Respect Animals – A Creative Nonfiction Conversation

             A crude drawing of a warty pig was one of the oldest cave paintings discovered, “Dat[ing] back at least 45,500 years,” (Ferreira para 2). It was etched using pigments made of berry juice, and when one looks at the photo, they can’t help but feel it to be the type of art a little kid would create. The pig has a massive plump body and course lines for hairs, all stained red with fruit-blood and time. Its head is small, however there is an eye carefully placed - a sideways teardrop. While one may be inclined to assume that all cave paintings were created by early humans, “the [pig] also open[s] a debate over whether the artists could have been Homo sapiens, or members of another extinct human species,” (Ferreira para 4). As a creative nonfiction writer, the notion that beings other than humans have the potential to create art doesn’t surprise me in the least.

            My craft is one that requires consistent field research, the field being the course of my life, and the research being intent observation. As such, the fact that I have spent a majority of my life around animals drives much of my personal creative analysis. Some of the earliest photos of me depict this lifestyle, my favorite one capturing myself just weeks old, surrounded by two cats who had infiltrated my crib. The cats squint up into a camera flash, eyes reddened by reflection and old technology, as mine rest; lids closed, veiny and thin.

            As I grew, my connection to the non-humans who occupied my space did too. I spent time with them, learned their individual body languages, and pressed my face to their hearts – if they would let me. Some of them beat faster than others, some felt nonexistent. Small animals such as hamsters and rats had the fastest heartbeats, and dogs, especially large ones, had rhythmic hearts, pumping strong and slow. I soon learned that the speed of an animal’s heart was like a clock, the faster it beat, the sooner they would die of old age.

            I volunteered at animal rehabilitation centers starting from the age of six. I witnessed gruesome afflictions, painful amputations, abuse victims, as well as unwavering spirits, loving licks, and affectionate purring. I learned very quickly that if a person claims animals have no emotion, they are more simple-minded than the ones they allege to be superior to. Since my connection with animals was so intense, I drew an early parallel to mortality and loss – a theme that is prevalent in my writing. I learned to metaphorize life very early on in my field research, and I believe it is important for all creative nonfiction writers to have an understanding of non-human life. I do not claim, nor do I think anybody should claim, that nonfiction writers need to have animals in their work. I simply state that there is a worldliness required in the genre - an understanding of the way different brains operate and feel.

            Humans are creatures of respect. They draw, write, and create things which bring them joy, which garner their reverence. This is why it comes as no surprise that animals were among the first subjects to be painted on cave walls – the humans (or humanoids) hunting them, respected them deeply. These pigs, deer, and buffalo were all mighty beasts, ones which provided a challenge, beauty, and sustenance. In my opinion, there is a reason why flowers seem to be neglected in prehistoric art, and that reason is simple. They were uncomplicated, unimportant: a mere part of the landscape.

            A creative nonfiction writer’s main goal is to write about the world as they see it, presenting it in a manner which is pleasing, a manner which has purpose. This is impossible if the writer has no respect for the world around them, as it is their job to dig for fossils of meaning behind life events.

A creative nonfiction writer begs their reader to not let their stories become a simple landscape. A creative nonfiction writer pleads with their reader to pay attention to deeper meaning and emotion. A creative nonfiction writer gets on their knees pathetically and implores their reader for respect. If it’s done right this literary groveling is done tactfully, in a way that immerses a reader into the story. The reader does not have to ask themselves, why am I reading this? They will simply know that it is worth reading.

If a creative nonfiction writer lacks respect for their world, which includes animals, they will have a hard time breaking into their readers’ hearts. Understanding emotion is the root of creative nonfiction, and the individuality of animals coincides with this prerequisite. Evolution is a complex thing, creating delineations of life; life which is created from the same stuff. If early humans were able to respect animals enough to draw them, if I learned that this dog likes ropes more than balls, if my cat kisses my nose when I have a fever, surely a creative nonfiction writer should be able to observe the complexities of non-human life.

