The Familiar as New: Object Journals and Images that Stick With Us

            Most writers have been told to keep dream journals. Leave a flashlight by your bed, a small notebook open, a pen; wake in the middle of the night, scribble down the genius, go back to sleep. For me, this has resulted in ugly scribbles of “lava mermaid” and “heart steal competition” with no further remembrance of context. Not ideal, to say the least.

            That’s not to say dream journals don’t work for everyone. Our subconscious is a valuable vault for us to mine, and sleep brings that closer to the surface. But for me, it has always felt an unreachable goal, an attempt to organize images that my dream-brain presents, half-remembered and fleeting.

            This January, I had the opportunity to intern with the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, where I was assigned to assist Reginald Gibbons. Throughout his workshop and craft talk, Gibbons proposed the idea of an object journal. Objects are those things that stick with you—images, places, smells, the recurring theme in one’s writing that may or may not have an identifiable source but comes again and again into the mind. Allen Ginsberg's “first thought, best thought” feels applicable here—not that the words will be the same through every edit, but the thought of the object will stick with you as an integral part of the writing.

            These objects don’t have to have positive associations. They can be related to trauma—a certain song, a feeling, a moment or place—or to joy, or to moments of clarity or noticing the world around you. Growing up in Florida, a lot of objects that show up over and over again in my writing are very personal to that experience—oranges, fresh squeezed, or drooping mangroves, or pecking ibises, the slow meander of an iguana into a canal—as well as moments with distinct associations from my childhood. Their recurrence does not weaken the writing; instead, it gives me the opportunity to revisit that which is familiar in new and novel ways. This surprise is one of the key parts of poetry, specifically, and a lot of other successful writing: a volta, a turn, a subversion of the reader’s expectations to allow them to experience something they thought they knew in a way that surprises them.

            As for writers who do this well, there are so many that I could scarcely name them all. But some of my favorites give readers this new version of the familiar: Gwendolyn Brooks’ detailed attention to the lives of the people in “kitchenette building” and “The Bean Eaters” give us, as readers, two different views of similar living situations. Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead” encourages us to look at boxes (possibly an object) and grief in a differently tactile way. Oranges are an object for Cathy Song, Li-Young Lee, Gary Soto, Frank O’Hara, and many other writers. As readers, we are comforted by the familiarity of these concepts and then stunned, shocked, amused, and alternatively comforted by a different version of that same concept.

So: keep an object journal. Write down the thoughts and images that stick with you, that feel like something when you see or hear them. Type it in your phone notes, if you aren’t a pen-to-paper kind of drafter. But don’t lose that first thought. It’s coming to you for a reason.

Haley Bell Keane is a first-year MFA student in Poetry at Florida Atlantic University. Her work focuses on gender and sexuality, religion, ecology, and trauma. She has previously worked as an editor for the Kudzu Review undergraduate literary magazine and a summer intern for The Southeast Review graduate literary magazine at Florida State University. She is currently a poetry reader for Swamp Ape Review, the graduate-run literary and arts magazine at FAU.

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.

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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.

The Forms Memories Take

Memories are not always clear and linear. I know many of my own memories can be hazy, nebulous, and somehow all the while vivid and crisp—surreal, even. Interestingly enough, these strange recollections are the ones I turn over the most, as if the very fact that these seemingly insignificant details have transformed into colorful memories that have stuck with me all this time must mean there is a profundity in them that deserves examining.  I do most of this scrutinizing in my writing. Perhaps my favorite aspect of writing is the flexibility through which I can choose to express and explore (and at times dissect) my psychological ties to the images and sensory detail from my memory.

As a writer who has dabbled in both creative nonfiction and poetry, I could say there is a method to the way that I choose whether I’d like to convey these kinds of memories in an essay or a poem. Would I rather bare my soul in paragraphs or stanzas? Sentences or lines? And then from there, how can I be clever with my structure, how can I lead my form to follow function?  The truth is there is no real answer I can give, no way I can adequately clarify how I make certain distinctions.  What I can say is this: either way, writers will have to go with their gut.  For me, if the memory I want to convey in my writing is something that is specific and can be arranged chronologically, I might turn to an essay format (though admittedly, I particularly enjoy writing lyrical essays which may utilize a poetic device or two.)  Even in essay format, I find it difficult not to incorporate lyricism when unpacking a memory, but then again, for me, nostalgia has always been hard to deliver without a song. For my more bizarre, dreamlike memories, I turn to poem format much more often.

My poetry, not unlike my other writing, is usually approached with a degree of emotional distance rather than erring on the side of confessional.  When describing or conveying a memory in my poetry, I think this distance allows me a kind of dexterity, an ability to manipulate form and language to illustrate the stranger details of a memory—for instance, a peculiar scent that recalls candy, flowers, plums, and rubber from when I was five years old, the one that would make me ache with the absence of fancy-free youth if I smelled it now. Something about the brevity, and concurrently the great depth, of such a memory certainly lends itself to poetry, which in some ways seems to perfectly serve this type of memory in its own format—brief and insightful.  Phrases that sound like the taste of my grandmother’s spaghetti on Easter weekend, words that feel as toasty as the fireplace in my childhood home—sometimes only the musicality of language in poetry can express that flash of emotion and color buried in my mind’s eye.

