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.

Shamba: Why I Write

My father calls four times a week, cheering me on from across the Atlantic as I write my way through an American MFA program. He’s on the other end of a video call, pleading. Write. He’s looking at me with his head tilted out of focus, my screen blurring the deep creases on his hollow cheeks, dimming the brightness in his brown eyes, and fuzzing the bushy brows that lead up to a forehead drooped against his folded right hand. I see silent stories etched in deep wrinkles on my father’s face.

He says he can show me what to write about as he moves his hand from his head and presses it against the grey mudwall behind him, rising up from a three-legged wooden stool. He keeps his hand clenched around his phone as he glides from the kitchen, to the living room, and out onto the verandah. He pauses by the door and glances down at his phone – I’m still here – then he makes his way down to the shamba. I shift my position inside my bed, tossing in sweaty discomfort and mewling my frustration at the enervating South Florida heat, waiting. My father, in seeking to keep me up to date with the progress of our land, switches from the front camera to the back, and then clears his throat and asks, his voice rising with every word, “Chemu, can you see?” 

I can’t see – what I’m looking at is a nebulous mix of black and brown. I squint harder, blinking at my cracked screen until I make out black blurry stick figures planted above a shadowy brown mass; the network in Ndalat is poor, and I refuse to tell him that, so I imagine. The early sun shines under vast velvet clouds, rays coming down on the shamba in hues of golden red and orange. In that soft light, my mother, bent over like a hook, plows her hoe at a narrow trench. As she turns the soil and breaks its surface, an acacia tree sways and watches at a distance. Beyond the thorntree, my sister waves hello, or was that goodbye? Beside her, my brother introduces his new-born daughter to the family: Limitrophy. But that can’t be her name. I heard it at school, from the group of white people that surround me there. 

My father switches to his front camera, his brows puckered, waiting for a response. I take a deep breath and clear my throat, my voice raised far beyond its natural pitch, “I see it, Baba.”

Inside the hut he sinks back into his stool, a grunt, contentment. He holds out his phone, stretches out his hand at an angle he thinks works best. I rest my elbow on my pillow, propping my head up with my hand, we can’t get comfortable. 

I long to fold myself, slip into the screen and join my family. I see them on the shamba, watching me from that shadowy brown mass, urging me on. My mother nods to my father and me, half-smiling. She stands to take a break, to straighten her spine, and to feel the gentle wind. She wipes her brows with the back of her hands before bending back down to the shamba that wears her out. Behind the acacia tree, my sister beckons, come, she calls, come and meet her, the newest member of the family: Limitrophy, my niece. Soon my world will resume, but for now I hold onto my father. I’m with him in our shamba, in that place that propels me forward. I imagine the limit as a space for expression, a place that inspires and acknowledges and honors differences.

From across the ocean, I can feel my father, so I write.

Daphne Kiplagat is a Kenyan-international MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University, specializing in fiction and non-fiction. You can find her short story here: https://www.alienliterarymagazine.com/daphne-kiplagat. 

Today I Fed the Birds

 

I am seated outside on a lawn chair, basking in the mid-morning sun. This is my favorite thing to do, especially since it’s been raining non-stop for a few weeks now. Duke, the German shepherd, is napping under my chair; Benson, the black lab, is stretched out on the lawn, sunbathing. With the ‘short rains’ season, it’s usually so cold throughout the day. So, the sun feels good on my skin. I have carried several things with me to move along this studying agenda; it has been three years since I had to study for school, so I need a refresher. 

 

A Christopher Hill book, printed pages from Baker’s Anthology, a few loose scripts on 17th-century texts, creative writing workshop submissions, a manuscript I’m working on, my leather-bound notebook, a blue highlighter, a pen, a bowl of freshly diced watermelon, and a glass of water. They are placed strategically on the table so that I know what to reach out for when needed. There’s a stack of misprinted printing papers on the book shelf that I write on habitually; it’s the easiest to grab when I get an idea for a story. I enjoy writing manuscripts, developing the framework.  I find it easier to scribble ideas in my handwriting, string them into sentences, compile them into paragraphs, and when I finally type them in, I fill meat in the bones, and voila, the story.