Animals spend hours observing us, as they respect us enough to do so. Squirrels watch the sidewalks until it is safe to descend from their trees. Cats watch the window, waiting for their human to return home. Goldfish stare wistfully from their tanks, anticipating the dark looming shadow which will provide them food. If animals give us enough respect to pay attention, surly we should give them respect as creative nonfiction writers. Our job is to reflect the world in meaningful ways, and that is the entire world as we see it. There is no way in hypothetical hell, that a writer has not had an animal cross their path.

In order to be completely grounded in reality, a creative nonfiction writer must respect their surroundings. The notion of animals possessing emotions worth analyzing just comes with the territory.

I have no doubt that prehistoric artists watched the pigs sleep, spears at the ready, respecting their prey’s right to dream.

Science is busy working to determine if non-human humanoids painted the oldest known cave art to exist. I wouldn’t be surprised.

My cat is in my lap. I type softer knowing I could disturb his slumber. Animals respect other animals. It’s just what we do.

 

 

References

 

Ferreira, Becky. “Pig Painting May Be World’s Oldest Cave Art Yet, Archaeologists Say.” The New York Times, 13 Jan. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/science/cave-painting-indonesia.html.

Alex Borowsky is an MFA student at Florida Atlantic University, specializing in creative nonfiction. She graduated from New York State University at Oswego, where she majored in Creative Writing and Communication Studies. Borowsky worked as the Editor in Chief for Oswego's literary journal, 'The Great Lake Review,' as well as collecting the 'Rosalie Battles CNF Award.' She hopes to publish a collection of essays in the future, as well as kickstart a career as a creative writing professor. 

Writers will always be writers—making art happen after the MFA

 I did a lot of emotional preparing for my life after the MFA.

Semi-dramatically, I grieved it long before I left, spending my final thesis year savoring the joys of being a full-time student of craft. Writing from a foldable camp chair in the doorway crack of a Boca studio apartment where I’d cooked three meals a day on a hot plate burner. Biking to and from FAU’s palm-waving campus in the scorching midday heat, blasting my eardrums raw with The New Pornographers, another story blooming from that place stories come from: the ingredients of unstructured time, pauses, sunlight, love of complicated people, past tragedies large and small, dreams you can no longer deny.

My cohort happened to take wing of grad school the moment the COVID-19 lockdown went into place. With graduation, the magic of those three years quickly became something very different.

What’s different now, then:

● I use bullet-lists. I write and edit for a content marketing company, and boy, bullets do come in handy.

● Editing the internet has made me a better editor of my own writing. When you’re constantly editing, no matter what it’s for, you learn how to quickly spot the bullshit—that is, the words that don’t really mean what you need them to mean.

● In this zooming comet of a 9-5 that I’m riding, I do still write stories, but with far less frequency and far more selectively. I began many stories this year, but finished only two.

● I write from a different perspective: Truly, a more fully adult one. After the pandemic, a heavier realism rips strikethroughs through the former zaniness of my prose.

In short: I utterly appreciate just how much time and focus and not focusing and emotional energy and life conditions and loving support and friendship is required to make the gift of writing happen, and to do it well. Creating those conditions after the MFA takes effort and can feel painstakingly hard to balance amidst the need to make money, but harder things have been done (maybe).

Tips about life after the MFA are many, but maybe you haven’t heard these as often, or you could stand to hear them again and again, so I will add a few more bullets to this pile:

● Stay close to your writing friends. Cheer for them even when you don’t know your own way forward.

● Try very short workshop formats. When the great Ms. Emily Donovan from our class of 2020 suggested doing a one-page workshop—writing and workshopping only one page

of writing each week—it was a stroke of genius that kept our literary community flame alive.

● Be alert to all the evolving signals of what motivates you, and new cues about where and how you write best. Maybe you need to read a little in the morning before the workday starts, then get out a paragraph on lunch, and read more at night; maybe you need to set up a few three day weekends where you finish drafts to conclusion.

