What I Think About Workshops in General
[Note: I wrote this little missive in my second year at ASFA. It's, admittedly, somewhat grandiose. But I stand behind the basic ideas it expresses.]
Dear Fellow Workshoppers:
There is a little green bug in its death throes on my desk. It has tiny, iridescent wings. It could be a mote, a speck of fabric or dust. But it’s not. It’s a little living thing and it’s almost spent its allotted appointment on this earth.
So it is with workshops: they, like the artists of which they’re comprised, are little green things with shimmering, paper-thin wings. Tender, light, mostly ignored.
They’re here and then they’re gone.
99.9% of all people have no idea what they are. If they even know they’re there.
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What does the supreme egotist do when someone accosts his intellect, art, validity? Nothing. Or maybe she giggles with an almost imperceptible glee.
All working artists find their way to some form of supreme egotism.
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Is it important to be read? Yes.
Is it important to be understood? Not necessarily.
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What is consensus to art? Death. Art is vital, provocative. A poem that gets a unanimous reading – one way or the other — is very likely a dead poem. The “Workshop Stamp of Approval” is a guilty pleasure, an immediate gratification. It wiggles and flaps its tiny, pretty wings as it dies upon the table.
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You will forget and forever lose the vast majority of everything you ever write here.
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Again:
You will forget and forever lose the vast majority of everything you ever write here.
It’s a simple fact. I don’t say that to make you sad. (Please say you’re not sad.) It’s a kind of freedom.
Point being: process trumps product. How is more important than what.
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What should I do? How should I fix it? Did you get the part about…? Did you like it?
These are doomed little green bugs.
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We are aesthetes. We like pretty things. Own it. It’s okay. Resist making a science of it. Delight in the mess it makes of sense and reason and the workaday world.
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Art inspires art. The critical impulse comes later, after, or sometimes not at all. Respond to art with art. Respond to what you read—everything you read, everything you experience—as the artist you are.
This is why it’s especially crucial to fully characterize your reading of work that resonates with you. In these moments, you enter into a conversation with yourself, you understand yourself more closely, more deeply by a fraction.
“There’s nothing wrong with this” is the deadest response because: it masquerades as support; it implies—both to your peer and to yourself—that what you love isn’t worth articulating, isn’t worth the effort of turning on the artist portion of your brain. It says “Ah, kindred spirit: I recognize you. Goodbye. You don’t need me. You are fine alone. I am fine alone. I have my special artistic place. Clearly you have yours. I will not swim around in you. That way I can be sure I won’t drown.”
Also it is dead because it furthers the myth of the “Workshop Stamp of Approval”—“Ah, kindred spirit: you have achieved that loftiest of goals—a piece of writing I cannot assail. Touché and adieu.”
This is crap.
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The dirty little secret of all workshops is that they’re largely a pain in the butt. I have taken them or taught them for most of my adult life and I cannot tell you what about them helps, what about them that’s good. I know I exist in them. I know that I’m a product of them. There’s some kind of weird inversion: their value comes when you start to transcend them. Maybe it’s the knowledge that you can write your way out of them. It is a race. It is a race to self-sufficiency.
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“I write for myself and strangers.”
— Gertrude Stein
Please don’t ever forget that you are writing for yourself and as many of the 6 billion strangers on the planet who will pay attention to you.
[FYI: The entire ASFA CW Department (including teachers) ≈ .0000000075 of the estimated global population. “Ah,” you say, “but I’m not writing for those in Swaziland or Singapore, nor the Maori peoples of New Zealand, or even the Basque separatists in Spain. There are scores of people I’m not writing to, for, or about. In fact, my ambitions can safely fit in the artistic cosmos of Birmingham’s metropolitan area.” In that case, the ASFA CW Department (including teachers) ≈ .0018 of that number, provided the Magic City’s reading public consists of a paltry 25,000 people. Which is to say: Even in that sad example, we ASFArtisans comprise less than two-tenths of one percent of your maximum total audience.]
Think large. Bring noise.
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The little green bug lies still upon its back. I will say that it is resting. Yes. It is resting.
