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. 

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.

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.

 

Picture of the Mind

 

Teaching for the first time, during COVID-19, has already produced its challenges in unprecedented ways. Unlike many of my cohorts, I elected to teach my GTA classes in person, as online-only classes disorient me when it comes to gauging students’ attention. But teaching in person has offered quite a similar obstacle.

While the concept of wearing a mask in public is nothing new at this point, wearing one while instructing a body of students who are also wearing masks proved itself a challenge immediately. The great Roman scholar Marcus Cicero once stated, “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” And to this point, it’s wild how much difference a mouth makes. Only being able to see a person’s eyes creates an uncanny valley effect where you might think you’re seeing a different emotion or intention than the one being displayed – it could be a real smile or a fake smile. So to this effect, students peering at me through vacant stares from the backend of (seemingly-infinite) rows of desks has me questioning if anything I’m saying reaches them, mentally or spatially. That same stare can mean a hundred different things: they’re lost in their own thoughts, maybe preoccupied with whatever they did last weekend or are looking forward to doing this one. They probably just haven’t gotten enough sleep and my examples of how to construct a thesis don’t hold enough tangible sway to wake them. Or perhaps my enunciations aren’t clear from inside of my own mask. Or maybe my insecurities are trying to get the jump on me – students are bored at the constant drone of your under-stimulating voice – they have a distaste for the shirt you’re wearing – they just don’t like you. Swallowing these fears from moment to moment can be tough, but I’m getting better at mentally pushing through the awkward silences, learning to not let them faze me because they’re only natural.

In regards to Cicero’s quote, it’s hard to get a window into the mind when that window’s bottom half is covered up (who said eyes were the windows to the soul? Lies.) I guess it takes a pandemic to recognize just how uniquely every facial twitch, wrinkle of the lips, or deadened yawn are all working in unison to excavate and convey the moving, thinking, reacting soul underneath.

Day one already feels like it was months ago, where I mumbled and stuttered over every line of the syllabus while a room of masked youths stared in uncertainty at their masked dictator; all the masks blanketed the room in an oppressive, even sinister atmosphere. Or maybe I’ve been watching too much Watchmen. But a few weeks in, and the off-kilter tension of those first classes seems to have subsided as I get to know my students. Sure, I won’t ever be able to tell just how much I’m actually getting through to them than I would in a pre-COVID-19 world, but so far, they’re engaged and doing the work so I guess I can’t ask for more than that. Still though, if the face truly is a picture of the mind, I eagerly await the day (if it comes) I can interpret the whole picture.

 

 

J Q. Salazar is a South Florida native. After doing a four-year stint in the US Air Force, he earned an AAS in Screenwriting for Film at the Colorado Film School and a Bachelor’s in English at CU Denver. He is currently attending FAU for an MFA in Creative Writing. His first publication can be found here.

T-minus 60 Minutes

 

T- minus 60 minutes to my very first MFA Creative Writing class.

No one prepares you for this big moment. Especially since we are currently living with a backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been going on for 6 months now. Daphne Kiplagat did give me a pep talk. ‘Let’s write’, she said. Brief and straight to the point. She’s an MFA student at FAU; a writer, story-teller and literary giant on whose shoulders I now stand. We hold hands as we enjoy this beautiful world of literature where great things await.

It’s 12:00 midnight. I just got off the phone. I was talking to my dear friend Julie. I had asked her to call me and be my alarm so that I do not oversleep. I’ve had a busy day. The weather has morphed severally like it usually does in Ngong, Kenya. It was drizzling in the morning, then some sunshine in the evening and now it is cold. So cold that I can feel it in my fingertips. After an early dinner, I watched an episode of my favorite medical drama The Good Doctor and took a nap. The mission was to wake up and get ready, at least an hour before class- 1:10am.

‘This is not for the faint-hearted, you know,’ Jules says with a hearty laugh. ‘But you will hack it,’ she reassures me through the phone. Pretty sure she’s talking about the night shift but it also applies to MFA. Julie is a Telecommunications Engineer, so she works night shifts mostly. She can sense my nervousness, I think.  I’m a bubbling brook of emotions right now. Excited, thrilled, edgy, sleepy and excited. Yes, twice as much! We digress and talk about graphic design, illustrations and animations. I love to sketch and draw. So this conversation is going well. At least I can feel myself relax and ease up a bit. Python, java, coding, programming…we really get into it. I’m now fully alert.

