Tom Sleigh and Writing without Rules

Because I am in my final semester of grad school, Tom Sleigh is the second and last Sander’s Writer-in-Residence whom I will have the pleasure of taking an additional workshop with as part of the MFA program. After I graduate in May, I will enter a whole new realm of writing — the realm of writing outside the workshop. And Sleigh’s workshop, while still nestled under the umbrella of the workshop and still safely away from the storm of real world writing, provided a good starting point for considering what writing can be outside the workshop setting.

Workshops create their own guidelines for how to achieve that level of writing that members of the literati would consider “good.” In a way, this is a necessary part of teaching writing. How can you help students improve their writing if you can’t point to what is “good” and what is — in the euphemism of the workshop — “weak,” then give those students strategies for taking the “weak” and making it “good”? However, in trying to guide students toward “good” writing, the workshop gives advice that is picked up and parroted by students until by virtue of repetition it becomes a rule, an impermeable boundary.

In Nonfiction workshop, one of the most common rules is that personal essays and memoirs should be written from a place of emotional distance. In theory, this principle allows writers to analyze their lives with clarity and logic. And it gives them the time and context to understand the importance of a life event and clarify that importance for the reader. However, it also leads to a lot of writing about half-remembered events, and a lot of writing that avoids the messiest aspects of human emotion. There are times when writing from that place of immediate emotional turmoil could produce stronger and more engaging work. But because emotional turmoil doesn’t usually produce stronger writing, “emotional distance” has become one of those repeated rules of nonfiction writing, and it is a rule that nearly everyone adheres to.

During Tom Sleigh’s workshop, we were asked to break all of our rules. Sleigh asked us to look at our writing and consider our process — the rules we’ve set for ourselves or heard touted in workshop and adopted — and to do the opposite of what we would normally do. For people who normally write from a place of logic, try writing from a place of emotion. For people who normally write minimalist prose, try writing as a maximalist. If there is a subject you avoid, why? If there is a subject you always return to, find something else. Sleigh’s workshop was a process of undoing what we have done to our writing in previous workshops and remembering that with each piece we write, we must sit down and decide for ourselves what form it will take and what rules will help or hinder the piece — Is this a piece that will benefit from emotional turmoil or emotional distance? Only the writer can decide. Because in writing, there are no rules, only decisions. Every writer has the privilege of deciding what form will benefit her piece, with or without the consensus of the workshop.  

Shari Lefler is an MFA student, focused on Literary Non-Fiction at Florida Atlantic University.  She was born and raised in Boca Raton, FL, where she spends her spare time trying to cuddle with her dog, which spends its spare time trying to escape her grasp.          

Tom Sleigh Doesn’t Give a F***, and Neither Should You

A few days before his arrival, I volunteered to give poet and essayist Tom Sleigh a lift to his hotel after our last workshop session. Almost immediately I began to suffer mild anxiety over what it would be like to have a Famous Poet in my car. My friend Renee once drove Kurt Vonnegut to an appearance, and he was cantankerous about the automatic seatbelt in her 90s era car. He didn’t want to wear it, and they back-and-forthed until she finally said, “Look. I’m not really a great driver, and I don’t want to start my fledgling writing career as ‘The Girl Who Killed Kurt Vonnegut’, so put on the seatbelt, please.” He laughed and clicked himself in.

I needn’t have worried. By Friday afternoon, Tom had quietly dazzled us with BTW-I-Was-A-Junkie-When-I-Was-Your-Age stories, with his matter-of-fact stoicism about living with a chronic blood disease, and by dropping unabashedly fluent F-bombs. His ability to quote lines and couplets across five centuries of poetry verges on the astonishing, and man (!), he is friendly with so many Famous Writers that I couldn’t help thinking how much easier it was going to be to win Six Degrees of Separation with Tom Sleigh in my deck.

We spent the week riffing on the relationship between emotions and our work. Tom told us how important and helpful it is for writers to think of ourselves as collaborators with language, to always remember that we cannot control language, and that we are merely the medium through which language passes. He told us that if we want to have a good relationship with ‘the muse’, we should begin to consider the gift of our talent and drive to write as something larger than ourselves. He encouraged us to lose the “workshop mentality,” in which we are compelled to perfect THIS poem, THIS story. We must think of ourselves in the long term, he said – considering each poem or story we write as a part of one long poem or story eases the pressure to achieve an elusive perfection.

We spent two days reading our own work to one another. When Tom said we were amazing and that the time he spent with us was the best part of his three-week stint in South Florida, we believed him.