● If you need to take a break from writing, be nice to yourself. Take a vacation into real life.

● Listen to your mentors. Mine told me to apply to a fellowship that I’d never heard of, and I had zero expectations that I would be accepted, and I did and it was wonderful.

● Send out work even when you’re really not sure what’ll happen. You can get fellowships, land publications. Even when you think you’ve got the mag’s style pegged, the editors are always changing.

And most of all—as is often mentioned in the program at FAU—create and be true to your own standard of what it means to be successful.

This I believe with all my heart: the writing life is long, and writers will always be writers, and writers become better and more interesting with time. We can trust ourselves to sit down again as the new forms of interesting come along.

Cherri finished her MFA in Fiction in 2020. She’s been published in Catamaran Literary Reader, Shirley Magazine, and Foglifter, and she was a 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow. Since graduating from FAU, she’s chosen to remain a Floridian, begin propagating succulents, and she is still revising the final draft of her first short story collection. https://www.cherribuijk.com/

Lit Mag as Seed Bank

For a moment, accept this metaphor: books are gardens, their parts as seeds. Art as a seed in the mind to sprout on the page—some in a private garden, some transplanted carefully to the place it would grow best. The literary magazine, then, becomes a seed bank, its editors and readers storing not only what will be but the potential and beauty of what is, the seed as a whole universe. And with the amount of work available to us both online and in-print, why would we not want to see our whole stores?

The experience of reading curated work from different artists, and that art put into conversation with others, feels different than reading a book by one author. But so many people, even those who submit to journals, don’t tend to read them. Don’t we love to read? Isn’t that why we’re here? There are so many magazines! A huge variety! Traditional, formal, off-the-walls, weird, all about food, themed, quirky! Large and small teams! The lickety~split vs. Ninth Letter vs. our own Swamp Ape Review—all weird in their own fun ways! So why not read them? Because they’re there! And when you know what a magazine wants, it’s easier to figure out which work to send them that will fit their aesthetic. There’s a literary magazine library in the conference room available for all English graduate students to check out and browse through, curated by our own Becka McKay, that would take a person months to get through. There’s a sign-out sheet to the left of the shelf—accept the challenge!

And working for a magazine either as a reader or editor has its own benefits, like learning behind the scenes of how magazines and journals work, what pieces get published and why (and why others don’t) towards use in your own writing and publishing. And the small joys—receiving an excited response after sending an acceptance, or a really kind response after declining work—and references that make you feel like you belong to the community (Julie Marie Wade, who is contributing to our next Swamp Ape Review issue with Denise Duhamel, signs off her emails “Plums,” after William Carlos Williams’ poem). And everything you learn from bios: where people have published, which magazines you want to look into, how they fit into the literary world—and through them, how you do.

Because our work—our poems, our paintings, our prose—has a place, and sometimes that place is a magazine and sometimes that place is a book and sometimes it is, eventually, both. Because a seed bank is strongest when there are many seeds, many banks, a great deal of space to keep safe that which is precious, that which will become more and is, already, everything.

Haley Bell Keane grew up in South Florida and is completing her MFA in poetry at FAU. She currently works as poetry editor for the Swamp Ape Review. Find her @horripilatious on Twitter and Instagram.

Experiments in Writing from Nothing

Isolation isn’t good for the human spirit. People are social creatures; we require & rely on the presence & emotion of others to calibrate our standing in the world. When our normal patterns of socialization were interrupted by health concerns of more immediate importance, my entire relationship to writing & the world was challenged. I lost the people, the communities, I measured my life against. I lost the productive social spaces that kept the dynamism of learning rewarding, fresh, & funny. Without the joy of creating in community, my tether to good writing habits weakened. I have annoyed many a student by repeating, over & over again, that learning & writing are social processes. But, like my students & peers, I was tested by the scope of this truth as I struggled to learn & create through COVID-19 lockdown.