Maddy García is a first-year poetry MFA Candidate and instructor of English composition at FAU. Much of her work grapples with identity, ambiguity of form, and the human experience juxtaposed against the cosmos. She is also a visual artist and, in her free time, she enjoys cooking and surrounding herself with cats.

On Sharing Ourselves

I have had the opportunity to work with Ayse Papatya Bucak, professor at Florida Atlantic University, for a few years now. She patiently read and responded to my creative work as an undergrad (even through the terrible zombie-dystopian-Twilight-gothic years) and has encouraged me throughout my graduate studies (reminding me that I am on the right path, that I am not a failure at what I do). These are all things that keep me going and are very important to me—but what I think I’ve enjoyed most about working with this phenomenal instructor is how much of her writing process she is willing to share.

Professor Bucak’s debut collection, The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories was released into the world last week. I’ll have you know; she blew up on the internet. Every email shared, interview posted, and podcast linked littered my Facebook timeline, repeated throughout my Instagram stories. We (her FAU cohort) could not be any prouder or more excited. She premiered her collection at the lovely Books & Books in Miami. The room was full, the excitement palpable, and the appreciation for this wonderful writer abundant, ever-present against the backdrop of floor-to-ceiling walls of books; shelved stories not unlike our own. She read “Good Fortune” from her collection. Lines like, “Before: a nephew-stranger, a brother-replacement, an old beginning. After: still fear but less, still stone but less, still Gudrun but more,” read like magic, defined a main character (Gudrun) and played with sentence structure, which she is always reminding us (her students) to do. We leaned toward her, away from our seats. We listened. Not only did we get to dive into this story as a collective, delighted audience, but she also showed us her notebook, her scribbles. She shared the evolution of her sentences, her notes, her writerly mind. And me, a mere student, a mere fangirl, thought, I have notebooks like that too. I have sentences waiting to be evolved too. Of course, this reading wasn’t for me. This reading was for Papatya, to share herself and her hard work. But how wonderful it is, to find inspiration in others, to be a part of a lineage of hardworking artists who don’t mind sharing themselves.

I am in my third and final year at Florida Atlantic University’s graduate program in creative writing. As expected, I have made countless connections to the writing community, gained quite a few new friends, written a lot of words, had many a breakdown, worked my little writer-nerd’s self into the ground, and—most importantly—learned to share myself. In what other world do people have the opportunity to share their words, their art, their bones and trauma and joy so professionally and so completely? I think we can find circles who support us throughout this journey of life, but to find friends and mentors who openly share their process, their successes, and their advice so willingly and so supportively is truly unique. In my experience, Professor Bucak has always opened her door to students looking to create a world on paper. She remembers our names, our stories, and she helps us practice our craft, all while accomplishing feats in the sometimes-paralyzing but always fascinating publishing industry. Her collection of short stories is a pleasure to read, and an inspiration to those of us who look up to her as a writer. Her reading in such a local, bookish spot was a culmination of all the things the MFA at FAU represents; a community of supportive colleagues and writers witnessing the magic of a new book being articulated into the world by an author we love.

            Congratulations, Papatya. 

Emily White is a third-year MFA still attempting to complete the daunting task of finishing a story. She is a bit further along now, though.

Cracking Shells

Invariably, my favorite part of any workshop has been the community that gets formed throughout  the semester. The inside jokes, the unique intimacy, an understanding of peers that can only come from picking apart their writing. The vulnerability that comes with sharing your art leads, inevitably, to a sense of trust and camaraderie. So while I was stoked, this spring, to learn from a poet I greatly admire, I was disappointed that the workshop would last only a week. Too short a time, I thought, to develop that kind of bond. Of course, I was wrong.

Danez Smith came into the room, so overwhelmingly themself, so comfortable and ready to begin. There was no academic veneer, no stuffy posturing, no attempts to mute their personality. They had us laughing, and, on the first day of passing out poems--to the left--had us singing “Irreplaceable.” A chorus of “To the left’s” erupted, and the energy in the room was light, lively, accepting. Now, it takes me a while to warm up to people. I hold a lot back. (A friend has said of me that it takes a while to crack the shell, but once you do, you find “a pretty weird fucking bird.”) Point is: I’m reserved, upon first meeting people. But Danez Smith had me, on that second day, table-drumming and belting Beyonce. If that’s not a testament to their teaching ability, then the rest of this blog post better convince you.

It wasn’t just the affability or realness that Danez brought to the table. They forced us to reconsider our relationship with language, to step outside the comfortable. For one assignment, they had us list the poetic strategies we rely on, and a second list of all the topics that appear in our work, and then had us write poems in which we abandon those crutches. Writing those poems felt like stepping out expecting a stair, and tripping awkwardly down. Eventually, though, I found my footing, and was able to see language from an entirely new angle. Defamiliarizing myself with my language allowed me to enter a fresh, generative space. By the end of the week, I felt rejuvenated, closer to writing than I had in awhile.