 

My legs are outstretched on the adjacent seat, luxuriating in the sun. The table is against a tree that is providing some shade. Reading history is always fascinating. I’m enjoying the 17th-century English prose class because it’s a subjective way to learn about history, since the texts are the opinions and experiences of influential people during the English revolution. The writing workshops are hilarious and engaging. I honestly wish it were under different circumstances, and we were able to meet in-person. Nevertheless, we are hacking this digital learning experience. No one could have predicted that online classes would be a global norm in 2020, especially over teleconference. But it happened, and here we are. Tunasonga tukisonga, Swahili for ‘We move, regardless.’

 

Life in the Arts is a new field for me. I have always been in the health and environment discipline  I’m learning the hows as we move along. Halfway through the workshop submissions, I pause and look around. Two birds are drinking water from the dog’s water bowl. I adjust my glasses and look closely, a male red-cheeked Cordon and an orange Weaver bird. I watch them for a while; they take turns stooping to drink water, balancing on the rim of the bowl, then fly off to the flowers on the fence. My brother, Kigen, is a bird-watching enthusiast, so he set up a bird station. The bird feeder and the water trough are hanging on the eaves of the roof. I wonder why the birds are not using them.

 

Being a rainy season, typically the second planting season of the year, the flowers are in full bloom. Different colors, types, shapes, and sizes. A buffet for the birds. There’s a tiny forest (a woodlot, if you may) bordering the fence, leading to a river at the bottom of the ridge. This woodlot is home to hundreds of bird species that flock around, mostly early in the morning. I pause and listen; the chirping, the occasional fluttering of wings, some warbling in the trees- beautiful, tranquil, and melodic. 

 

I try to trace the two birds, but they have blended in with the rest. I see about eight Whydah birds on the power lines. They are known as Chepkosiit in Kalenjin, my tribal language.  I can’t tell which particular species they are. But with the long tail and grey feathers, they are all males. An eagle flies low, obviously on a mission to snatch a neighbor’s chicks. I also spot a red-billed fire finch somewhere on the hedge. Kigen has taught me a thing or two about birds. I go over to check the feeder and trough. There are no more pellets, and the water trough is clogged- so freshwater isn’t moving from the bottle to the channel. They are perched pretty high, so I climb the grill to remove them. I scrub and rinse them clean, then sun-dry them for a while as I play with Duke. The water pump next to the tap whirrs in five-minute intervals. An airplane whizzes past, distinct across the clear blue sky.

 

With both troughs refilled with clean water and bird pellets to the brim, I take them back to the eaves and hook them up carefully. All this while Duke has been following me around. He doesn’t want to be left out on anything. He watches as I climb down the grill, making sure both feet touch the ground safely, instincts of a guard dog. Then he skips off to chase some tiny bluebirds that are walking under the hedge. I walk back to the table in the shed, feeling good about feeding the birds. The watermelon is crisp and refreshing. I draft some pen on paper illustrations for a poem I’m writing. Sketch, sketch, erase, sketch. Nice! Now it’s time for me to get back to reading. Or maybe I should watch the birds for a few more minutes.

Gloria J is first year MFA candidate at FAU. Her works focus on pre-colonial Africa, lifestyle, health and environment. She’s also a book lover,  photojournalist and illustrator. She loves to try new recipes, bird-watch and bask in the mid-morning sun.