I have always been a night owl. That’s no problem for me at all. Back in high school, I was for sure the last one to go to bed in our dormitory, in boarding school. In campus (undergrad) I basically functioned better at night. That’s when I’d complete my projects and assignments, chill with my friends while moon gazing and yes, binge-watch entire seasons of Game of Thrones through the night. This, right here, right now, feels different. A good kind of different. My mind and my heart are in sync. Like when you open a vault and the grooves and bolts lock, then there’s a click and the pressure eases. That’s how accurate my intuition feels right now. I want this, I got this.

I brew a cup of Emrok tea, chai as we call it. Stir in some Marigat Gold honey. The dogs are barking outside. Other dogs from the neighborhood chime in. They love company. Maybe they are not used to seeing the lights on this late at night or early morning. I’m layered up in warm clothes, some socks and a throw blanket. It’s a chilly, overcast night. I cozy up into the chair at the desk and power up my computer, switch on the desk lamp and unstrap my leather-bound notebook. My pen sits eager, ready for some action. Phew! It’s nerve racking! A sip of chai should calm my nerves. T-minus 10 minutes. The thumping in my ears gets louder. This is it. Here we go.

I adjust my camera and launch Zoom. A semester like no other. This is it. Oh, wait; it’s 6pm in Florida! I’m way too early. Almost logged in an hour in advance. Time zone difference legiterally needs a calculator. Oi! Guess I’ll be waiting until 2:10 am. More chai?

-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 in the kitchen and bask in the mid-morning sun.

A Matter of Focus: Thoughts on Craft in Poetry

When A Thing happens, when I feel a poem begin, I feel it as the base of my brain stem humming. It happens when I notice river-water curling around the legs of a motionless heron on the opposite bank. It also happens when I feel the weighty comparison of petty bickering on the Food Network contrasted with a multi-car pileup, the burned-out wreckage alongside my commute. 

It happened when I went to church and it happened when I saw my bare feet framed by stars through my best friend’s windshield way past curfew. I feel the same sensation when I begin a nonfiction piece, or the beginnings of inspiration related to an academic paper, but with a poem it’s different. Less puzzled, more exultant. Less in the front of my brain, more in the back where my molars are anchored, where I hold tension, where tension holds me.

Do I notice the times I describe above, these generative moments, easily? Do I record them? My body certainly records them, my sense of living anxiety as good as a notepad for taking ideas. Not that I don’t use my journal (or even the Notes app of my iPhone) to jot down phrases that sound pretty or stir my sensibilities. 

But more often, it’s common for me to feel the poem in my chest and my stomach before my mind can articulate the words that my guts seem to be singing. When this happens, it’s best for me to get to some paper, pen, and some silence so the poem can emerge, mostly whole, as quickly as possible. Often, this visceral response to a situation is so broad and feels so specific (a macrocosm and microcosm all at once) that my main decision in terms of craft is to appropriately focus the lens of my perception. My poems, painted in large swaths, are unwieldy, licking at the seams of cells with the same fervor that they attempt to use in devouring the stars. 

To rein in my poem, I focus on pulling that abundant response to the world back to what I can ostensibly know about my environment, my body, my immediate surroundings. This might mean using my senses only: what can I touch with my skin? What type of dirt is stuck under my fingernails right this second, and where did it come from? What is it about this particular Marlboro that tastes differently, and what does it taste of?

When that exploration of detail becomes mundane, or indistinguishable from the experiences of anyone else digging in the same field or smoking the same brand of cigarette, then I begin to explore the broader questions (at the risk of challenging my earlier, established focus). Why did that dirt cause me remember the farm I took my first job at, my grandmother who tended those fields, my grandfather who faithfully ran the tilling machines? Where did the smoke of the cigarette go that enchanted me to follow it? 

It’s in this connection between the stimulus and what memory was stimulated that I find the poem. It is the attempt to feel a chill and write, while shivering, what it means to be cold before I am warm again. My decision of craft is less a carefully measured editing or author’s mechanism and more a dreamer’s earnest attempt to explain the dream, to grasp at it with language before it fades from the body upon waking. Eileen Winn is a first year MFA student with a concentration in poetry and an interest in nonfiction. Originally from Ohio, Eileen lives in Florida with their husband and their cat. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.

Dear Grad Students: How to Make It as A GTA

First of all, you don’t make it. Instead, as you rush out of your apartment on the first day of class, you skip a block on the staircase and tumble down the rest — right knee and left ankle dislocated. Also, you fall so thoroughly and quickly, like a blink, that you think you imagined it. You, with an entire weekend of lesson planning, bathroom rehearsals and slowly cooked optimism. Naa, this can’t be real, you think. Or! It is a prank, maybe. A joke from the universe stretched too far so you hahah in your head and un-imagine yourself from the ground. Pain, awkwardness and the desire to call your mother. Welcome to the Academia! 