Danez spoke passionately about language, life, community, and communication. The lack of pretense, the lack of a professorial guise, the complete absence of a fake-self, allowed them to speak directly to us, to the point. The cliche I'm about to offer you is that they taught me not just about writing, but about being. Their parting bit of advice for us writers, the last wisdom they imparted, was a small phrase that I don’t think I can hear enough. “You want to be a writer? Then write. Just write.”

Aiden Baker is a first year MFA candidate in Fiction at FAU. Originally from Chicagoland, she now lives, writes, and sweats in South Florida. You can find her work in The Ninth Letter Web Edition.

The Annual Poet Invasion of Delray Beach

For 15 years in a row, Miles Coon and his wife Mimi have brought poets from all over to Delray Beach. It is a week-long event of workshops, craft talks, readings, and bonding over a love of poetry. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival creates a space for poets who might be seeking their first publication to work with and alongside poets who may be finishing a manuscript and writers looking to train in a new form. There are hundreds of participants who work in the same workshop group all week, taught by some truly incredible poets, and some of us are lucky (or perhaps naive) enough to volunteer our time to help for the week.

Florida Atlantic University is a short 20-minute drive from Old School Square in Delray Beach, where the festival takes place. Thanks to the proximity of our campus, Florida Atlantic University MFA students make for the ideal volunteer interns for the Festival. There were four of us from FAU this year—Caitlyn GD, Colton Martin, Kelsey Moghadospour, and myself—along with some students from Florida International University’s MFA program and some independent volunteers both local and from far away. The diversity amongst volunteers matches the diversity of the Festival faculty.

I was lucky enough to work with two poets in my workshop, Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown (and their sweet golden retriever, Solace). Our workshop group progressed so much from our first meeting on Monday through the end of our time together on Saturday. What really made the experience worth it to me was picking up great tools for my own writing and getting some new methods for my teaching. Plus who doesn’t want to hang out with poets like Laureanne Bosselar, Sharon Olds, and Tyehimba Jess for a week? It’s a lot of work, but it’s something I’m already looking forward to next year. In the workshop time, I was able to compose two new poems and got inspiration for some assignments for my Teaching Creative Writing course. I also made some great friends from FIU, got closer with my FAU cohort, made connections with staff from some journals and presses, and bonded with my workshop faculty. Jessica, Nickole, and I have been eagerly making plans to meet up in Portland at AWP later this month. Volunteering is never easy work, but it is a vital part of being a model literary citizen. I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of the PBPF this year.

Kelsey Allman is a first-year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She earned her BA in Writing & Linguistics from Georgia Southern University. In addition to writing creative nonfiction, poetry, and tweets about football, she is working on a graphic memoir about mental illness. Her dog Remington controls most of her life decisions.   

Testing the Waters

I walked into Danez Smith’s workshop with the extent of my poetry knowledge limited to Shel Silverstein and an introductory course during my undergraduate studies at Penn State. I was lucky to be prepped with a few mini-lessons on form from my fellow Graduate Teaching Assistant and friend, Renae. She is exceedingly patient and kind, explaining to me the intricacies that are line breaks and tension. As a fiction candidate, I like to stick to what I know when it comes to writing and, more specifically, what I know I can write well. In a poetry workshop, I was a Type A fish out of my neat and tidy Type A water.

I took my seat at the table where we would gather for the week, and Danez asked us to introduce ourselves with additional tidbits of information – where we were at in the MFA program, what our primary genre was, where we were from, and what our favorite fast food restaurant was. Right off the bat, I was flummoxed, misstating that I was in my third year at FAU (I am a mere first-year) and letting the rosiness on my cheeks signal my embarrassment. I turned to Renae and reiterated, “I am out of my element.”

Soon enough, however, I felt myself embraced by Danez, who was successful in explaining poetic form by comparing entities like The Powerpuff Girls to a crown of sonnets. According to Danez, much like the crime-fighting trio, this form consists of unified “sister poems,” also known as poems that are “same same, but different.” Danez was able to break down concepts to more manageable ideas, and I’m always a sucker for a solid pop culture reference. We laughed as we compared one type of poetic sequence to the 2016 collaboration between Rihanna, Paul McCartney, and Kanye West for “FourFiveSeconds.” Danez explained it as something that makes no sense at all, yet somehow, it works. Cartoons and celebrities? This was very much my speed.

As the week went on, I found myself inspired by what Danez had been talking about. Not just poetry as a form, but poetry as a way to express thought and feeling through writing. During their reading, Danez stressed that being honest in your work is something they focus on, and I felt a resonance with that statement. Maybe poetry was the outlet that would allow me to talk about my experiences and the ideas I so often tried to integrate into my fiction. I ended up walking away from this workshop with a new sense of what poetry was, and I felt inclined to thank Danez for their time working with us during the week. I shook their hand, thanked them while smiling, and felt the same nervousness I had on the first day. This time, however, it was nervousness in the form of excitement and the potential to get started. Having tested new, sometimes uncomfortable waters, I now feel confident in expanding my writing wheelhouse.

