That Great Cathedral Space: My First Year Post-MFA, Part Two

“I don’t know. Emma as you see is the foundation

of my house. Toni is the perfume in the air.”

~ Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

Everyone believes they’re a writer until they realize the expenditure. It is only then that most (not all, but almost most) recognize that they were only pretending.

            I’ve found myself having to mistressize my writing. I’m forced to hide it away in my office (when the baby is napping and the wife is busy struggling to decide how to properly consume her own little crumb of free time), at work on my breaks, in the “super-secret” notepad app on my IPhone, and various writing journals I’ve covertly deployed throughout our townhouse. I hide it from friends. I hide it from family. Most importantly, I hide it from my wife because—in the event that we do have free time—she (as well as I, because I am the caring husband-type, despite what I’ve written beforehand) usually likes to spend it together, given that we never, ever, ever get any time alone. And there is where the legendary “rub” lies.

            For persons like myself who didn’t grow up with a whole lot, survival becomes a desperate game of shadow boxing against your environment/condition, because poverty behaves like a bully: every day slapping you across the face and kicking you in the solar plexus. You’re left with no choice but to develop an imaginary feud with it—a feud you learn to carry every single day of your life, for the duration—until it carries you out of that margin and into that great cathedral space that you can’t help but only imagine exists above it.

            Now, as it relates to writing and the writing life, this is an approach that the serious writer has to assume in order to survive. I’m not advising writers to approach writing with a combative attitude—save that for Call of Duty marathons online. I’m simply suggesting that an aggressive attitude can and will keep the keyboard, and you, alive. Let’s face it: this lovely game of ours, in its own twisted way, does function similarly to online battle games, save for one major difference: even though failure begets the same sort of figurative death, the aim is survival and not just mindless carnage.

            I’ve managed to lift myself out of that margin and into a better place, however, not without a few spells of knuckling-up. And even while I am more than happy with the situation I find myself in, I’m still not completely satisfied with it—not without the level of writing/professional success that I’ve come to expect out of myself. My wife, my daughter are the foundations of my life. However, writing will always be that lovely “perfume in the air.” It’s another little feud I’ll have to carry-on forever, but one what I’m willing to uphold at any and all costs.

            Why? Because a writer lives the way a shark does: we swim constantly and endlessly or else we float to the surface and die off. 

  

A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's MFA program, Michael J Pagan's work has appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, The Coachella Review, The Nervous Breakdown, CommuterLit, Gone Lawn other publications. He is a fiction reader for Burnside Review. He lives in Deerfield Beach with his wife and daughter where he continues work on his first poetry manuscript, With a Bullet, Sparrow Voices, along with his first stage play, PING. You can read his blog, The Elevator Room Company, here: thelevatoroomcompany.blogspot.com.

A New Year for new habits (good ones)

Writing is an act of pure discipline.  No one demands I transfer thoughts (hopefully significant) to paper or computer screen.  No one leans over my shoulder or paces around the table encouraging me or yelling at me to get it done. 

Due to the metamorphosis of thought into written language, the solitary process of writing requires an enormous amount of discipline.  We’re taking the already difficult attempt at communication, and then striving to construct a complex piece of literature.  As writers, our task lies in this evolution of communication.  Some people might say, “I write for myself.”  While this is a great starting point (and the only one I know of), the completed work should ideally be accessible to some sort of target audience. 

I’ve strayed from discussing my point about discipline, but I think my purpose behind writing should be revealed in order to provide a reason for developing fierce, and I mean fierce, discipline.  I recently finished Stephen King’s memoir about his life as a writer (thanks, Meg Mary, for lending me the book).  King states that to be a true writer, you must take that shit serious - you can’t tinker with it here and think about it there.  In his early years, every day after work he closed the door of the laundry room in his doublewide and wrote for four hours.  Door shut, alone in a room, balancing a typewriter on his lap, he worked while his wife (who has always supported him and is a published author in her own right) watched the children - he existed in a sphere of solitude and self-discipline (I don’t intend to sound sexist, for the women writers the husband can sit his ass in the other room watching the children and leave you to your work as well).  

During my first semester fiction workshop with Professor Furman, we read a book about Emerson on writing, and an Emerson quote stuck with me: "The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent."  To me, Emerson is stating that writing is an all or nothing endeavor, so to be a serious writer you can’t half-ass it.

I can be extremely undisciplined by nature, so striving for rigorous self-control can be a brick wall sometimes, but once I get that first sentence down, the brick wall begins to fade, thoughts connect, and I make sure to ride that momentum to at least 500 words.  Which to me is not near enough (and I don’t write 500 words a day, but when I can, I sure as hell do).  I think King remarked that he writes 2,000 words a day. 

I’m not saying we all have to be as prolific as Stephen King, but what we do is not what “normal” people do, therefore, we must be abnormal in our work ethic.  In order to become writers, I believe we must go beyond other peoples’ capabilities in terms of perseverance and work ethic. 

A few notable authors’ writing habits:

Maya Angelou - 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edits down to three or four pages in the evening.

Graham Greene - counted each word, and would stop for the day at 500, even if he were in the middle of a sentence.

James Joyce – “In the pantheon of great writers of the last century, Joyce looms large. And while more prolific writers set themselves a word or page limit, Joyce prided himself in taking his time with each sentence. A famous story has a friend asking Joyce in the street if he’d had a good day writing. Yes, Joyce replied happily. How much had he written? Three sentences, Joyce told him” (writetodone.com).  (Personally, I’d suggest writing more, we can’t all be James f-ing Joyce, nor should we be.)