Follow the story to before the chaos begins. Before the fall and the limp and the pool of student’s eyes drilling into you. Before that first phrase: Good morning, Class! And the clear white silence that greets you back. Before that awkward stretch of time, eternity crammed into one teaching session, as you exhaust your lesson plan in the first ten minutes. You know, before that small riot in your head, that slow killing tension, before you realize that your mouth is open, and the words pour out and you are cannot pull them back and force them down your throat – too late! You tell the class about your fall. Laughter follows, sympathy too, and you realize that is not the day you die. 

So yes, before all that. Maybe then to begin at Orientation? That first morning when you skip into the room, bright-eyed and alive with your American dreams. New beginnings shine on your skin. Three years of studenting and teacherly things – how hard can it be? Except you have class activities due for essays one and two. Easy, breezy, you think at first, until night when the words begin to blur and tease and mock, because your English has crossed the Atlantic and now you are simply no longer sure. Also, what is this lingering headache and obsession with bread. What is cognitive distortion? *you cry hot tears! 

It occurs to you on Day Three of Orientation that you are not prepared for this, that you do not know the first thing about teaching and maybe even writing? Because heck, school people like their commas and most times you are too lazy and anxious to care about them punctuations.  But! There is free food and nice smiling-people and the guy from the elevator, so you push aside your doubts as quickly as they enter. Who cares if you ruin the American educational system with your rabid inexperience? 

After three weeks of teaching you will meet K (Yes, K, because you won’t write real actual names in this post; what if K gets you arrested/deported?). The first thing about K is that you think he is a student. You think, from that drowning look in his eyes that he is a freshman trying to piece together an essay, seeking help from an instructor. And then, by means of casual introduction you will find out that K is a Program alumnus with three years teaching experience under his ‘proverbial’ belt. Also, shame on you for thinking otherwise. 

You will learn from K that a student can call you out for looking ‘un-teacherly.’  That anxiety can seep through your pores and leave your palms dripping with sweat. That it is not a good idea to keep the markers in your pocket because those stains are tough to clean out. That some students will sleep in class. That words and your mind will fail you as you lose your thoughts mid-sentence. So maybe then that no matter what you do, the first time was always meant to be a mess. 

Flip the coin. You, Grad Teacher, are also a student. You will begin to use words like Epistemological in sentences and you will do it with a straight face because well, this is your life now.  You will shelve out two separate spaces in your head for reading plots and for your students’ names. Hopefully, you won’t ever address a student by a novel character. (Doesn’t matter that both names start with S and end with A.) Of course, you will learn how to prioritize. There is the unending backlog of papers to grade and your course assignments to wrestle with, but you, my friend, must choose Netflix. Chat all day with your friends from home. Join a dating app and laugh at the absurdity of people on it. Remember that you are a person on it. Leave the app. Cook some meals. Burn hours on Facebook. Try to get some work done. Fail at it. Miss home. Etcetera.

This is the journey and you are figuring it out. Hopefully!


Tochi Eze is a former Lawyer turned wannabe writer. She is a first-year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University, a Program she hopes, among other things, will cure her of her compulsive laziness and procrastination, so that maybe one day she could actually start the novel she has written in her head.

On Fluidity in the Creative Process

My creative process is young.

Most of the time, I get an idea for a piece stuck in my head and kick it around a while. I’ll think on it, go about my life, and come back to it from a different angle. I know it has potential if the idea follows me around long enough. Usually, I’ll work out the first sentence or so in my mind before I sit down to write anything. Sometimes it’s a couple words that I focus on, sometimes a whole paragraph. I think about the words while driving. I think about the words while talking to someone about an unrelated matter. I think about the words while I’m teaching class. While I’m taking class.

Ideally, I like to meditate before I write, but this is not something that’s always possible. If I’m at home, I’ll burn sage, read a passage from the Tao Te Ching, and lay flat on my back with my palms open. I prefer the lying-down meditation to sitting or walking. I’ve read a bunch of books about meditation and practiced many styles, and this is the one that works best for me. It took a while for me to get there.

