Today is the first day after finishing my inaugural semester in the MFA for Writing & Publishing program at the University of Baltimore, and it seems as good a day as any to start writing in this space.
I realized today that I finished my undergrad degree at Marlboro College in Vermont almost seventeen years ago. I turned forty at the end of August, so that's nearly half my life ago. There was a long stretch where I wanted to write “more seriously” again, but I started my family when I was thirty, and for various reasons, writing “more seriously” was difficult.
I realized today that I finished my undergrad degree at Marlboro College in Vermont almost seventeen years ago. I turned forty at the end of August, so that's nearly half my life ago. There was a long stretch where I wanted to write “more seriously” again, but I started my family when I was thirty, and for various reasons, writing “more seriously” was difficult.
My daughter was born with
a congenital heart defect, which required surgery when she was five-months-old.
The first five months of her life were hectic in part because she was our first
child and we became new parents while my husband was finishing up his doctorate
program, but also because when a newborn has a heart defect complications can arise, and we faced many of them. My daughter was also
born with Down syndrome, and we had many early intervention therapies in our daily schedule. If I could do it all over again, I would have approached how
we addressed her disability differently. There would have been far fewer—if
any— therapies while she was so young, but that’s a story for a different day.
We moved several times
after my daughter was born for my husband's work after
he got his PhD. Ultimately, we bought a house Baltimore, MD in 2008 when my
daughter was fifteen-months-old. I was pregnant with my second child at the
time, and my son was born six months after we arrived, prompting his older
sister to begin walking finally, just days after he came home from the hospital
(she was twenty-one months old at the time).
My mother has been sick
and unavailable for many years, and we never lived close to what little family
we have. We’ve also never hired any regular outside help. I’m sure you can
imagine how busy I was as a stay-at-home mother, and if you can’t, there are
plenty of places where you can read about what that experience is
like.
My point in mentioning all of this is to illustrate briefly how difficult I found it to find the time to write “more seriously.” What
I’ve only recently begun to realize and give myself credit for, is that I never
stopped writing throughout any of it. I kept a blog for about fifteen years. I began it prior to
starting my family, and I stopped just a few
years ago. I daresay there was a time when it received a fair amount of
traffic. I’ve since decided to make that blog private, but it served my desire
to write and communicate with people for a long time. I also wrote “more
seriously” in the course of that time, but I think because it just sat in
folders on my desktop, it didn’t feel real and I didn’t give myself credit for
that, either.
In 2014, when my kids were six and eight, I heard about the Words After War Writing Intensive at Marlboro College, where I got my BA in Poetry & Literature in 1999. At the urging of a friend, I applied. Taking part in the intensive began my foray into writing "more seriously" again. After participating in the program in 2014 and 2015, I decided I was ready to go back to school to get my MFA.
In 2014, when my kids were six and eight, I heard about the Words After War Writing Intensive at Marlboro College, where I got my BA in Poetry & Literature in 1999. At the urging of a friend, I applied. Taking part in the intensive began my foray into writing "more seriously" again. After participating in the program in 2014 and 2015, I decided I was ready to go back to school to get my MFA.
I looked at multiple MFA
programs, most of them low-residency and in other states. My husband was
willing to help me make that work, but it would have been difficult. By chance,
I went to the Baltimore Writer's Conference last fall where I met Marion Winik and D. Watkins who spoke about the program at the University of Baltimore. Ms. Winik, a prolific author of many great works of non-fiction and NPR commentator, spoke as a professor, and Mr. Watkins, the breakout author of the book, The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America, and more recently, The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir, spoke as a graduate of the UB program. I didn't know at the time that the program existed.
After the conference I
did some research and liked what I saw. I applied, and it was the first thing
I’d done in a long time that made me giddy with excitement when I thought about
what it would mean for me and the course of my life if I got accepted. I loved
the idea of being able to get involved in the Baltimore writing scene, and going to
school and working in the same place where I live and hope to develop my career
as a “serious writer.”
I hope my use of scare
quotes when it comes to being a serious writer, rather than just being
annoying, has illustrated what I wish I’d known all along. I don’t think there
is any such thing as a serious writer, any more than I think there is such a
thing as a not-serious writer. Writers write, and in so doing, they become
writers.
***
A requirement for all
candidates in the first semester of the UB MFA program is a class called Creativity:
Ways of Seeing, and I’ll be honest that at first I thought it seemed kind of hokey. While in
real life I am quite goofy and playful, and have perhaps even secretly yearned
for someone to come along and tell me I HAD to take a class that required me to
play with crayons and glue and glitter (and what’s more, make mistakes and
revel in them while I did it), I’m also a pretty serious person.