On our last day, Tom had some final words of advice for us. “All editors are idiots. All editors are morons. That’s got to be your attitude”, he said. “When you send manuscripts out, be immune to the whims of editors. Acceptance and rejection mean nothing. If you can’t be immune, get into another line of work. If you make your ego dependent on the praise of the world, you’re done for. If you win (a contest), it means nothing. If you lose, it means nothing! Do not despair. Do not presume. Win or lose.”

We wrapped up the workshop and Tom signed a few books of his poetry for us, casual-like. He clapped one of the guys into a tight hug, said, Keep in touch. We walked to my car, where he buckled himself in and passed the next twenty minutes acting genuinely interested in what I had to say about growing up on a dairy farm and teaching immigrants in South Florida high schools.

Trina Sutton is working toward her MFA in Fiction at FAU.

Facing Our Dragons: A Week with Tom Sleigh

It is inevitable in writing that, sooner or later, we will come face to face with a dragon. My dragon is often my grandmother’s death; I want to write about her, but nothing I put down on the page feels good enough. I get overwhelmed and it scares me to look the dragon in the eye. It is so much easier to put down my pen and wait for the dragon to curl back into its cave. I’m not ready. Maybe it’s not my story to tell. Perhaps I’ll write about something else.

Tom Sleigh described the writing process to our workshop group as a combination of emotions, thoughts and words. Emotion finds a thought, that thought finds a word. We took out old pieces of things we’d written days, weeks or months earlier and began to revise them, recasting our sentences because that, Tom said, is the joy of writing. The lines we had initially written were stretched and broken and changed until our emotions found the right thoughts and the right words to portray them on the page. And in that workshop, we watched ourselves (and each other) transform.

Eventually, we writers want people to read what we’ve written. Why else would we keep submitting to journals or showing up to workshops? But when we’re faced with material that is overwhelming to us, difficult to write because it’s too personal, too tough to get out and on to the page, sometimes we give up. Sometimes the dragon looms over us, breathing heavily down our necks and we can’t take the heat. Our emotion found the thought—waking the dragon—but the words aren’t there yet.

In our classroom, on the board, Tom draws a dot. “This is you,” he tells us, “and this—” he draws another dot, “is your dragon.” He connects the two dots with one very short line. “Now, you can’t fight a dragon with your bare hands, but if only you had a sword.” Tom draws another dot, redirecting the route from “you” to “sword” to “dragon” making a triangle for us to observe. “Put something between you and the dragon and you’ll get that distance you need to fight it.”

We use language as a disguise. We want the world to know what happened to us but we don’t want the world to see through the experience to find us cowering in a corner afraid of what we might have unleashed. By focusing on individual words and sentences first, building up from there and allowing our material to grow, Tom Sleigh encouraged us not to hide from our material, guiding us to see that it’s not about what you write—it’s about how we move through it. Orchestrating the perception of the reader through manipulation of the line will create the thing so many might refer to as “voice.” Tom, however, calls this “style.”  

Rebecca Jensen is a second-year MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry appears in Eunoia Review, Firefly Magazine and FishFood Magazine, and she is a nominee for the 2016 AWP Intro Journals Project in creative nonfiction. 

Tom Sleigh Workshop Series: Part One

My initial reaction, generally—to a place, to a text, to a person—tends to come to me in the form of a simple question, a one word question. I don’t think an example is necessary. Right? Then, after some limited consideration, I expand upon the interrogative in an attempt to better understand my reaction. The question that came to me during the first day of the workshop with Tom Sleigh: What? The expansion: What makes a person seem, at once, so relaxed and so intense?

“I live a split-screen existence,” Tom volunteered. “That’s a boring thing to have to articulate, but it’s an interesting thing to have to live with.”

What? What is worth doing? Tom, after relaying some of his own experiences, asked us to consider this question in terms of our writing, to approach language in terms of our convictions. I wonder if my writing is something that grows out of or around a sense of responsibility to those with whom I’ve shared my experiences, to the culture that has helped shape my texts. If so, perhaps my writing has to matter to them as much as it matters to me. If not, perhaps still. Perhaps I have an obligation to do more than advertise my own originality. What? What does it mean to write the best piece? To put words to ideas in the catalogue of my experiences. To pull experiences through my catalogue of words to relay ideas. To show my catalogue of ideas as experiences through words. “If you have an obsession,” Tom said to the group, “don’t question it. You thank your lucky stars and move toward it.”

