Why Workshop

(a recent talk I gave at The Bennington Writing Seminars)

What is at the heart of workshop and what even is workshop? A place of worship? A confessional box? A crying room? A hospital? A womb? A therapist office? A sinkhole? A museum? A trash can?

We could, of course, workshop what is workshop. Tear it to shreds. Glorify its potential. I spoke to workshop this morning and asked it if it would stand here beside me while we asked what it could do, what it should do, what it wants to do but isn’t yet doing. I asked workshop if I could xerox it, pass it around the room, so we could write our ideas about it in its margins. So that we could cross out some of its weaker lines. It said it would think about it. I told it we would leave the door to the auditorium open.

When the writer brings her stories and poems into workshop should she disappear? Replace her body with the page? And why do we drag our poems and stories and essays into workshop anyway? To air them out. To rescue and repair? To be given a prescription for its spreading rash? To heal our writing from its loneliness? What are we after and what are we given back?

On the first day of workshop when I was in graduate school, our visiting professor walked in, put a small grayish bag down on the middle of the table, told us her father had just died, and those were his ashes. I don’t remember finding this odd. I remember thinking she was sad and missed her father. I don’t remember any of us, after the workshop, remarking on the dead gray father in the small bag. She told us her fathers ashes weighed exactly how much he weighed as a newborn.

We didn’t go around the room or introduce ourselves or talk about workshop expectations. She handed out no syllabus. Mostly our professor spent the first workshop disparaging the law that keeps us from keeping the whole (un-cremated) bones of our loved ones in our house. The whole skeleton, leaning up against (I imagined) the living room wall. If we inherit anything from our loved ones shouldn’t it be at the very least their bones? She wanted her father’s bones and had to settle for his ashes instead.

For me what is weirder than this story is that every writing workshop doesn’t begin like this. The material we begin with is so raw why shouldn’t the baby teeth of our children or the ashes of our fathers accompany us to workshop? Why shouldn’t we critique with a lock of our mother’s hair around our necks?

I googled “can I keep a human skeleton in my house?” Turns out no. I think I knew this already, but it’s always good to check. She was right. It’s against the law. We are not allowed to possess each other’s remains unless it’s in the form of ashes. We are not allowed to possess each other’s remains unless it’s in the form of ashes. (Sometimes it’s good to say something three times just in case it is a spell).

After I had my first son Noah, I took one semester off teaching poetry (for practically nothing) at the University of Georgia. When I asked to return I was told they had nothing for me anymore. Nothing plus nothing. I counted it all up. I loved the classroom, and I missed the classroom, and I knew I was a good teacher. I sniffed the head of my newborn and cried and when I was done crying I decided to build my own writing workshop. I would walk around my town with a small bullhorn calling out writing classes for sale, writing classes for sale. Surely someone would sign up. Surely someone in my town had a story they’d like to tell and didn’t yet know how to tell it.

I hired a man, let’s call him “Names” for the sake of anonymity, to renovate my garage and turn it into a writing workshop. Half his work was beautiful. He exposed the beams, and let in the light. He painted the old cement floor a shade called The Dreams of Mermaids. The other half of his work involved plumbing. “No problem,” he told me. When he spoke of the toilet he referred to it as a commode. For some reason this led me to believe I was in very good hands. I trusted him though I knew he wasn’t a trustworthy man. I live in a small town and already knew things about him, but I tried to forget the things I knew because I so desperately wanted the workshop to be beautiful. And I wanted the workshop to work. One thing, I reminded myself, had nothing to do with the other. But it does. Everything has everything to do with everything else. Everything has to do with the other. With my credit card he kept going back to the hardware store for more and more pipes. He kept disappearing under my house, and emerging caked and baffled. Our water began to smell like glue and dirt. To make a long story short, he built a whole bathroom that didn’t work. Like something you might find in a dollhouse I guess, but person sized. He laid down all the tiles with the wrong grout, then tried to fix it by pouring three bottles of Clorox over everything and leaving the floor to seep overnight, and then to seep the next night, and the next night too. I asked him if the toilet would ever flush, and he looked at me like I had just asked him where god was or what happens after we die.

This went on for months.

I finally called a real plumber to check his work. Do you want to know what you don’t want to ever see a real plumber do? Emerge from under your house shaking his head muttering, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” He described the intricate web of pipes like some sort of imaginary road to nowhere, and when he described the pipes I imagined them leading all the way back to the first terrible poem I ever wrote. Nothing worked. He just kept shaking his head.

Names left me with $6000 worth of damage. His assistant (who had once been my dear friend, but that story is not this story (except is is)) gave me an old mirror as an apology. Unlike the entire bathroom, the mirror worked perfectly. When I looked into it I could see my own defeated reflection.

I hung an embroidery up in my workshop that read Everything Will be Okay. And then I wrote a story about Names whose name is not Names who I call King in the story. It’s called “You Are Hurting My Feelings.” The story was the only story cut from my collection WILD MILK.

