Framing, Compression, Ongoingness

When Paul Lisicky visited our campus in March, we learned to slow words.

The timing was definitely ironic: Paul visited us the week before we launched our first Swamp Ape Review print issue and hosted a panel at AWP Tampa, the week theses were due (for third-year students), and the week before spring break (aka midterms). Adding a daily, 2-hour workshop to the week was, on paper, daunting. Yet to walk into the classroom with Paul on day one was to enter a literary (Vinyasa) yoga class. He’s brilliant, greeted us warmly and spoke with measured words in a way that invited us to pay attention. He is kind, reflective, and a true teacher—someone who is engaged and thinking about how to help his students learn. The way he respected our pieces—really assumed that every choice we'd made was intentional and should be considered—changed the way I will teach in the future, and increased the respect I give to my own work. In the midst of so much feedback from all our classes, and so much self-doubt as writers, he reminded us that what we are doing is a weighty thing, important.

A few days into workshop, several themes emerged for the week: framing, compression, ongoingness. We studied graphic novel excerpts from Thi Bui's memoir, The Best We Could Do, and analyzed photograph-like progressions of prose from D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land. At the end of each discussion, Paul gave us a prompt that generated some of our best work; I have known several of my writing peers for three years now, others for two years, or six months, and I read writing from each of them that was in some way a departure from what they’d done in the past.

That growth is a testament to the energy Paul brought to campus. A workshop like this is a brief encounter... we get 10 hours with this person (though in Paul's case, because he was generous, we also spent long hours at local bars or the Living Room Theatre talking about agents and publishing and craft, relieving our hands of pencils and laptops for sweating glasses of beer). Our teachers instruct us well day in and day out in this program, but the Sanders Writer-in-Residence workshop each spring is by nature a different experience; it feels like a secret society, meeting together in a small group of 10 for the week, our work not privy to our usual classmates and professors. It is a tightly framed experience, a workshop compression.

And compression, as we all know, tends to produce something (diamonds, fossils, overflow...) For me, the compressed energy went into my work. I spent the past year writing my first novel, so attending an intensive, week-long workshop focused on compression was an inversion. Last summer I spent 2-4 hours each day drafting long chapters that I later returned to and whittled down, or removed entirely. In Paul's workshop, we lingered on each word like poetry. The respect he gave to each line, each piece, made me reconsider how flippantly I sometimes write. I wanted to write slowly, lingeringly, because I knew how carefully my words would be attended by him and the writers in that room. I wrote one piece that was only 456 words long. Another that was 224. Yet each was more effective for its length. It was a reminder to me that my verbose style could change—that sometimes a new teacher, a new mind, can show you your range.

There is an ongoingness to writing, I think, in this: I may develop my voice, keep my preoccupations, or gravitate toward one style, but there is always room to encounter a new writer and watch my craft evolve. There is space to slow down, even during the busiest week of the term. And every time we do slow down, slow our words, perhaps that is when we most respect the language we use in service of a story that outlasts us.

Natalie Rowland is a graduating in May with her MFA in fiction and a novel manuscript (following rounds 1 and 2 of emotional drafting and revision). She’ll begin round 3 this summer. Wish her luck.