Poetry as Gift: My Experience Teaching a Community Outreach Workshop

It was exactly a month ago that I taught a community outreach workshop through the Palm Beach Poetry Workshop. The theme: “Gifts Given & Received,” & was to be held at the Crest Theater in Delray Beach.

The Director of Community Outreach thought it would be fun. “I really think this should be a fun workshop,” she told me. “And our participants just want to generate new poems—not attend a highly academic seminar.” Fun? And paired with “poetry workshop” to boot? Was she friggin’ crazy? My experiences in Graduate Workshops (Capital “G” & “W”, if you really know what’s good for you) led me to believe that the purpose of workshops was to unravel bones, no?

“I’ll bring the snacks & cider!” she added.

It took three weeks of serious thinking in preparation for the two & a half hour class. I emailed colleagues & former professors & consulted some literature; a few tips here & there. Finally I was ready, & then an amazing thing happened: I threw it all away—all except the prompts & a couple of worksheets I’d made. I had the entire workshop scripted, only to decide as I was sitting in my car inside the parking garage to leave it all behind. I decided I didn’t want to be just another piece of furniture in a classroom—I wanted to be there, in the moment.

I wanted to have fun, too. Then I proceeded to walk into a room where I was the only male in a room filled with females, not one of them under the age forty-five. Most were old enough to be my grandmother.

            And yet, it only took only two writing prompts for a truly amazing thing to happen: a breakthrough. The most rewarding thing that can come out of any writing workshop. Unfettered writing—the most righteous kind.

               One woman shared a poem about a father who abandoned her & her younger sister before she broke down crying in the middle of class. Another about growing up a Jew in a Bronx tenement building filled with Latinos. “They taught me how to love,” she said. Another about being White & privileged, born on the “right side” of the track. How she’d sneak away to the “Black side,” the “wrong side.” How they taught her about Jazz, & how she came to love them for it. 

               At the end of the workshop, one of my students shared about teaching writing to special needs children & children who came from violent backgrounds & how important it was to make them feel safe—only then could they write. Then she turned to me & said: “This is a safe room. I feel safe here,” everyone nodding their heads in agreement.

               For the record, that was the single most rewarding workshop I’ve ever attended & not because I was the one teaching it—I barely taught anything. I was more like Ariadne in Inception—the architect who designed the world—& they filled it with their ideas & creativity.

A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's Creative Writing M.F.A. program, Michael J. Pagan’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM,  Pacifica Literary Review, Spork Press,  Verse, The Coachella Review, BlazeVOX, Spittoon Magazine, Tupelo Press, Menacing Hedge and Mad Hatters’ Review among many others. He currently lives in Deerfield Beach, FL with his wife & daughter.

 

En Route to the Island

“Patricia: You mean, you were diagnosed with something

called a ‘Brain Cloud’ and didn’t ask for a second opinion?”

~ Joe Versus the Volcano

Inspiration is a myth.

So is Writer’s Block.

Actually, they both kind of remind me of that all-time favorite relationship cop out: “I love [Insert Name Here], I’m just not in love with them.” It’s deceptive and confusing. It’s also astonishingly convenient. Why can’t lovers admit when they’ve reached the point that they just can’t stand each other anymore? In my opinion, it has nothing to do with love. It has everything to do with obligation.

So, why can’t writers admit when they don’t feel like writing? Say it out loud: “I need a break! I love to write, I just don’t feel like being around it right now. I need to take a mental health day/month/year.” Don’t go blaming it on some imaginary condition. If you’re gonna go blame it on something, at least be creative about it, no?

“Inspiration,” as well as “Writer’s Block,” are convenient to those who believe that writers somehow spend their entire careers de-atomizing things—selectively plucking out of the ether molecules of thought, ideas, images, scenes, etc., that haven’t been discovered yet, then gifting them to the world as if they’ve discovered some new technology or vaccine.

Writers don’t do that.

            If anything, we simply remind ourselves.