Ross Gay Reminds us that the World Deserves Humanity

I first read The Book of Delights by Ross Gay during a rather grim time in my life. It seemed I couldn’t find joy in the things I once did: a ripe tomato on a hot summer day, the way a baby stares at you like they have never seen a “you” before, the way a candle flickers at the end of its wax. I was surprised by the journey to explore the delights of each and every day, a journey we all have so much to learn from. Before The Book of Delights, I was introduced to Gay in my high school poetry classroom. We read “The Bullet in its Hunger,” a beautiful poem that starts with “the bullet, it its hunger, craves the womb of the body. The warm thrum there.”  I remember sitting in that classroom twirling my pencil, mesmerized by Gay’s ability to humanize the bullet, the object that has caused so much pain - by humanizing the bullet we begin to ask questions that remind us that all pain, all violence start somewhere, somewhere deeper than what we know. The ability to humanize is the real magic found in Gay’s works - he shared many with us during his reading. “Coco Baby” or “An Abundance of Public Toilets” show us the beauty in being human, beauty in our everyday routine. That even when placing lotion on our bodies or searching for a place to pee, there is something to be said, something to delight in.

Gay was beyond gracious with his time. Before he began reading, he said, “If you want to wait on people, I’m patient.” He gave us backstory when it was needed and read intimate pieces without hesitation. He went on to say “The writing I want to do is the 'oh I can’t do that!' kind of writing.” And he reminded us of his belief in “inspiration.” Gay embodies the “I can’t do that kind of writing.” He makes topics like delight, that could so easily be cliché, anything but. He shows us joy in the real, and pain in the joy, and always stays away from the superficial, the joy we hear about but can’t access. A favorite of mine is “Feet.” When I was done reading, I turned to my own ugly toes and saw that even they have been lost. Even they have a story to tell. 

Ross Gay reminds us about the need for humanity in our world. That even the strangest or most difficult of times have something to offer us. He never disguises the pain in these moments but tells us in a way that reminds us it’s good to see the good. To value our friends, our families, our communities. To live in a world of togetherness. A world where I remember the delight in a tomato warmed by the sun.



Mary Feimi is a current MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She is the winner of the 2019 Amy Wainright Award for Poetry. She was the previous poetry editor for the University of North Florida’s literary magazine The Talon Review. In her free time, she enjoys spending time outdoors with her dog, reading, and cooking. 

 

Writing in Coldfoot, Alaska

I write in Coldfoot’s TV room. I sit on a seat that belongs in a tour van. Sometimes I strap the seat-belt over my waist and pretend I’m a passenger. Coworkers enter and ask why I do this. 

"Better safe than sorry," I might say.

“I am heading north,” I might say.

When sports are on, the TV room fills up quickly. Somebody drills a white board to the wall. The daily spreads are written in erasable blue marker. Coworkers cheer and lose cash and I go to the camp office, above the restaurant, in a chair with rusty springs and unhinged armrests that dangle at the sides. There, you can hear John Prine playing in the kitchen, or Mac Miller, or Earth Wind and Fire, or the breakfast cook belching--the Hobart kneading bun dough. You can hear the morning host, Duffy, tell pipeline workers he’s going to buy a truck soon, and that when he does, he’s not doing jackshit for a while.

You hear Dalton Highway truckers at the trucker table. They talk engine failure in onomatopoeia. They eat biscuits and gravy with scrambled eggs mixed in. They work each other up over George Soros funding Antifa, about nose swabs in Prudhoe—about everything coming to an end. 

Coworkers sit in the office also. They check email, browse the web, talk to one another. They look at things they hope to buy. Will Kuruz wants a printing press, but “shipping is mad expensive.”  Rebecca needs an apartment in town because she’s “over kitchen work.” Duffy needs insulin, but nobody delivers, so he has to go to town. 

‘I have to go to town,’ he’ll sometimes say to me.

‘Yeah?’

‘I gotta get insulin.’

‘Dang.’

‘I gotta get a truck, too.”

I write in the Coldfoot library. I sit in a purple chair beside the book shelves, surrounded by Christmas lights, coworker artwork, various decks of cards, and framed drawings of the mountain Sukakpak. Will’s master prints are hung up too--detailed collages of vans lit on fire, men with grocery bags over their head, people in banana suits, and frogs—lots of frogs. Sometimes I write from a giant bean bag chair beneath a bobbing, glittery, star mobile. Coworkers in Carhart overalls and bunny boots pass to get to tent village. At night they gather here and drink whiskey and spill their guts. I do this too, but not when I’m writing. When I’m writing I don’t say anything. I probably have a mean look on my face. But I’m not mad.