Abigail Reinhard is a first-year MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University with a concentration in fiction. A native Jersey Girl, she received her bachelor's degree in English from Penn State University in 2016.

Dangerous Seed

Having read Don’t Call Us Dead in both my African American Literature course and my Poetry workshop, I was eager, and nervous, to meet the author behind the words. This was my first workshop hosted by an outside author at Florida Atlantic University, so I didn’t know what to expect. After meeting Danez Smith, the nerves quickly faded. They were so welcoming and motivating throughout the entire workshop, I almost felt as if I had met them before. Perhaps because their poems evoke that same, welcoming aura, and perhaps because they always seem to have a smile on their face.

            Throughout the workshop, Smith emphasized the importance of writing for specific audiences, which is something I had previously not put enough consideration into. We all belong to different communities, and can therefore write to those groups in a specific language of sorts. This doesn’t have to mean a literal different language, but by including specific insiders, one invites people in while concurrently holding others at a distance. Smith had us put this idea to practice by taking one of our poems and reworking it, keeping three separate audiences in mind as we revised. When we all shared our new pieces, the poems seemed to change form completely, solely dependent upon who the speaker was addressing. Moving forward with my own work, I will be sure to decide who exactly I am speaking to before I begin writing.   

While attending Smith’s reading at the end of the week, I found myself smiling along with them as they read. I was sitting next to fellow MFA student Abigail Reinhard, who I met through FAU’s MFA program and now consider a best friend, when Smith read their poem “acknowledgements,” specifically dedicated to friendships. Abigail and I found ourselves nudging each other whenever something applied to us (specifically the line “I text you & you say, I was bout to text you bitch”). While reading all of their poems, they had the room laughing and aching at the same time. To evoke those senses simultaneously through writing is to evoke something true. Listening to Smith read was admirable, and reminded me of the many reasons why I love to write.

At the end of the reading, I waited in line for Smith to sign my copy of Don’t Call Us Dead. When it was my turn, I made sure to ask them if they meant for the italicized lines in “summer, somewhere” to read both down and across the page, to which they said yes, they did intend this, but not initially, like a happy accident. As a writer, I lingered on these words—that feeling of doing something exciting subconsciously is a moment I, and I assume others, strive for.

I walked to the parking lot after the reading feeling full (and not as a result of the provided food, which was lovely). I opened my copy to see what was written. They crossed out their own name and wrote, “Renae! Be a dangerous seed!” I think these words capture what Danez Smith was teaching us during the week-long workshop—take risks with your writing, and know that your words mean something to someone and, most important, that they hold power.

Renae Tucker is a first-year MFA creative nonfiction candidate at Florida Atlantic University.

Observing like a Writer

When I received the writing advice to slow down in my prose, it felt like (unintentional) life advice. But life advice, I’m sure we all can take. 

            Whether you’re reading this as a current/former/hopeful MFA student or as a writer of any stripe, it’s safe to assume you’re a busy person. Fair chance, writing isn’t your only obligation and to slow down seems impossible because you can’t drop your job(s), children, classes, teaching, spouse/partner, etc. And you can’t drop your writing (I’d hope).

            But you can slow down in your writing, particularly when thinking about setting and details.

            I should have realized sooner that my aversion to sitting in a setting and providing a reader with the unfolding details of a place was a reflection on my aversion to sitting in a setting and taking in the unfolding details of a place in my life. I eat breakfast during my office hours, with a book in one hand and a pen in the other. I meet a friend for lunch and my mind is confetti on the next dozen things that need to get done (the next scene to write, the next paper to grade, the next paper to write, etc) and so place becomes transitory. At lunch with this friend, I won’t be able to recall afterwards whether the chairs were wood or metal, whether the table had both ketchup and mustard but no mayonnaise, whether all the Splenda was gone, but the Sweet n’ Low was packed too tight. If I can’t slow down and notice the details in my life, why was I surprised that I couldn’t slow down and provide those details in my prose?

            Chances are, I’m not alone in moving through the world as if each space is only a bus depot to hop to the next transitory location.

            I know mindfulness is a buzz word that can feel cheapened recently, but there’s something to say about writerly mindfulness. We learn how to read as writers and (hopefully) read to feed our creative work. Reading becomes part of the work of writing. We learn to dedicate slowness with published work and understand that if we don’t read (and don’t read with the purpose to learn and expand possibilities) then we don’t improve. We learn to read mindfully. Can we also learn to observe mindfully? Can observation become the deliberate work of a writer? I’m a fan of carrying a notebook everywhere, but even then, I don’t take down every detail of every room I enter—that’s exhausting for one, and also when you notice everything you can’t hone in on what’s important. But, I can take down one or two ideas. Just the ketchup bottle alongside the mayonnaise packets. Just the Sweet n’ Low with the bent pink corners.