What does the writer mine when they’re cut off from the dynamism of life, the fuel of art? How does a writer create inspiring circumstances when they are, for example, on Day 142 of living, working, writing, & bouncing off the walls in a 700 square foot apartment? After exhausting all available episodes of, & commentary on as well as critique of, Tiger King, I decided to construct an answer to this question in my own life. In my nonfiction workshop, under the pressure of looming deadlines, I reached immediately for what most writers probably reach for when they feel drained of inspiration: the past.

Looking backward & completing creative research to spur memory was a task that focused my attention toward writing despite the difficult circumstances of virtual school & the all-encompassing reality of illness. I took pleasure in revisiting my stories, familiar to me in a chaotic world, whose problems have the benefits of hindsight. I have enough distance from these struggles that I can invent coherent narratives for them in my writing (whereas current life is never that neat). This satisfied me for a while, & so I dove into researching ladybugs, Anthony Bourdain, bipolar depression, & other facets of a personal essay that tackled a personally tumultuous time. The problem? My past includes many instances of isolation & neglect. After a few weeks of perfecting the piece, its themes began to mirror too closely the lonely hours I spent remembering them. I put the piece away, determined to wrench myself into a new vein of writing that wasn’t going to reinforce my mandatory loneliness. What is the opposite of hard memories, of struggles since overcome?

I settled on wonder as an antidote. But awe is hard to come by when you’re on Day 183 of the same easy egg breakfasts, the same Zoom links for weekly meetings, & the same ache in your lower back from an at-home desk chair that was never supposed to see so much use. This is where I returned to basics: the body, to whom all this bullcrap was happening & who felt most deeply the consequences of all this sameness. My body was feeling the effects of talking to people that I could not physically sense as present. When I looked at the raw materials in front of me, I saw my flesh & missed its ways of responding to the world physically, a world that now felt very distant. I wanted to use my writing to remind myself of the capacity to connect that my body has, or the capacity to be impacted. This time, I wrote about goosebumps & the tiny muscles that raise the hairs on our arms like flags whenever something moves us. I wrote about all the things that give me goosebumps, interviewing my friends to ask what gives them chills, & wove these experiences together in lyrical prose. But without the face-to-face contact with the outside world, I struggled to imbue wonder into a piece that wonder inspired, & yet again I wrote a piece that I needed to walk away from. Writing about goosebumps did not replicate, for me, opportunities to have them.

My final piece for this workshop was also the most successful; an advice column titled Dear Self. When I finally posed my creative questions inward, I found a truth running deeply underground, something to counter other painful truths of isolation & its withering effects. I found that I still contained some connection to wisdom, some patience, some otherwise-untapped estuary. It is not the world that makes me a writer. Only I can do that. Whatever attitude I practice in my life will determine the level of inspiration I can gain from my surroundings & even, it turns out, from myself. If I have any advice to give another, it is only the advice I have already given myself:

Dear Self,

I seem to not be able to really say what’s on my mind lately. It seems like there’s something beyond the cliché to say, but I just can’t quite do it. I’m having trouble articulating the things I care about and value the most. When I do, I sound childish and naïve. I’m worried that the pervasive cynicism I have isn’t steeping my innermost virtue, because when I look inside and see what I think is really important, it just looks like bubblegum and rainbows and warm breath, like the kind I breathe into the collar of someone I love. I thought by now I’d have a sharpened steel of word to work with, to whittle away the frippery and human-interest angles I’ve got running through me. Instead, I think about what’s important to me and I wilt, I sigh, I curl inward. The words don’t come. Can you help me?