I like to squeeze the writing moment for all it’s worth. I write in large bursts, and I like it that way. I don’t do a little at a time. I’m an extreme person, always have been. This area is no different. Kerouac’s philosophy of “spontaneous prose” is fascinating to me. I’ve never written 50,000 words in a sitting while on large doses of speed, but I don’t think it’s a bad approach. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of experimenting in that way. I’ve worn out my welcome in the drug department.

So, I create a mood and I proceed to exhaust every bit of energy out that mood as I can. I purge myself onto the page. I don’t really like the word “purge,” however. It implies I have something bad to rid myself of. But I guess a lot of times I do. At least “purge” sounds better than “ejaculate,” the other descriptive word that comes to mind, even though the invocation of orgasm is more positive. Writing is much closer to a purging for me, an evacuation of thoughts. The process doesn’t always feel good as a rule, and I’m not always satisfied when it’s done.

I’m forcing myself to write with greater frequency, which means all these little steps I’ve outlined become less feasible. For instance, I did none of this before writing this piece right now. This is a good thing. I can’t expect conditions to be perfect—or even good—all the time. I do what I can to mitigate anxiety and I write. I get as much on the page as possible, and I work it out later. But the spirit of the moment is always paramount.

My creative process is idealistic.      

Jonny Rawson is an MFA student in creative writing at Florida Atlantic University, where he’s working on a memoir about addiction. He’s from New Jersey, which he actually considers an asset. You can check 

Teaching High School Students to Write Science Fiction and (Not Always) Blow up Their Alien Worlds

Teaching high school students how to write science fiction is exactly like reading science fiction; it’s fun and weird, but a lot of the time you’ll have to do mental gymnastics to figure out what’s going on. For the 2019 FAU SciFi Collab Lab, Christopher Notarnicola (my co-teacher) and I took the classic science fiction trope of a hive mind and used it as a lead into collaboration for a group of high school students to write works exploring the complicated and bizarre. As a class, we dug through classic science fiction writers like E. M. Forster, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as more modern science fiction stories like Mass Effect and Zima Blue.

We began the “collaborative” aspect of the workshop with exercises combining individual writings into collaborative pieces called “exquisite corpses.” These exercises were a low-stakes way for students to get to know each other and practice writing together.  Each student would write a single sentence on a piece of paper, then pass the paper to the next student.  We started with ten separate pieces of paper, then after each person wrote a line, they would pass it on. We ended up with ten odd and unique stories.

Our ultimate collaborative work came in the form of two (much more structured) short stories.  One was Red Alert, the story of a secret agent infiltrating a post-apocalyptic government in order to save her remaining family.  The other was Shmoppo: The Story of a Grumpy Hero, where the “Froppie” protagonist must survive strange and unpredictable weather.

Of course, no writing summer camp should exist without writers getting to put together their own solo works.  Each of our writers came up with grippingly weird characters and plots ranging from a superheroine in space fighting to find herself to anthropomorphic amoebas trying to survive a science experiment.

Throughout our time writing and analyzing works of the past, we viewed everything through the lens of craft, with discussion geared toward answering the question: how do you write good science fiction?

The trickiest thing about teaching high school students the answer to that question was getting them to acknowledge the narrative points that they took for granted.  For example, having a swashbuckling space pirate with the power to cause supernovas might sound cool, but unless she has human concerns like making sure her dog has food, or a fear to use her abilities because she once accidently destroyed a burgeoning planet with sentient life, the story is almost literally all flash.  Initially, nearly all the students were focused on an over-the-top power or “sciency thing,” while ignoring the element that makes readers care. 

So, my favorite writing element I worked to get them to consider was contrast, something they used to devastating effect.  We went through the first issue of Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead” to see how the calm, (relatively) happy times make the forthcoming zombie apocalypse that much more upsetting. 

In one story, a student wrote about a hellish, fiery apocalypse (obviously, it was delightful).  We spoke about contrasting in more positive elements, so the student added a dream sequence of flowers in a meadow, a concert with glittering bright lights, and a white house in the country with a freshly cut green lawn.  Then she went back to killing off humanity.  Sure enough, her (still slightly worrying) story hit all the harder, and she was thrilled with it.

Effectively, teaching this workshop is just like teaching a first year ENC class but with students who all want to be there.  The happier Chris and I were teaching—the more we nerded out about the stories—the more comfortable the students were trying new things.  Craft was important, but this was also a summer camp, where the expectation is to have fun, so that was always our goal.  When in doubt, put on another YouTube video with Wall-E knockoffs racing through a meteor shower.  High school students love analyzing robots getting blown up.





Justin Piesco is a second 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.