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/

Writing and Traveling

I’d missed my flight. Maybe everyone should miss a flight at least once in their lives, just for the experience, I thought--framing the situation like I often do, delicately sidestepping the whole moderate financial mishap thing.

My girlfriend, always handy with an optimistic scheme of an idea, affirmed for me that I wasn’t dying, that there were worse problems, and then suggested booking a different, more circuitous itinerary that would prove less squashingly expensive to re-book. The next day I got on a plane to Vegas, where I would pick up a miraculously affordable rental car and start driving several hundred miles to my destination of Oakland, California.

That next morning, I woke up in a campsite that faced a mountain range of Death Valley, and the day after that, woke up along a river near Lake Tahoe, California, until at last, I took the final leg down the highway that runs, itself like an inevitable water, into Oakland. Within those three days of highly unplanned travel, I’d quickly hiked a canyon before the barometer hit 110 degrees, met a group of hippies who told me about growing up in a nudist camp, watched cows graze on the greening mountains of the melting Sierra Nevada snow peaks. I took notes at a small desert bar filled, interestingly enough, with young Russians. It’s an understatement to say that it had paid, as I realized later, to have relaxed into the initial supposed crisis, to have done a thing I would never have otherwise planned.

Writing, I’ve come to learn, is often a lot like this. We miss the flight. We thought we were writing a novel but we’re writing little vignettes that we decide to turn into postcards and send to all of our friends, and some of the friends will keep the papers forever and some of them will gently send them to the recycle. We write five hundred pages, believing we’re chasing some great work of our lives, and then what we’ve got is five hundred pages of a messy, funny, poignant, moving good try, but maybe try again.

The remainder of that summer, the almost too dreamy three months of a break between the second and third years of my MFA, was like one darn long extended metaphor as that lesson continued to reveal itself in so many shapes.

---

As my girlfriend and I worked house sitting jobs across Northern California, taking day trips to redwood forests in Marin County and evening drives into the cities of the Bay, the beautiful-but-bootstrapped writer’s retreat I thought I had designed for myself was clearly not quite happening. California was gorgeous, but for the first week after I arrived, I wasn’t really writing. (The two facts might have been a little related.) Revising stories? I thought, sitting at the desk of a man who owned a beautiful home in a small town known for its bocce ball tournaments and the historic site of John Muir’s home. Someone’s revising stories? I said, staring at the blank computer screen--and not writing.

Why this little drought? I had come a long way, had planned and anticipated what this West Coast light and air would stir to life, and there it was: Something in me was demanding time off.   

It was unlike me to really, truly dip out of my planned writing practice. I keep to it. For many years, writing what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages” kept me alive to the dream of being a writer, and it kept me alive to the truer undercurrents of my life, heart, and creativity. It kept me, quite honestly, afloat in the uncertainty and unconventional priorities that marked my twenties.

I sat on the porch of that couple’s house, petting a cat who wasn’t mine, and thought: How do I need to write, now? What’s the form? I tried to relax, avoid the self-doubt that I was no good for writing until further notice. I tried to sidestep the fear, and search instead for another route to the goal of staying awake as a writer.

I kept notes, journals. I tried my hand at short short stories, realizing that the spontaneity of traveling felt more important than the demands of a four-hour morning devotion to twenty-page story projects that consumed the best part of my day. I shifted a little, moved into a mode of observing and noting short bursts of stories, letting go of the daily jobliness of my usual writing. And when I arrived back home at the end of the summer, settling back into the place of my job, settling into the final year of my MFA, those notes glowed and sang from the vantage point of recollection, and I found them forming into longer pieces I couldn’t have foreseen in the midst of the travel itself. 

Writing, like love, seems to demand a constant attentive listening, where we ask every day: What do you want from me now? What do we need to do next?

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When traveling, I noticed, I didn’t need to force myself to have the same kind of writing practice. My foiled intentions to write in a certain kind of way made me uneasy, but in fact, I owed myself a needed release from the pressure of plans and structure. Through travel, we have the freedom and the privilege to direct our attention where instinct moves us, looking where we may have never expected to look, feeling from spaces and positions and views we had never expected to feel. 