            The creative mind doesn’t just shut off, automatically defaulting to its own cute little lock screen with a picture of a panda or a funny hamster or the Liam Neeson quote from Taken: “I don’t know who you are. But I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you,” forcing you to have to scramble for days/weeks/months/years trying to figure out the doubleplussecret security code your brain somehow got past you. We don’t hack into our own brains in order to access the creativity inside—we’re creative all the time, not just when we (or our brains) want to be. The question is: are you disciplined enough to transcribe it?

            “Creativity,” “Inspiration,” “Talent” (or whatever the hell else you choose to name it) is bred out of circumstance, pressure and opportunity. One of the most insightful things I’ve heard an artist say came from Tom Cruise while visiting The Actor’s Studio - he said something like: “If I walk on set and I’m tired, I just accept that I’m tired and tell myself, ‘My character is tired. Let’s explore that. Let’s see where that takes me.”

            If you feel you can’t write, don’t write. See where that takes you.

You put in enough time into writing and you realize quickly that all that other theoretical nonsense is pregame. It ends when you put finger to keyboard. All that other mess resides in the idea/theory department, not in the practical. After that, it’s habit and muscle memory. That’s really how you get your money’s worth out of an M.F.A. program—developing habits.

Everyone says you should write every day even though in reality you probably can’t—

unless, of course, you’ve got enough ducats to not do nothing except write and still have a means to pay your bills—so forget that nonsense. Instead, collect. Like I said before, you’re creative all the time, that’s how our brains are wired. So, pick up your pen and paper and start hoarding scraps of images, dialogue, scenes, shapes, whatever, until you remind, or re-remind,  yourself of what it was you wanted to write about. It doesn’t have to function chronologically. It doesn’t have to fit into that piece you’re currently working on. It could be that missing bit for a poem or short story you stashed aside because it felt incomplete, or the bud for a new piece you haven’t bothered to concentrate on just yet. The point is: we all carry an idea of what we’d like to write about, we just don’t quite know how to put it into words until we actually rediscover the words. After that, it’s just about putting them in their proper order.

            And do yourself a favor: don’t fool yourself into thinking that words are elements that, if mixed irresponsibly, can produce explosive chemicals. If it doesn’t seem to work, hit the Backspace key and do it again until it does work.

Born and raised in Miami, FL, Michael J Pagán spent four years (1999-2003) in the United States Navy before (hastily) running back to college during the spring of 2004. He currently resides in Deerfield Beach, FL with his wife and daughter where he continues to work on his poetry, short fiction, and a collaborative novel. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, BlazeVOX, Pacifica Literary Review, Spittoon, Verse, Spork Press and others. Links to all of his published work can be found on his blog: thelevatoroomcompany.blogspot.com.

That Great Cathedral Space: My First Year Post-MFA, Part Two

“I don’t know. Emma as you see is the foundation

of my house. Toni is the perfume in the air.”

~ Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

Everyone believes they’re a writer until they realize the expenditure. It is only then that most (not all, but almost most) recognize that they were only pretending.

            I’ve found myself having to mistressize my writing. I’m forced to hide it away in my office (when the baby is napping and the wife is busy struggling to decide how to properly consume her own little crumb of free time), at work on my breaks, in the “super-secret” notepad app on my IPhone, and various writing journals I’ve covertly deployed throughout our townhouse. I hide it from friends. I hide it from family. Most importantly, I hide it from my wife because—in the event that we do have free time—she (as well as I, because I am the caring husband-type, despite what I’ve written beforehand) usually likes to spend it together, given that we never, ever, ever get any time alone. And there is where the legendary “rub” lies.

            For persons like myself who didn’t grow up with a whole lot, survival becomes a desperate game of shadow boxing against your environment/condition, because poverty behaves like a bully: every day slapping you across the face and kicking you in the solar plexus. You’re left with no choice but to develop an imaginary feud with it—a feud you learn to carry every single day of your life, for the duration—until it carries you out of that margin and into that great cathedral space that you can’t help but only imagine exists above it.

            Now, as it relates to writing and the writing life, this is an approach that the serious writer has to assume in order to survive. I’m not advising writers to approach writing with a combative attitude—save that for Call of Duty marathons online. I’m simply suggesting that an aggressive attitude can and will keep the keyboard, and you, alive. Let’s face it: this lovely game of ours, in its own twisted way, does function similarly to online battle games, save for one major difference: even though failure begets the same sort of figurative death, the aim is survival and not just mindless carnage.