I write in a bathroom that has never had running water. It’s a small space, historic for past co-worker productivity. One once taught English to Chinese kids for a winter. Another wrote a poetry collection that got published. Another got her masters. Me, I sit on the toilet seat until my legs are tingly, and the walls seem to be tipping over. The shower has blue stains that orbit the drain. Before I leave, I always flush, and check myself in the mirror, and wonder if I'm handsome. 

Sometimes, when cooking crew specials, I write haikus on the back of a server’s pad, or, when nobody’s looking, I post rhymes on the camp white board. In the summer, I go to an abandoned bus in the boneyard, and lie on an old raggedy mattress. I write in a spiral notebook the thoughts I have. If the mosquitoes are bad I lock myself in the driver seat of a broken down tundra tank. When it gets too hot I go to Big Tent, where there’s a stove and a homemade craps table. I sit on an old, dusty recliner and write amid the smell of campfire.

A lot of times I write leaning against my bedroom wall. It's wood-paneled and flimsy. I often hear Duffy groan in his sleep, or struggle to get up in the morning. Imagine a king sized bed and a skinny wall down the middle. That’s Duffy and me sleeping. 

I write propped up on pillows, or old brown blankets, or dirty clothes. Green LED lights snake around my ceiling border. I can change the color with a remote. I can make them blink, or fade in and out. 

Outside in the hall doors open and shut. Coworkers walk to the bathroom or the exit, or another room. I know who they are by their footsteps, by thud on the carpet and the space between each step. I know who is at the door before they arrive. 

Sometimes I’m up really late, or really early, and I can write anywhere I want. I might grab a coffee from the restaurant and take it up to the office before the pipeline rush. Or head to the broken bathroom and pretend I am the only person alive. Maybe it’s winter and the Aurora is out. Maybe it’s summer and breezy. And so I don’t write. Instead I go outside and do things there. Like hike up a mountain, or fall into a creek, or sit somewhere with a coworker, talking. I suppose writing in Coldfoot is like writing anywhere else, so long as you are writing. 

Jacob Hibbard is a writer, cook, and MFA candidate at FAU. He currently lives in Coldfoot, Alaska. 

Breaking Form

Last fall, I wrote an essay entitled “25 Fragments.” In short, it’s 25 micro-essays that consolidated to a larger narrative, based on my tumultuous relationship with mental health and SSRI medications. Although this will sound impossible from the synopsis I just gave, I enjoyed writing it.

I got the idea for the essay after we read, and I presented on, 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso in Dr. Schmitt’s creative nonfiction workshop. To that point in my career I’d mostly read and written essays using a traditional time progression and form. However, after years of doing this, I was bored and I felt welcomed by the community of the classroom to try something new, to possibly fail, so I went for it. Specifically, I wrote the “fragments” in no particular order, printed them out, cut them up, and laid them flat on my floor. I spent hours, days, weeks—forever— positioning and repositioning them while my cats continually attempted to ruin the whole process by stepping and sleeping on them. The physicality of printing out and placing the piece gave me a deeper understanding of craft, why I write, and why I needed to write this essay. Specifically, seeing all of my bouts with mental health in fragments allowed me to push the narrative outward, to a greater meaning than just myself, something I said was my goal when starting the MFA. Because it was so different from anything I’d done, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go over, but in workshop Dr. Schmitt and my peers encouraged me to revise and submit. And, if anyone knows my writing better than me, it’s my workshop peers. So, I revised it a few more times and sent it out.

Months later, after the holidays and AWP and the start of pandemic and the completion of the spring semester, I felt stuck in everything and I was in the middle of a mid-day nap, waiting for the world to end or to get going again, when I got an email from The Southampton Review telling me the essay had won their annual nonfiction contest. I was surprised, because it had been rejected fourteen times before this. I immediately got up, emailed them back, and then started on the next essay in my collection.