            But even then, taking notes can still be exhausting or cumbersome. Another observation technique is to build your observations into the work you already do as a reader. When I read as a writer, I read for setting. I read for how the writer walks me through a room (or not), how the writer directs my attention. I observe and take notes on the places I would never think to set a story or place a scene.

            I don’t expect any of us to get less busy, but I hope that slowing down can create writerly mindfulness so we can observe with intention. I hope that observation can become a part of your writing life, something as integral as reading. The places we inhabit are not transitory and I, at least, needed a reminder of that, in my life, as well as in my prose.

Cheryl Wollner is a first year MFA student in fiction, currently working on an alternate history novel about Bess and Harry Houdini. She 100% believes in magic.

An Open Letter to First-Year MFAs

Dear Incoming MFAs,

Firstly, allow me to congratulate you all on getting into an MFA program—this is no small feat. You should all be proud of yourselves and your work; I trust that you’ll find FAU to be a nurturing program where you’ll have the chance to hone your skills (and develop new ones) as writers, be exposed to opportunities that will help you grow professionally, and develop longstanding relationships within a community of like-minded people who take their art just as seriously as you do.

As I prepare to graduate and embark upon my next endeavors, I would like to take a moment to reflect a bit on my time here in the MFA program and offer up some advice for navigating the next three years of seriously pursuing your art. Disclaimer: these suggestions may not be for everyone—what you get out of this program will depend, largely, on what you want out of this program—but they are reflective of my own experience here and what I wish I’d known starting out.

1. View Your Responsibilities as a Full-time Job.

Many of you, I imagine, will be entering this program as Graduate Teaching Assistants. This means that, in addition to completing your academic work, you will be teaching two sections of Freshman Composition each semester. Teaching—although the most fulfilling job I’ve ever had—can be very time consuming. Between time spent in class, lesson planning, office hours, and essay grading, you will have plenty to do. I don’t say this to induce anxiety or overwhelm you. In fact, I say this to hopefully assuage your worries. If you treat the totality of your responsibilities at FAU as a sort of full-time job, balancing all of your work won’t be a problem. I recommend carving out some sort of schedule for yourself (even if it’s just a mental one). Allot yourself the necessary amount of time to read your assigned texts, work on any lit essays as they arise, get your grading/teaching tasks done, and, of course, write.

A wise professor at FAU once told me not to forget the real reason I’m here: to write. Your writing, in other words, should always come first. Especially if the inspiration strikes; don’t ignore your muse because you teach the next day and you haven’t figured out a lesson yet. Many of my lessons have been scrambled together on my way to campus (and, ironically, these have been some of my best classes).

Somewhat related to this: don’t view your required lit classes as an inconvenience. Allow them to inform your writing as well. Learn the theory and pay attention to how the authors you’ll study have employed it. Although it may not seem so at first glance, these classes can also serve to improve your craft.

2. Be an Opportunist

One aspect of MFA programs (and this one, more specifically) that often gets overlooked is the amount of extracurricular opportunities that will come your way. It is such a rare circumstance to be in, to have three years to focus on your art and to be inundated with opportunities streamlined straight to you (no need to hunt!). Take advantage of as many of them as you can while you’re here. There will be calls for submissions that magically appear (thanks, Mary) in your inbox. Submit to these places and others. Submit your work voraciously in the next three years—your publications can make or break your job search post-graduation. I’m sure you’ll be told this all the time by your professors as well, but I feel that this sentiment cannot be overstated. Submit, submit, and be rejected. You’re a writer, rejection is just an unavoidable hazard of the occupation. Embrace it. Allow rejection to become an ally, let it make you stronger and fuel your drive to revise and improve.

Apply for every other opportunity that comes up. There will be grants, competitions, travel stipends (see: the Swann Summer Scholarship), calls for conference papers/readings, chances to teach Creative Writing (both to undergrads at FAU and in the form of community workshops), and invitations to work on Swamp Ape Review, the MFA’s national literary journal, visitations by renowned writers (see: The Sanders Writers-in-Residence) and agents. My advice to you is to attend, apply, and participate. Many of us will not again have such easy access to so many professional opportunities post-graduation.

3. Start Thinking About Your Thesis, Now

When I first got to FAU, I had no idea what I was planning to write for my book-length thesis project. That’s okay, most of us didn’t. The sooner, however, you can come to a decision on this, the sooner you can start working on it; and the more time you have to work on it, the stronger and more realized your thesis will be. This might sound obvious, but I think it’s worth explicitly pointing out. This should not be a source of stress for you, though, especially not in your first semester, and you won’t want to tether yourself to one idea too early on. Be flexible. Throw ideas against the wall, try some out, see if they stick. Some won’t, and that’s okay, you’ve weeded those out. Pick a topic or a framework that speaks to your individual strengths as a writer, challenges you, and will sustain your interest for two-to-three years. Again, don’t fret if you don’t have a clue now, but be looking for clues as you write and read and workshop.