Jack London - between 1,000 and 1,500 words each day.

Joyce Carol Oates – “I try to begin work as early as possible, 8:30 a.m., perhaps, and I try to work until past noon or 1 p.m. I try again to write in the evening. Much of my writing is ‘remembering’—I imagine scenes, entire chapters while running or walking—I am very dependent upon this meditative quiet time.”

Currently, Ben Hill Parham is an MFA - Fiction student and GTA of English composition in the FAU creative writing program.  He grew up in LaGrange, GA drinking beer around big fires.

From Grad Student to Assistant Professor, Episode One: Time Management

            After almost ten years of higher education—of interacting with faculty and observing them on a daily basis—this past semester, it was finally my turn. I love my job even more than I suspected I would, though being an assistant professor is much more than I ever imagined it would be: more fun, more challenging, more exciting, and, yes, more work. I've learned a lot over the past few months, including: most aspects of this career are truly great, departmental meetings are not fun and will take twice as long as they were supposed to, and time management is everything.

            Being a faculty member is a curious mix of freedom and obligation. The biggest thing to change for me this semester is the way that I look at, understand, and manage my time. In some respects, being an assistant professor affords me a tremendous amount of discretion regarding how I spend my time, which I love. The only hours that are truly spoken for are the ones that I spend in the classroom. However, teaching and time spent preparing to be in the classroom is just the tip of the academic iceberg. As a grad student, I never really thought about the job of a professor as being a 30-30-40 time split between teaching, service, and scholarship. As a new professor, however, finding a balance between the three has been essential.

            The way that I looked at my writing, both creative and scholarly, also changed when I started my job. The reality of the academic system is that as soon as you sign a contract, the promotion clock starts and everything you do becomes a quantifiable measure of your professional success. For me, this was actually a good thing because it made me block out time every day devoted to writing and sending out work, establishing a routine that I've struggled with in the past. I've also learned that designating time is a necessity, because  if you don't claim time for each thing that you want to accomplish, that time disappears.

            The service category was somewhat of a mystery to me when I began my job last August, and in hindsight I feel a little silly for worrying that there wouldn't be enough opportunities (ha!) for me to fulfill this requirement. Fear not, future professors—service opportunities abound. Committees and meetings are a fixture of the academic environment, and I had no idea how involved and time-consuming they can be. Though meetings themselves can be tedious, I ultimately really enjoyed the service-related work that I did this past semester, which included being on a job search committee, running an essay contest, and volunteering at events.

            My first semester as faculty was a wonderful experience. I get to teach thoughtful, dedicated students in a fun, dynamic environment, and I also get to pursue my own writing outside of the classroom. While the first semester learning curve was somewhat steep, and I certainly wouldn't mind a few more days of winter break, I'm very excited to have a job that I love and I'm looking forward to getting back to work.

Courtney Watson is an alumna of the FAU MFA program and an Assistant Professor of English at Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, Virginia. Her writing has recently been published in 100 Word Story, Into the Willows, The Inquisitive Eater, and more.

Quiet and Drudge

Offer your craft two hours a day. Twelve hours a week.

Easy peasy, but it doesn't always happen. The writing comes in gangly fits of productivity. So I was thinking: Why don't I have the focus to regularly perform this act that I spend all my time fussing about? Discipline. I'm bad at it. I added an oath: Exercise every single day for 100 days. The idea was that if I could make my body do the things it didn't feel like doing, then – in my writing cubby – I would know where the switch was, the bio-feedback leverage to pull so I would quit circling the act of sitting and writing and sit and write.

The project goes further than discipline. Of course people have already figured out the connectivity between physicality and artistic endeavor – Mishima – but the act of doing it differs from the concept in that one doesn't necessarily gain understanding. Perhaps it's because the processes call and respond to each other. With fitness – you can easily measure progress; numbers and time, but movement towards writing goals aren't so clear. Word counts don't always reflect progress. However, the number of variables in the actions are something like similar in so much as there are too many unknowns. As it was easier to write the second failed novel than the first one – you can do more pull ups than you could three weeks ago because you understand more of the weight you're trying to hold. Even if you're not altogether sure why it feels lighter - you know how to pull harder.

I've found that the quietness of simple labor can also bring about a clarity of artistic decision. Intrinsically, this quiet can't be reproduced at a laboratory-desk area; you have to mow the lawn or lift weights – hardcore open-eye meditation. Your body and most of your vision distracted – there's a good chance the chatter in your head-space will shut off. Out in the sun, moving the weight of myself and my giant, can-headphones – it's easy to enter a space isolated from the chatter of intellectual distraction – where you're not trying to think of anything except what you're physically doing. Fall off the push-up bar wrong and it's your teeth. Guaranteed time to not think about writing is a thing most of us who spend a good amount of our time thinking about writing should consider.

The writing life has more to it than writing, but for me – finding words seems to be a kinetic act.
This is not to suggest that process can function like an oil-well. There are days that the writing session fails too soon and not much happens. But you did it. You wrote. It's become another thing you do with your time. So when those big ideas come along – you'll be strong enough to reel them in. Your books will get written.

Jake Henson graduated from the MFA @ FAU in 2011. He is a writer, painter, and enthusiast making cool stuff in South Florida.