My undergraduate classes,
despite the fact that I went to an incredibly liberal school, were very much embedded
in white male-dominated literature. I’m certain that’s changed a lot since I
graduated, but lets face it, American literature, at its roots, is white and
male. I think this background helped distill in me this desire to Be Taken
Seriously (caps intentional). I don’t mean to suggest that being playful (or
goofy) is a feminine trait, but I do think I’ve had a tendency to squash that
urge in myself, at least in part, because I want people to think what I say and what I write about has worth and should be taken seriously.
***
Last night our Creativity
class met for the last time. We had a party to celebrate the end of our first
semester and presented one last project, which we had one week to work on. They
were based on the poem, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet. We were to write our own version (in any
genre) of things we didn’t know we loved, and present them in some
way beyond just reading them.
The presentations were as
diverse as the people in the classroom. One woman passed out balloons and asked
us to pop them and read the slip of paper she’d put inside. She then read the
part of her piece that correlated with the phrases on the papers. One woman did a
guided meditation with us before reading her piece (which, incidentally, is an ingenious way to get a room full of people focused before you share a piece of
writing). One woman handed out the cookies she made from her mother’s recipe
before reading a lovely piece about her. A man wrote his entire poem on a
length of duct tape and we passed it around the room reading it aloud in a
round, and another woman made Cootie Catchers as part of her presentation.
Each presentation was
creative and fun, and it was great seeing a whole other side to this diverse
group of people—both in the unique ways they presented their work, and in the
works themselves, which seemed to shine extra bright last night. The director of the UB MFA program, Kendra Kopelke is the professor of this class. She is also a poet whose
work I’ve only just been introduced to, but really love. Under her guidance, we went from an awkward, shy, and rather quiet group of
strangers, to—do I confess?—people who at the end of the night danced to Stevie
Wonder while holding hands and celebrating.
***
Some writing programs
have a reputation for being cutthroat and competitive. I haven't participated
in any other MFA programs, so I can't speak from experience, but I have been in
critiques that didn't feel safe, where it felt like people don't want
you to do well.
When I went to the Words
After War Writing Intensive at Marlboro College, it was in those critiques,
under the advisement of an incredibly gifted professor, writer, and person,
John Sheehy, where I discovered what I find most valuable in a critique. For
me, the best critiques I've been in include writers and writing in all stages
of development. I have learned much from both the most and least experienced
writers, and the most and least polished pieces of work.
I want a critique of my work to be honest, and delivered in such a way that I believe the person has my best interest in mind. I want to deliver criticism to others in this fashion. I want there to be a spirit of love in a critique. Love! There, I said it. And don't I sound a little bit hokey?
I’m going to embrace that. I know I won’t always find it, but I’m going to strive to find those places where love guides our creative voices. I never knew I loved criticisms (when delivered in an honest and loving way).
I want a critique of my work to be honest, and delivered in such a way that I believe the person has my best interest in mind. I want to deliver criticism to others in this fashion. I want there to be a spirit of love in a critique. Love! There, I said it. And don't I sound a little bit hokey?
I’m going to embrace that. I know I won’t always find it, but I’m going to strive to find those places where love guides our creative voices. I never knew I loved criticisms (when delivered in an honest and loving way).
***
There is a term in the UB
MFA program that encapsulates what the program and the process is all about.
It’s “Plork.” You can read more about it here,
but in short it’s meaning is derived from the words work
and play.
I want my work to stem from that—from a place of work and play. That’s not to say I won’t
continue writing about topics that are darker—I am who I am, after all—but even
for the work that seems less playful in the end, I’d like to approach the
process with a spirit of freedom, of creativity, of wonder, and of play.
Ironically, it can take a bit of work
for an adult to learn to play, and I love that on multiple occasions in the past
several months, my children have opened the door to find me gluing and
glittering pages in my creativity journal. Perhaps by rekindling my own sense
of play, my kids won’t lose theirs quite so readily. A mother can hope.
***
In the spirit of Plork, I’m going to share what I did for
my final presentation. It’s an animation. I only just learned how to animate
anything whatsoever on Saturday when I pulled my first all-nighter that wasn’t
kid related in a long time, and it’s rough. The poem, too, is incomplete. I don’t
like my “poet voice,” and I feel kind of embarrassed sharing it, but what the
hay, I’m going to do it. The entire thing is a work-in-progress, just like me.
The piece is about my
daughter.