            I’ve managed to lift myself out of that margin and into a better place, however, not without a few spells of knuckling-up. And even while I am more than happy with the situation I find myself in, I’m still not completely satisfied with it—not without the level of writing/professional success that I’ve come to expect out of myself. My wife, my daughter are the foundations of my life. However, writing will always be that lovely “perfume in the air.” It’s another little feud I’ll have to carry-on forever, but one what I’m willing to uphold at any and all costs.

            Why? Because a writer lives the way a shark does: we swim constantly and endlessly or else we float to the surface and die off. 

  

A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's MFA program, Michael J Pagan's work has appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, The Coachella Review, The Nervous Breakdown, CommuterLit, Gone Lawn other publications. He is a fiction reader for Burnside Review. He lives in Deerfield Beach with his wife and daughter where he continues work on his first poetry manuscript, With a Bullet, Sparrow Voices, along with his first stage play, PING. You can read his blog, The Elevator Room Company, here: thelevatoroomcompany.blogspot.com.

Out, Out, Far Out to Sea, & Alone: My First Year Post-M.F.A.

                                                             for Virginia Woolf

“. . .so I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably, all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words.” ~Virginia Woolf

               We are far out to sea & alone; my wife, & ten-month old daughter Izzy—whose pictures you’ll find beautifying the landscape of my Facebook profile—the only bearings I have available to keep me from setting adrift; existing in a place apart from landmass that is the non-writing populace; agonizing over contractions of imagination & creativity on almost a daily basis; living in our heads & stargazing—even placing our thumbs over the moon like Tom Hanks in Apollo 13—at what we can’t help but believe will be eventual success, instead of doing the practical thing & earning a degree in Business, or Accounting, or Business with an Accounting focus, etc. In other words: what have I gotten myself into?

               In my case, it’s quite simple: four years ago, I, of sound mind & body, chose to make a mistake, given that it was the most practical option. I chose to bypass the G.T.A. program at our university. Why? I couldn’t afford the pay cut. I had three choices: 1. Leave my part-time job. 2. Attempt to balance a full course load & my teaching responsibilities while still working a few days a week at the job in order to negate the pay difference. And oh, yeah, while trying to fit in some writing. 3. Maintain the status-quo: skip the GTA, continue going to class & working my part-time job: because Mos Def said it best: “Ends can’t meet where the arms don’t reach.”

               So I have no PhD, no G.T.A. experience (and therefore, no teaching experience), and no book publications. More importantly, my current job (the job I couldn’t afford to leave), makes me (professionally) unhappier than Septimus Warren Smith (minus the suicide). This is why I pine over relative “success.” One positive is that it provides me more free time to write in comparison to my writing brethren who teach. But, with a wife and ten-month old child, “free time” isn’t necessarily free.

               Teaching or not I do manage, however. That is one reality my publications reflect; I’ve written to the tune of twenty individual publications spanning across poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and “performance text” and/or drama. To be fair, most would consider that a very successful year for a developing writer. For me, however, if a full manuscript does not out materialize out of all this “success,” I will regard 2012 as a disappointment.           

            There is no definitive answer as to whether or not I made the right decision four years ago when I was a first-year M.F.A. student.  I have no doubts that I would be happier working in something related to my field of study, whether it be teaching, editing/proofreading, copywriting, etc. & I’ve applied to each of them in gaggles, but to no avail. I do, however, have an appreciation for my professional unhappiness given that it gives me a bit of an edge. It keeps me starving to write & write & write now, which ultimately is what’s keeping me from sinking to bottom of the sea—without my words. 

A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's MFA program, Michael J Pagan's work has appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Spork Press, Verse, Requited Journal, and other publications. He currently serves as an editorial assistant for SquawkBack Magazine, as well as a fiction reader for Burnside Review. He lives in Deerfield Beach with his wife and daughter where he continues work on his first poetry manuscript, With a Bullet, Sparrow Voices, along with his first stage play, PING.