Often my students will ask me about writing about other people. Is it moral, we all wonder. What is off limits? What is on? Sometimes I go with Anne Lamont who says we own everything that happens to us. “Tell your stories,” she says. “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Or as I now put it, if Names didn’t want me to write a story about him and then give this lecture he should’ve fessed up. Instead he puffed out his chest and got in my face in the way no one should ever get in the face of another. I thought he was going to hit me. My expectations, he insisted, were unreasonable. He told me the toilet might flush if I run the washing machine at the exact same time. He blamed the city. “Call the city of Athens,” he said. “It’s their goddamn fault. All their pipes are breaking.” When he said this all I wanted was for him to be gone and never to return. He was scaring me.

But instead of what is okay to write about and what is not okay to write about, I think the better question (with the better answer) goes something like this: What compels us to write? Why do we keep going back for more? When my son Noah was younger he obsessively took apart his toys. His favorite superheroes were often missing legs. Capes were torn off only to be replaced with little squares of gauze. He always wanted to look inside things. There is the superhero, but then there is what is inside the superhero, and then there is the superhero in pieces, and then pieces are missing, and then we go looking for those pieces and sometimes we find the pieces but sometimes we don’t. I once found Flash’s head in my makeup bag, and it reminded me narrative is never fixed. It’s an ongoing, moveable feast. We can all end up anywhere. In taking things apart my son was engaged in an endless study in composition. I want to see all the inside parts too. I don’t know what I’m thinking unless I write it down. I don’t know what I’m feeling unless I write it down, until I break off the arm and look inside. Or I write to keep myself from thinking and feeling too little. Writing increases my vulnerability to my vulnerabilities. It sharpens my focus. And when we sit in workshop and listen to each other read often what we have just – maybe even merely hours ago, days ago – written, we are experiencing each other in the most tender, fragile phase of creation. It’s like when god holds up a chicken and asks the angels “tree yet?” and the angels say “no still a chicken.” God needs those angels to check the work. I believe we need that too.

I should’ve gone under the house with Names and looked at the pipes, but I was too afraid, and I am not fluent in plumbing, and probably would not have been able to read what was there, but I should’ve at the very least looked.

As we began repairs on the workshop, I took the most solace in knowing the actual space of it began as a failure. It started off wrong as most good poems and stories do. Names wrote a whole poem with a toilet that couldn’t flush. It was the worst metaphor. We’d have to hold everything in. Or we’d have to fix it.

Once, when I was in workshop as an undergraduate I remember a tall, beautiful practically see-through student getting sick while we workshopped her poem which was written on strawberry-scented paper in bright pink cursive. The professor about this swirling hopeful poem was brutal and the rest of us echoed her brutality. At one point this student stood up, leaned against the wall, put the back of her hand on her forehead, and slid all the way down, crumpling like expensive paper. Our professor, without getting up, kicked a small trashcan in a perfect line towards her mouth into which she started vomiting. The professor never asked if she was okay. No one asked her if she was okay including me. I remember no one helping her. How did I not help her? I am ashamed of myself as a twenty-year-old thinking the poem should be bigger than the body. I am ashamed of myself for not being able to find anything of value in her words. There is always value if you look hard enough. I was mean and I wasn’t looking hard enough. The woman’s name, I remember, was Barbie.

I think about Barbie a lot. Someone should’ve helped her up. I should’ve helped her up.

When my son Noah was six he told me his friend – who is an only child – told him he once had a baby brother but the baby brother was hit by a car in a parking lot and died. The story isn’t true. He was, he told my son, holding his baby brother’s hand when this happened. The trauma of being alone for the boy was worse than his imaginary baby brother’s death. It’s like his childhood is a story or a poem he is writing, but he has no one there to read it, experience, it beside him as he is experiencing it. And so he invented a dead baby brother. A ghost workshop. An angel witness. An audience.

When my sons cried I would I hold them and say don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry until I realized I should say cry, cry, cry or I should just hold them and say nothing.

It is very difficult to witness each other in pain, but I believe one of the reasons we’re all in so much pain in the first place is because we don’t give enough witness to each other. Workshops are a good place to spill your guts, and then learn how to re-arrange the guts formally in lines or sentences, making certain that these lines or sentences still have on them the faint scent of some of those guts. I grew up in a lot of workshops where we were told to ignore the guts. No guts here. No crying allowed. Only thing of worth here is the poem born from nobody. Something, I’m sorry, happens before a poem happens. I prefer a workshop that leaves open the space to return to that something.

I’ve collected from writers some of the strangest thing they have ever experienced happening in a workshop as a student or a professor:

1) Literal smoke rising from typewriter in corner of room.

2) Student pulled out a box of action figures and started posing them on his desk during workshop.

3) Everyone started crying.

4) An instructor gave a student some feedback she didn’t like on a poem, and so she ate it.

5) One day a student came to a summer poetry workshop I was teaching with a tight rubber band stretched over the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks. The next day he came back to class without the rubber band, but with a line of deep red welts where the rubber band had been. A student asked him, “Jack, what happened to your rubber band?” He said, “What rubber band?” She said, “The rubber band you were wearing on your face yesterday.” He said, “I wasn’t wearing a rubber band on my face yesterday.”