Professor Bucak emailed me as soon as the award was announced. She suggested I use some of the money to buy something, an object, something responsible but tangible, she said, that could embody the accomplishment. I still haven’t gotten around to doing this, but I thought about it a few weeks ago when I was in a Zoom meeting with Dr. McKay and she asked about the paintings of two ravens behind my head. I told her that the art was my partners and that I didn’t know anything about it. However, what I didn’t tell her is that nothing in my home belongs to me, it’s all his, because the same mental health issues I wrote about in the essay have caused me to throw away all of my things too many times; that I have lived so many lives unrecognizable to this one; that I have been so many different people; that everything has felt like multiple fragments until this very moment.

As I wrote this, emails poured in from my undergraduate students, my thesis advisor, and seemingly everyone else. However, I can currently hear parrots chirping in the tree outside the window behind my laptop, and I can see lizards slinking around the branches, and can feel my anxiety rise over the amount of time I’ve spent on this instead of my thesis, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to use some of the contest money to buy something, anything, I can look at that will remind me of my time here. I’m not sure what I’ll do, or where I will go, but I know I want to carry some part of my experience at FAU forward.

Matthew Hawkins is a queer writer from West Virginia, Ohio, and Chicago. He is currently an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University and the Co-EIC of Alien Magazine. Recent work of his is featured or forthcoming in Fugue, The Normal School, and The Southampton Review. You can find him on Twitter: @catdad667.

The Carousel Never Stops Turning

     Lately, I can’t stop thinking about the following quote from my favorite guilty pleasure TV show, Grey’s Anatomy: “The carousel never stops turning. You can’t get off.” This line plays in the back of my head on repeat. We are in the middle of a pandemic and we have resumed our daily routines, or at least tried to do so. Some of us are working from home on a computer, while others have gone back to their workplace. While I find it comforting to keep busy with my work, I know that this has been difficult for a lot of people who have lost family members or gotten sick. It never stops. There is no time to heal. There is no time to pause. Keep writing. Keep working. Keep producing. One of my classmates wrote about this pressure to be productive in one of her pieces lately, and it struck me. My identity has always been so tied to productivity, and I do not know how to turn it off sometimes. Life just keeps going, and it doesn’t stop for anyone, which is simultaneously comforting and unnerving.

Starting an MFA program in the middle of COVID-19 has been quite the experience. As an instructor, I am teaching ENC 1101 fully remote, which frees up time to work and write from the comfort of my home, since I don’t have to commute. Unfortunately, it also means that most of the time I am teaching to blank squares on Zoom, which makes it hard to gauge if any of my students are even present. I can’t wait to teach a hybrid course in the spring and see some of my students in real life. Can you imagine?

As a student, I spend most of my days reading online articles, books, and discussion posts from a computer screen, which means that by the end of the day, my eyes are fried to a crisp. I find myself having to take walks every now and then to refresh my eyesight. I print as many articles as I can so that my eyes can enjoy the sight of real paper. I have also taken up the art of journaling once again. I cannot wait until we are taking creative writing classes in real life again, sitting in a circle and talking about literature and poetry with books in hand.

My main challenge as an MFA student right now stems from the question that haunts me every time I sit in front of the keyboard: what the fuck is the point of writing my stories when the world is going to shit? Well, the point is to tell our stories as best we can because they are now more important than ever, and we must demand that they are heard. This is only my first semester at FAU, and the program is already paying for itself; I have begun writing essays that I had been putting off for years. I have met classmates and staff that make me feel like I am home. I know, I know, it’s corny, but it’s true. If you are thinking about applying to the program, do it! You won’t regret it. I am hopeful that this MFA will help me become the kind of writer that can analyze some of life’s greatest questions. I’ll let you know how it goes.

  

-Elizabeth Diaz is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University. She graduated with her B.A. from Florida International University in 2017.