What? What is worth doing? Tom, after relaying some of his own experiences, asked us to consider this question in terms of our writing, to approach language in terms of our emotions. I wonder if my writing is something that stems from the way I feel about the world around me, my reaction to the culture, to everything apart from and including me. If so, perhaps my writing will intrinsically matter to others. If not, perhaps it never will. Perhaps I have an instinct to write only that which creates meaning for myself, which, perhaps again, is the only way any writer can intentionally create meaning. What? What do I want to write? Stories that put my emotions to ideas through words. Words that put my emotions into stories. Emotions that— Can I interrupt myself by having Tom’s voice interrupt my structure? “You want to write interesting sentences.”

.

Tom stressed a micro view of work—as opposed to a macro view of the work—in order to, at least while writing, shift the writer’s attention away from the career, the publication, the piece, the page, and toward the sentence, which, if we want it to, if we deem it worthy, can blend our split-screened perceptions or separate them just enough to let us see the world more wholly, to let others see it with us.

Christopher Notarnicola studies creative writing at Florida Atlantic University.

Fringe: A Query Into Genreless Writing

          I’ll start this blog post off with a light philosophical conundrum. You know, because that’s what really draws the reader in. Blaise Pascal’s logical argument for the pursuit of a belief in God suggests that, based on the possible outcomes of believing in God (infinite reward if s/he does, finite loss if s/he doesn’t), it is more beneficial for a human being to try to believe as opposed to entirely disregarding the possibility for the existence of a God. Many of you have surely heard this argument before and will likely not change your belief in God simply because a dead philosopher says it could help you in the end. Nor am I really concerned with convincing anyone that God exists in 500 words or less.

            What I am concerned with are the consequences of believing in something simply because it is inevitable. In my experience, nearly every writer I’ve met has certain things in common historically. We all loved stories, in one form or another, from a very young age. Personally, I started off with an obsession for cartoons and movies and fantasy novels. The idea of a story has always captivated me. Storytelling, as an art form, is etched somewhere deep inside of me. And, for me, this is God.

            When I first put pen to paper, so to speak, it was actually a box of crayons. My mother told me recently that she used to find picture books that I had drawn on printer paper and folded into my own books. Often they were of scuba-divers on deep sea expeditions, or of astronauts finding an abandoned spaceship. This is when I became a writer. And I am confident that anyone in a MFA program became a writer long before they ever wrote their first “real” story.

            But what did I write, exactly? Right now, having been trained to understand writing through particular lenses, I would say that those picture books were most definitely fiction. I would look back on my scribbled dialogue and tell myself that was the beginning of my career as a fiction writer. But only in retrospect. Back then, before there was even an idea of fiction or nonfiction or poetry or academic essays, I was telling a story that was as real to me as my blood or my skin. I was telling the story of a real diver; a real astronaut. Because when I started writing, the boundaries disappeared. I’ve heard many of my peers call this some form of escapism. But I would argue that I never wrote with an impulse to escape. I wrote with an impulse to explore.

            My point here is a simple one: writers are storytellers. And all writers exist in a system of classification. We applied to schools under the guise of a particular field: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry. And these classifications are certainly not useless distinctions. But they are just that; distinctions. They are the lines drawn on a map to make travelling across the U.S. feel as though you are putting puzzle pieces in their comfortable corners. However, these lines are drawn for the reader, not the writer. The writer (in this exhausted metaphor) is the cartographer.

            So ultimately my query to all MFA students, and more so to all writers and storytellers, is this: How much does your “chosen genre” dictate your writing? How much do these boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction and Poetry and Academic writing matter to what you are producing? Are you jeopardizing creative exploration in favor of comfortability?

            I should note here that I AM an advocate of genreless writing, in theory. But I am still bound by Fiction and I always will be in some way. And this is why I keep the young storyteller with the crayons at the ready. The writer on the fringe of reality. Because in my naivety, I was as close to boundless as I had ever been. I was able to explore reality by creating the unreal. I was able to paint infinite futures out of poetry. I was on the search for God in an 8x12 piece of printer paper.

And that’s really what it comes down to. I hope that, with an awareness of genre and form and how they either encourage or discourage or guide or misdirect… I hope we are able to write with the same ontological hope embedded in Pascal’s Wager. That it is worth trying to write without genre in mind, even if the results end up being the same. Because the infinite gains outweigh the finite loss.      

Nicholas Becher is working on his MFA in Fiction and is in his 2nd Semester at FAU.

Go Tell it On a Mountain: My Two Weeks at the Mont Blanc Workshop.

