatever we’re naming? The sun. The ocean. The moment or glance or sheen. I hated how that piece of feedback made me feel—registering that indeed, the intention had gone unnoticed, a subtlety unrewarded—and I received it often from the professor, who sat at the head of the table declaring declaratively with such presumption I found myself seduced into a style that directly opposed her own.
Getting frictive little line notes from strangers week after week seems ill-advised. I wonder whether somewhere along the..line..they agreed it was the best they could possibly do in such a format as around a seminar table. I wonder whether the MFA workshop is built around the genre of fiction, where ‘line items’ like plot, character, and ‘style’ are imagined to be operating discretely among each other and can be fished out and altered easily even by strangers. The strangeness of the workshop did not occur to me until I left the program, now that it has been six or seven years since getting clear of it. I have moved away from criticizing the attempts of others to express themselves and, on the rare occasions now when I am asked, instead simply provide encouragement, general but sincere, in the direction of ongoing and deepening expression.
Expression is always self-expression to some degree. Before the self or expression of that self can be judged or altered, or even accurately beheld, it must be acknowledged, affirmed. Yes, you are. Yes, you are expressing. “Be here now.” There is a way to do this without losing the thread, but it requires trust among equals, something that is difficult to establish, especially in college classrooms. The basic mistake or failure of the workshop model for poetry, to my mind, is a lack of genuine affirmation. The assumption that we are bringing broken or sub-par artifacts into a shop to work them over until they are something everyone can get behind is a neutering and debilitating attitude toward expression, and towards the self. This sounds like a cheesy Instagram-psychologist post. You’re not for everybody. But you can yet be affirmed in your expression.
This is perhaps too subtle a point for programming on a massive scale by educational institutions that exist to uphold the status quo for the profit of their shareholders. I didn’t intend to write about MFA programs today, and I do not care to workshop the workshop—I don’t have much hope that its fundamental structure is salvageable. But I have recently come back into considering myself a writer after a time where my sense of self and capacity for expression both had been severely damaged by experiences in an MFA. I became more interested in the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘expression.’ Or rather, it was only by a destruction of a great amount of tacked-on plaque around the ‘self’ that a refreshed will-to-expression could emerge.