Side note: try to take classes with as many different faculty members as possible. When it comes time to choose your committee, you’ll want to have an idea of what kind of writer you are, which professors your work seems to speak to, and which professors will give you the kind of feedback you find the most useful. The people you ask to be on your thesis committee should, like much of writing, be a matter of audience.

3. Forge Friendships and Concoct Community

The stereotypical writer is often portrayed as a more introverted individual, as writing is so often a solitary task. This may or may not apply to you. Either way, I encourage you to be open to developing relationships with others in the program, both personally and professionally. A friend and I sometimes refer to this as the “constant workshop,” as many of our conversations wind up becoming discussions of the pieces we’ve been working on lately.

Some of the most useful feedback I’ve ever received has been given to me at the bar in casual conversation. The possibility of finding lifelong friendships and familiar readers here is very real. This is a truly priceless accident of the MFA program.

These next three years will pass by swiftly. You’ll attend your first day of workshop and, the next thing you know, you’ll be writing an advice column to a group of incoming MFAs you’ll never meet. So make the most of it—be prepared to put in many long nights of hard work, pursue every opportunity that comes your way, and have fun writing—experiment, try new things, augment and obliterate any and all boundaries you may have in how you approach your work. You will not become a writer upon the completion of this degree. You are a writer as long as you’re writing.

Be well, be good, be great, enjoy,

Dustin J. DiPaulo

Dustin J. DiPaulo received his MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University in 2018. He currently lives in South Florida and has no clue where he’ll be in a month from now, but is oddly at peace with this. 

Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously

Paul Lisicky inadvertently broke the ice with our workshop. As usual, we shifted in our seats before the workshop began, nervously making small talk with one another in order to prove we weren’t uncomfortable, wouldn’t try too hard or be dorkily overeager for this year’s Sanders Writer-in-Residence. After launching into the short reading he passed around the room, he realized we hadn’t introduced ourselves.

“Oh my gosh!” he said, bringing his hands to his head. “And now it’s so awkward.”

The week continued like that — valuable literary lessons of how to use small frames to create a narrative, how to use music in writing, delivered with honesty and self-deprecating humor. No posturing or formulaic responses.

Lisicky even seemed to enjoy his time with us. When we would thank him for delivering such thoughtful workshop plans, he’d say, “You’re all energizing me!” He even came out for post-workshop drinks with us, patiently answering questions about MFA programs and agents, putting up with graduate student humor, and posting a picture of our group on his personal Instagram. He shared more time than he was required to, admitted when he didn’t know the answer to a question, and always spoke with joy and energy.

In writing workshops, I learn as much about the leader’s personality as I do about the writing principles they’re teaching.These writing lessons will nudge my poetry and prose a few steps in a new direction, and certainly the sustained, intense concentration on writing for a full week brings me renewed motivation to just sit down each day and write. But I mostly remember how each workshop was led.

Lisicky reminded me about the value of joy, enthusiasm, generosity, and humility. Here is a list of what I’ve learned in grad school:

1. Every time you don’t know something, admit it.
2. Always bring food to 7-10 p.m. classes.
3. If you’re suffering imposter syndrome, know that almost everyone else is, too.
4. Look for the courage to take your writing seriously.
5. While teaching and course work are important, don’t use them as excuses not to write.
6. Enjoy every 2 p.m. grocery shopping trip.
7. When you’re sleep deprived but have a mountain of work, sleep before you work.
8. Physical health is tightly braided with mental health, and both are tied to creativity.
9. Don’t take your writing so seriously that it doesn’t sound like you or makes you afraid to fail.
10. Experiment with your writing for fun.
11. You don’t have to know now what you want to do for a day job.
12. It’s OK to stay home on a Friday night.
13. If you want to be friends with someone, consider making the first move.
14. Read work that inspires you and draws you outside your comfort zone.
15. Enjoy the gift of time to focus on writing.

Kathleen Martin is an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University. Her work is forthcoming in Gulf Stream Literary Magazine.

Framing, Compression, Ongoingness

When Paul Lisicky visited our campus in March, we learned to slow words.

The timing was definitely ironic: Paul visited us the week before we launched our first Swamp Ape Review print issue and hosted a panel at AWP Tampa, the week theses were due (for third-year students), and the week before spring break (aka midterms). Adding a daily, 2-hour workshop to the week was, on paper, daunting. Yet to walk into the classroom with Paul on day one was to enter a literary (Vinyasa) yoga class. He’s brilliant, greeted us warmly and spoke with measured words in a way that invited us to pay attention. He is kind, reflective, and a true teacher—someone who is engaged and thinking about how to help his students learn. The way he respected our pieces—really assumed that every choice we'd made was intentional and should be considered—changed the way I will teach in the future, and increased the respect I give to my own work. In the midst of so much feedback from all our classes, and so much self-doubt as writers, he reminded us that what we are doing is a weighty thing, important.