Picture this: White tipped mountain tops cascading into an evergreen hillside so mammoth that when you look out of the window of the tiny alpine apartment you rented from a Scandinavian expat who currently lives in London, there is no skyline—all you see is green. This is what happens every day, for two weeks, at the Mont Blanc Writing Workshop.

photo credit: Michael Dahlie

            Some people may have been lured in by the fantastical scenery, or the chance to go abroad and be inspired by a foreign culture, or by the ability to spend time with like-minded writers from all over the world. These are all good reasons for a new writer to go to a workshop like Mont Blanc, but my reason was less picturesque—I wanted the chance to work with one of the writers whose work I had only just encountered in the months prior to applying, one who wrote the kind of prose I always wanted to write. For me, it was Alexander Chee.

photo credit: Michael Dahlie

            The first time I encountered Alexander Chee I was reading an essay he wrote for The Paris Review on James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. Chee began with a narrative in which he recounted working as a makeup artists on a gay porn set, recalling a scene wherein it was particularly difficult for the actors to “rise” to the occasion (pun intended). The director turned off the lights and closed the door so the actors could “work it out,” and Chee predicted that what happened in those moments were probably better than anything they actually recorded. He went on to say, “I thought about how something had happened in the dark that we couldn’t see, an excitement that couldn’t be in the film…It seems to me I am always in pursuit of that.” 

photo credit: Michael Dahlie

            It is clear that Chee was talking about sex—but he was also talking about the moments in life we are too scared to reveal. Moments that reveal our flaws, whisper secrets, admit to lies, or publicize truths that have always seemed better left unsaid. As a nonfiction writer, my work has always been an act of recollection—a way to grapple with the past, collecting and re-collecting the moments in my life that have the ability to say something to the world that exists beyond myself. Part of this is the pursuit Chee talks about—timidly feeling around for these moments and memories in the darkness, and dragging them out to immortalize them on the page. So after scraping around for money and expediting my passport renewal, I made my way across the Atlantic to Chamonix, a little town in France—le pays de mon coeur as my grandmother calls it—to find someone who might help me shine a light in the darkest corners of my memory.

photo credit: Michael Dahlie

            I could tell you I accomplished so much work there (which I did), and how my own project began to blossom again after looking at it from outside of the confines of an MFA thesis (which it did), or the relationships I built while I was there with writers I never would have met otherwise (this also happened)—but what good does that do you? Will it inspire you to apply to a residency next summer? Maybe. It is the same shit you hear from everyone who has told you how important these kinds of programs are? Probably. So instead let me tell you what I learned in the two weeks I spent in the foothills of Mont Blanc, and perhaps that will show the value of these kinds of workshops, both for those of you who are thinking of applying, and for myself who was broke for the rest of the summer after taking the risk. After a careful re-reading of my notebook from the workshop, here are the tips I will take with me throughout my writing career:

1.) Keep A Work Journal: One of the best things I learned working with Alexander Chee was to keep a work journal for writing—especially if you are writing a long form piece. Create a new entry after each writing session, ask yourself questions you have about characters, plot or the writing itself, jot down intuitions about the plot, and keep all your outtakes that you don’t think belong. Doing this allows you to come back to your writing the next day (or week, or whatever your rhythm is) and not have the anxiety of a blank page, because you’ve already given yourself a starting place. It also helps you resist the urge to go back and re-read your work over and over again—which, when you are writing a book-length piece, can slow you down immensely.

2.) “If you need to embroider, embroider the edges and not the center:” Alex said this was something Annie Dillard told him in a nonfiction workshop when he was in his MFA. Much of the work the members of our workshop brought to the table fell into the genre of memoir or autobiographical novel (even when some of us believed it wasn’t). He stressed the importance of not embroidering the center, because this is what gives the reader something to feel, see and touch. We can accomplish this by anchoring the stories in very specific things; however, when we begin to embroider we often fill the prose with abstractions, and the longer we stay in the abstract, the greyer the line gets. For me in nonfiction writing, the center is always the “truth”—the memory, the recollection, the stories I’ve be told throughout my life—and the edges are my own imaginings of the world these stories occurred in.