Signed,

For Someone Who’s An Open Book I Don’t Think I’m Saying Much

Dear Not Saying Much,

Shut up and listen. I don’t want to hate us, but you're making it pretty hard with all this “What’s the meaning of life? Can’t we just be kind to each other?” stuff. What if you sat down and put that fist-sized heart in our mouth so we couldn’t talk anymore, huh? I bet some amazing things would happen. I could even read to you, if you'd like, to simulate those people talking. I understand that it’s tough to sit in silence, to work alone, but what I can’t stand is how we don’t even look at the lace tied around the neck of our husband’s mandolin. Like there aren’t a thousand lessons, just there, about tenderness and a man’s careful devotion, like his tough hands haven’t tied something pretty onto a tool he uses just to offset our existential dread. We look past that every day wondering what’s important and the damn gift of it all is smacking us in the face.

Do not start with what is important. Start with what is small. See what it touches. There is no end. If we became a carpet of moss, we would still need to sigh, curl inward, be silent. There’s nothing to be done for it.

Love,

Self

Eileen Winn is a poet and author from Ohio currently earning their MFA from Florida Atlantic University. They work on the editorial boards of Swamp Ape Review and Alien Literary Magazine. You can find their work in or forthcoming from the 2020 Sundress Anthology Best of the Net, Cherry Tree, The Shore, in the Breakup Book anthology from Purpled Palm Press, and more. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.

The Community Writing Workshop

 

While writing workshops are a place to improve one’s writing, even the most experienced students can have a difficult time seeking progress over praise. 

No writer, as far as I know, has ever submitted to a writing workshop and in return been offered an award and/or publication.  Polite, hopefully useful feedback, sure, but turning in a rough piece only to be whisked off to fame, fortune, and prestige? It doesn’t happen.

And it shouldn’t.

That isn’t to say that I don’t wish my FAU Community Writing Workshop students to gain all the financial and social accolades in the world, because I absolutely do.  Between those with decades of experience in journalism or speech writing, those with enough genre knowledge to seemingly quote from every episode of Star Trek, and those finding pen and paper as the tools for self-expression, I don’t doubt the potential for success from any of them. 

But that brings up a question FAU’s Creative Writing Director Becka McKay asks all of her students: “How do you measure your success as a writer?” 

Rarely is the answer, “If I get a handful of ‘thumbs ups’ from the random people I ended up with in my workshop, my writing life will be satisfied.” 

Most, if not all, writers know that the workshop is the not the end goal.  And yet, submitting a work to a workshop and receiving more questions than praise, more frustration than applause, or worse yet, a room full of booming indifference is frustrating.

I discuss this trap with students on day one.  Whether we’re strangers staring each other down around a makeshift circle in-person, or we’re all debating turning off our cameras on Zoom so no one judges our messy closets, we tend to be more concerned with the immediate judgement before us than we are the grander scheme of our writing.

What has been the solution, for me anyway, is to specifically acknowledge the problematic nature of competition.  I don’t know exactly how many students have said, “I was a little worried about having my story workshopped after [that other student’s] because of how good that story was,” but it’s been a lot of us.

That hesitance and worry tends to come from an idea of “finding value” being the goal of the workshop.  A student is more worried about the opinions of their peers than the fact that they are actively learning how to recognize better writing.  The response could just as readily be, “I’m so excited to hear how to implement the great things the previous story did into my own writing!” That’s something I’ve never heard, but it so easily could be.

The goal in any workshop needs to be progress.  What I’m doing today will make me a better writer tomorrow.  If I’m competing with anything, it’s the passage of time, and I want my future self to be better than my present self.

In any workshop, the goal can and should be to find out what each writer does well and how workshoppers can utilize the tools of others in their own writing.  Matt is brilliant at figurative language; Chey is a genius at crafting scenes; Dan writes the smartest/funniest dialogue; Ben’s king of line-level attention to detail; Aidan’s images and artistic connections melt minds, etc. 

No Community Workshop teacher can or should tell students what it means for them to be successful writers, but what we can do is help students find ways to answer that question for themselves and to become better writers than they were when they began the class.

Justin Piesco is a third year MFA student in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University.  He has worked as a Writing Consultant at FAU's Center for Excellence in writing since 2014, and he has taught first-year English since August 2018.  He enjoys teaching and writing as both provide avenues for the gaining and sharing of knowledge.