A few days into workshop, several themes emerged for the week: framing, compression, ongoingness. We studied graphic novel excerpts from Thi Bui's memoir, The Best We Could Do, and analyzed photograph-like progressions of prose from D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land. At the end of each discussion, Paul gave us a prompt that generated some of our best work; I have known several of my writing peers for three years now, others for two years, or six months, and I read writing from each of them that was in some way a departure from what they’d done in the past.

That growth is a testament to the energy Paul brought to campus. A workshop like this is a brief encounter... we get 10 hours with this person (though in Paul's case, because he was generous, we also spent long hours at local bars or the Living Room Theatre talking about agents and publishing and craft, relieving our hands of pencils and laptops for sweating glasses of beer). Our teachers instruct us well day in and day out in this program, but the Sanders Writer-in-Residence workshop each spring is by nature a different experience; it feels like a secret society, meeting together in a small group of 10 for the week, our work not privy to our usual classmates and professors. It is a tightly framed experience, a workshop compression.

And compression, as we all know, tends to produce something (diamonds, fossils, overflow...) For me, the compressed energy went into my work. I spent the past year writing my first novel, so attending an intensive, week-long workshop focused on compression was an inversion. Last summer I spent 2-4 hours each day drafting long chapters that I later returned to and whittled down, or removed entirely. In Paul's workshop, we lingered on each word like poetry. The respect he gave to each line, each piece, made me reconsider how flippantly I sometimes write. I wanted to write slowly, lingeringly, because I knew how carefully my words would be attended by him and the writers in that room. I wrote one piece that was only 456 words long. Another that was 224. Yet each was more effective for its length. It was a reminder to me that my verbose style could change—that sometimes a new teacher, a new mind, can show you your range.

There is an ongoingness to writing, I think, in this: I may develop my voice, keep my preoccupations, or gravitate toward one style, but there is always room to encounter a new writer and watch my craft evolve. There is space to slow down, even during the busiest week of the term. And every time we do slow down, slow our words, perhaps that is when we most respect the language we use in service of a story that outlasts us.

Natalie Rowland is a graduating in May with her MFA in fiction and a novel manuscript (following rounds 1 and 2 of emotional drafting and revision). She’ll begin round 3 this summer. Wish her luck. 

Writing Concisely with Paul Lisicky

One of the best things about being in an MFA writing program is the opportunity to get a variety of eyes on your work. And so, when the applications for the Lawrence Sanders Writer-in-Residence workshop with fiction and nonfiction writer Paul Lisicky came out this year, I knew I had to sign up. Inwardly, though, I groaned. How was I expected to devote two hours per day for one straight week in the midst of my regular courseload, the odd jobs I work to make ends meet, and the fact that all staff members for our literary magazine Swamp Ape Review were one week ahead of the 2018 AWP Conference & Bookfair? Regardless, I sucked it up and submitted my application. And I’m so glad I did.

Not only was Paul down-to-Earth, but he created a space in which he challenged participants to reconsider structure, imagery, and form in ways I had never before conceptualized. Our week began with reading short pieces that utilized repetition and scaffolding. We studied writers like Nick Flynn, reading a segment from his memoir The Ticking is the Bomb, paying close attention to the chapters centered around the images presented in their titles. After a lively discussion of the day’s readings, Paul would then challenge us with short writing exercises. The form of the workshop was a welcome introduction to an experience I had never encountered - the chance to apply what we were learning in class in the moment. The week culminated in two days of bringing in short pieces that were image-centered, concise, and cohesively structured. Rather than focusing on critique, Paul created a space in which we expressly emphasized what was working in each of our pieces - a welcome break from the traditional workshop format!

One of the biggest challenges I face as a writer is writing concisely. Too often, I end up over-elaborating and over-explaining every plot detail I am trying to depict. Working with Paul was helpful because he exposed us to pieces in which the writers had the opposite approach. By trimming down the content, the themes of each piece shone through that much more strongly because diction was carefully chosen and frame was considered. It was a lesson I needed to learn and one I will apply to the pieces I currently am generating for my thesis.

Paul was gracious both in class with his feedback and outside of class with his time. His door was always open for those who wanted to meet with him one-on-one and we enjoyed congregating with him after class time, asking questions about the fellowships he’s received, his own experience in his MFA program, and how he approaches teaching creative writing. Our week working with Paul was certainly an influential one and an experience I will remember fondly in the years to come.

Originally a Metro Detroit native, Mary Mattingly now lives in South Florida. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in fiction at Florida Atlantic University, where she’s experimenting with form and trying (and failing) to keep her bar tabs low. Her work has previously been seen in the literary journal, Arcturus.

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.

Good Poets and Mystery Muses

Like all good poets, I have a notebook, in which the greater portion of used pages contain the unfinished. One-liners that hang from the top of otherwise vacant pages are in the majority, followed by varying lengths of fragmentary poems at different stages of development. Some of these are hopeless causes that no longer receive consideration. But there are a few that have become noteworthy thorns in my side. These will not rest or give me rest until they are complete.