3.) “The writer must survive the writing:”  This is perhaps the sentiment I find myself recalling most after leaving France. Alex said it at one of our first meetings, where we all spoke about what we were writing about and where we stumbled into the area of trauma. As writers, regardless of genre, we often pull inspiration from our own lives and experiences, and oftentimes this involves moments and experiences that are traumatic. We spoke about the trials and tribulations of this kind of work, and that—as writers—it is important to realize when we aren’t ready to take on these experiences on the page. Often in workshop (I’ve seen it most commonly in nonfiction, but I whole-heartedly believe it is true in fiction and poetry as well), we submit something we’re not ready to receive criticism or feedback on, or we begin writing about something we haven’t finished emotionally processing and feel obligated to press forward in order to finish the project. This is putting the writer at risk, not only for the emotional repercussions of revisiting these traumatic experiences, but for not doing justice to the writing—we leave things out we don’t want to remember, or skew them in a way that feels less authentic to avoid dealing with the pain, or we are unable to receive any negative feedback about the work because it feels like our lives are being judged. Maybe this isn’t what Alex meant by his sentiment, but I think that in order to survive the writing, we must also survive the reaction to the writing. If we are not ready to hear those things, it is better to leave some stories untold—at least until we are truly ready to tell them.

4.) "I hope you leave more of yourself than when you came:" This is the wish Alexander Chee has for all of the writers that leave his workshops. At the end of two weeks I left France with thirty new pages (about 15 of which were usable), a recommended reading list that spanned four notebook pages, a copy of Erin Belieu’s Slant Six, a couple blocks of cheese and a group of friends and writers that I still talk to today. I learned about surviving my work, embracing my strengths and accepting my weaknesses as a writer. I learned that inspiration is everywhere—not just in colossal mountain ranges across the ocean, but in people you wouldn’t have met if you hadn’t taken a giant leap outside of your comfort zone. I learned that there are working writers and professors from around the country who are willing to guide and teach you, but also treat you as equals, and as friends. I learned about myself, and remembered why I started writing in the first place, and in that way I did leave more of myself than I was when I arrived. So you got your wish, Mr. Chee, and I hope one day I can help other writers feel that way too. For now, I hope this blog post will help inspire some of you to decide to travel to re-find your writely selves, wherever that may take you. 

photo credit: Michael Dahlie

In addition to going to France and being an MFA in nonfiction, Nico Cassanetti loves corgis more than anyone else you know. She has written editorial pieces for LIFE|STYLE and M&V magazine, and has a prose poem forthcoming in the A3 Review in London this September. If you want to read other stuff by Nico, she made this little website for you: www.nicocassanetti.com.

Welcome to Fall 2015!

Welcome, everyone, to the Fall 2015 semester here at the MFA program at FAU. I'm your friendly English Graduate Advisor, and I want to give you some information before we get into the more interesting blogs this semester.

Speaking of more interesting blogs, if you have something interesting to say, I beseech you to get in touch with me. We're especially interested in blogs on the craft of writing, the publishing class, your writing process, and reviews of reading events.

And what great reading events we have this year! We will have readings from Chantel Acevedo, Russell Banks, Tom Sleigh, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jay Critchley, David Keplinger, and our very own Susan Mitchell.

But as you know, an MFA program isn't all readings and philosophical discussions. You also need to take classes and, you know, make progress toward your degree. Let me get some of that out of the way. The program is 48 credit hours: 21 credit hours of workshop classes (seven classes), 18 credit hours of literature/theory classes (six classes), ENG 6009: "Principles and Problems of Literary Study" (this is your only specifically required course), and six thesis hours. Take a look at the advising checklist if you're more of a visual sort of person. Heck, while you're clicking around, why not check out our Web site wherein I go into all this advising stuff in more detail? It'll be great fun.

If you're graduating this semester (or next, because, hey, it's good to be prepared), take a look at the thesis guidelines. Remember! After 18 credit hours you must have a Plan of Study on file. See me for help with this - it's what I'm here for.

Well, okay. And speaking of me being here, I won't actually be here the whole semester. As you may or may not know, I'm expecting a kid (a human one!) this Halloween. Don't believe me? Here's a picture.

He's just the cutest, right? What kind of unborn baby is this cute already? Gah.

But, okay, so I'm going to be here until mid-October and then I'm leaving you in the very capable hands of Kelly De Stefano. She'll introduce herself on the blog soon. I will be back to advising next Summer 2016.

So! Welcome or welcome back, as the case may be. I encourage you to attend everything! To host readings (and invite me)! To write and write and then write some more! I hope this is a wonderful semester for all of you.



MR Sheffield, aka Mary Sheffield, aka Mary Ruth Sheffield-Gentry, aka Mars (that's an authentic nickname, guys) is your English Graduate Advisor. She can be reached at Mfa@fau.edu. Email her and make an appointment - you will make her day, I swear. I mean, I know for sure. Well, because I'm she.