After all, traveling can be a chance to refill the well in ways we couldn’t have predicted. Driving once from Florida to my family’s Michigan home, the distance I covered began to feel like it was expanding my stories’ scope, suggesting a new and bigger stage from which I began to imagine the collection I was drafting for my MFA thesis. What was happening in this country, so big that only driving or riding by horse seems to be an appropriate means of comprehending its scale and variety--what all was there in the world, in Ohio and Kentucky and Tennessee, in all of these cities and towns, in all of these homes, while I had been tucked away in my small apartment, so quietly writing for workshop in Florida? Writing about place, writing through travel, can force us to ask ourselves and to reassess: What is it that seems most important, most vital to observe in the world?

And yet, even as the idea of travel writing can just glimmer with such idyllic promise, what happens when the work or the place doesn’t quite run the blissful, easeful program we had imagined? Both writing and traveling are big gifts to ourselves, ones that we often work hard to afford and make space for in our lives. But when I write as I travel, I can find myself assessing the appropriate ratios of art to life. Am I doing this travel thing right, I wonder? Am I living the best life, the best writer life? Am I making the most of my time?

Relaxing into what we have in front of us, the task of listening to the instincts that say, Go for a walk now, or Talk to the person at that end of the bar, or Scribble that down! That thing, the purple polka dot van converted out of an old bus!--all the notes, the thinking, the attention, the settings and characters we jot in messy notebook handwriting are all just as important, and sometimes even just as hard to notice and to find a way to keep, as the desk time work of writing. And who knows? That polka dot van could one day drive you exactly where you had wanted to go. 

Cherri Buijk is a third-year MFA candidate and teacher at Florida Atlantic University. She is working on her first collection of short stories.

On drafting and finding the heart of the story

In a comedy writing class at The Second City -- a standby in the world of Chicago improv whose classes I would absolutely urge the comedically-interested to check out -- a teacher looked at my scene sketch and made a face. She often made that face.

I strain to recall it all, but I think we were reading my piece about a pair of startup entrepreneurs who get into a steadily escalating blowout debate about their business concept -- and at the same time, they were throwing a party to launch the business concept, and there were some jokes about the food that these guys were serving, and there was some kind of feminist commentary in there somewhere with the entrepreneurs’ wives, and they were regaling their glory days as brothers of a fraternity, and they started outcompeting each other in some fart jokes, I believe -- and then, my teacher made that face. “Here’s something I like to tell people. Imagine you enter a room full of things. You could take all of the things and put them in your story, or you could take just one of them, and really see just that one thing. Which story would you rather read?”

That little parable might have gifted me with the single most important takeaway of my earliest and often embarrassing ploughings-away at writing fiction.

I think the metaphor of ploughing is actually a useful one. When we plough, we turn over familiar ground. A week later, totally unexpected plants might be growing. Ancient seeds, long dormant in that soil, are sprouting. We discover things we could have never anticipated -- and that’s a very exciting process of writing.

One of the toughest disciplines I had to learn, especially in the beginning, is the art of settling on just one main story idea that comes up in the process of drafting discovery -- the art of finding the heart of your story. For instance, looking back at the entrepreneur scene, I can take a glance at that messy draft and think -- ah-ha! How absolutely hilarious and satisfying it would be to explore just that one core emotional element, of these entrepreneurs who can never settle on an idea, and therefore never get their business off the ground. We could explore the blockages that most people can relate to, like perfectionism; the vulnerability going on in these two self-doubting former frat guys. In this case, knowing what I know now, I would not choose to explore all the semi-related items I found in the room. I would zero-in on just that one core aspect of their emotional dysfunction -- inability to launch -- and explore that one thing for all it’s worth.

Within these entrepreneurs, I know that that particular core emotional element is the
most interesting, fruitful aspect of the relationship between them because that element was the initial inspiration for the story; it was an observation that came from life. I once worked at an Internet company and would join lots of conversations that featured deep pining to start the next big app, online food truck, sustainable grocery delivery service, etc. I relished in hearing this group of my coworkers daydreaming about Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg, imagining their own startup careers founding multi-billion dollar efficiencies that solved the world’s inconveniences, but never committing to moving forward with any of these business ideas, big or small. It touched me. I was interested in this moment where Silicon Valley and young entrepreneurship was burning people up with FOMO, yet where dreams seemed so hard to turn into reality.

Do you struggle with focusing in on the core emotional place of your story? I
now readily embrace the beauty of the second draft in coaxing this element to life, reshaping the work around its heart. Of all the material you’ve generated in your first draft, of all the ground you’ve churned up and of all those discovered seeds that are growing, what do you have to trim away so that those one or two different story elements, the most vital, alive, important focus areas, can thrive?



Cherri is a first year fiction MFA student who is completing her first collection of short stories.