One of these restless poems is of a man I saw only once. I saw him while parked at a Loves gas station in a smaller than usual rural Oklahoma town, and immediately he became a poem in the making. He was one of my firsts, the first subject outside my familiar realm of existence, my first attempt at characterizing someone I knew nothing about. He puzzled me, and I knew instantly that he would continue to do so until I had done him justice. But what type of poem was he to be? And what do I say about a man I don’t know? For days and weeks following my sighting I carried this man around in my memory until fear of him fading without me permanently sketching his portrait forced my hand. So strong was the need to pin him down and figure him out that he consumed my days and commandeered my nights. But the question remained: What do I say about a man I do not know? I started with what I saw:

                                                He rested his bike and his back

against the wall, a pattern of

bricks, beneath

a sprawling sign that read:

Love’s Country Store.

Thus, I began what would prove to be one of the most testing pieces I have ever written. I knew what I saw and could easily describe the physical, the tangible. But I sensed more than I saw that evening. I sensed something that was not concrete, something I couldn’t easily pin to the page of a notebook. This detective-like gut feeling was as real as what I saw, only less visible. How do I convey what I saw and sensed? Both seemed equally important to the process of bringing this man to life on paper. I fiddled with the idea of fictionalizing him. Writers do it all the time, right? I mean, who would know? I would know, I conceded. It would be an injustice. I couldn’t. Like the Psalmist, I lamented, it is too high, I cannot attain to it.

So, I settled with what I wanted to know about him:

                                                I watched him with a longing to know

his thoughts, wanting to hear the

winding turns of his narrative…

He, my mystery muse, still haunts my thoughts. His unfinished poem awaits closure. And like all good poets who know that some poems cannot be rushed or forced into compliance, I hold his memory and wait for time to loosen the scales, hopeful that as they fall the hidden will be revealed and the man in my memory will be justly rendered.

                                                ... I searched

his face for a sign, a furrowing of the brows,

a subtle twitch of facial muscle,

evidence of life inside his dejected body.

But he was transfixed in his thoughts,

suspended in a state of delicate quandary,

a space more satisfying than the view

of trashcans and stained pavement.

Corrine is currently a first year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She is an international student from Jamaica who suffers from persistent homesickness.

There Should Be Voices in Your Head

I asked my characters why they speak to each other the way they do. They said,

“We don’t think about things before we say them.”

I erased a line of exposition from a previous paragraph and told my characters, but I think about everything before I write it down.

“Do you really though?”

I added a note to the margin of a previous page, she wouldn’t really react this way.

“She may not react that way, but she’s certainly thinking about it. We know, we asked her. She whispers instead of shouting when she’s upset and you have her there on that page yelling.”

I erased the line of dialogue and wrote, she whispered his name before she turned her back. She said, “I didn’t know.” As she walked, her dress brushed the floor, emptying the silence.

“Good, that’s good. But couldn’t it always be better?”

I put my hand to my forehead and resisted the urge to bang my temple against the page, so that the words would be imprinted on my cheek in pencil and I could show everyone how hard I’ve been working.

“Don’t think about the function. Think about the lyric. Listen for the music. Picture the sound in your mind, the sentence has to breathe like stars do, right before they fade.”

She whispered his name before she turned her back. She said, “You know I’m bad at conversation. I didn’t know you would be gone in three months.” As she walked, her dress brushed the floor, emptying the silence.

“Good enough,” they said.

--

I believe I read somewhere that dialogue should read like poetry. Characters do not always need to speak (to the same degree that some physical humans should not always speak). Therefore, when characters do talk, I make sure that their words have significant meaning in that they themselves are telling parts of their own story. Or, I make sure that their words benefit the exposition surrounding them, that the spoken words essentially sound ‘pretty’. At least this is what I try to do. Sometimes dialogue comes more naturally and therefore becomes something I have to cut repetitively in editing due to the fact that a lot of what people say is less important than what they do. I find this to be true for most of my characters as well.

With every line of dialogue I write, I try to pay attention to the line-by-line purpose. As an example, the characters above speak directly to me instead of speaking directly to my character. They are both demanding and specific. I, both as a writer and a character, do not always say anything back. Perhaps this is an exercise in getting purpose down onto the page without all of the excess, flowery language… perhaps I am simply hearing voices. Either way, dialogue, I think, can be a fun way to play with your characters. It can be a useful tool when addressing description, setting and atmosphere. For me personally, it's a really in-depth way to practice getting inside of my characters’ minds. This should make characters unique because no two characters are exactly the same, their voices should sound different as their minds work differently. Unless, of course, you are writing a story that involves two identical minds. In that case, I applaud your approach, question your sanity, and would like to read a copy.

I find that dialogue does not always have to serve a function. Instead, it brings the words on the page to life and sounds more like a rhythm, or lyric. It’s like that last piece to the puzzle, the outer edge or corner that only fits in a certain spot and deserves a lot of practice of placement. 

Emily White is a first-year MFA student currently trying to accomplish the daunting task of completing a story.