6) A woman pulled an electric frying pan out of her bag and fried eggs in the middle of workshop, and then ate them

7) A woman removed her pants and started applying salve to a burn.

8) 45 minute conversation about what it might feel like to shit feathers

9) Two students got into an argument because one student said she saw an angel walking outside the classroom and another student said that it was actually HER angel that she saw outside the workshop, and the first student said it was her angel and the second student said no it was her angel and this went on for a long time.

In Samuel Beckett’s MOLLOY, Molloy who is in his mother’s room, cannot remember how he got there, cannot remember if is mother was dead when he arrived, or dead after, or even dead enough to bury. Molloy cannot remember his own name, has a thing for sucking stones and wants to establish the best way to distribute the sixteen sucking stones he has to suck among his four pockets so he sucks each stone equally. So no stone is sucked less than another stone.

Here is a small passage from Beckett’s MOLLOY and as I read think about how the stones and the sucking are a possible metaphor for how a workshop could run:

“Good. Now I can begin to suck. Watch me closely. I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat , suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the right way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on? There was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But deep down I didn’t give a tinker’s curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed ...

I have read and reread the sucking stone scene one thousand times, I think I have it memorized, and each time I think oh, this is workshop. You suck the stone, and then you put the stone back in your pocket but never the same pocket you retrieved it from. It’s a mathematical nightmare. It is about doubt (did I forget to suck one stone / have I sucked one stone too many times), and it is about procedure and order and pleasure. And it is about failure. It is about forgetting to remember and remembering to forget. But why stones? Stones are minerals pushed up from the earth’s core, as the earth’s crust grows and erodes. Stones are the earth’s heart of the matter. They come from the center. I am reminded of Lot’s Wife who turned to stone, well salt, a hard mineral, because as she fled Sodom she looked back, perhaps for her daughters, perhaps to see the city again, she turned back and looked like a writer looks, to remember for one last time, okay maybe to remember for all of time. Lot’s wife is left there, forever, looking back. It’s a heavy punishment for one last look. And as I listen to Molloy, and think why stones, what is he after, I imagine Molloy putting his mouth around Lot’s wife, and loosening her out of her petrified state, because I believe Molloy sucks to remember, because right after Molloy casts off the sucking as hopeless, after he says “the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed,” right after this Molloy begins to see black specks in the distance (like memory), like little black specks of letters he can use to write a story, and we begin to understand that this unbearable seemingly ridiculous strange maddening sucking brings Molloy to this: “not only did I see more clearly, but I had less difficulty saddling with a name the rare things I saw.”

“Not only did I see more clearly, but I had less difficulty saddling with a name the rare things I saw.”

This is why we workshop, revise, compose. This is why.

Maybe I should’ve hired Molloy to build my workshop. Or maybe I did.

Years ago a microburst tore through our neighborhood, taking down dozens of trees. A microburst is a small downdraft that moves in a way opposite to a tornado. They go through three stages in their cycle, the downburst, outburst, and cushion stages which sounds like phases a story or a poem or an essay might go through if each was weather. Our neighbor hired an artist to carve one of the fallen trees across the street from our house into a totem pole. Owl on top, Fox below her, and Snake below Fox. A little science, a little art, a little myth, a little gratitude, a little apology, a little thank you Mother Earth. I watched the artist carve, He stared first at the tree for a very long time. I watched him watch the tree, and then I watched him carve these stories into the tree, and yes the finished totem pole is beautiful, but what I find more beautiful is being in the storm, and being afraid, and all the trees falling down, and watching the tree people come to carefully remove the trees, and then watching the artist watch the tree, and then carve the tree, and watch the owl appear, and then the fox appear, and then the fox’s eyes appear, and then the eyes are slightly changed, revised, and then the snake appears, and what I find more beautiful than the finished totem pole which is incredibly beautiful is the story that lives inside the totem pole. My workshops should be like that. Maybe at the end you leave with a totem pole. You might even publish the totem pole. Maybe the totem pole is too heavy and you never take it home. I remember once thinking I should only ever enter workshop with the whole completed, perfect totem pole. That the storm, and the tree guys, and the damaged roof, and the fear should stay outside the workshop. But I think in workshop you should bring all that in. It gets crowded. And uncomfortable. As it should. It’s a way for us to possess each other’s remains (in more than the form of just ashes).

Fast-forward, there is a pandemic and my workshop is turned into a homeschooling classroom for my kids, and I am expelled to ZOOM, the glowing screen, and now writers from all over are zooming in from their houses, and in the background a husband walks by, a cat furs up the whole screen with her majestic tail, the screen goes black, is turned back on, mutes and unmutes, and just when I might be able to open my workshop again my house burns down and with it the workshop burns down too, and miraculously it isn’t Name’s fault. I have a bag of these ashes which I place in the middle of every workshop I now teach. This is a lie. The ZOOM screen flickers and now I can see everyone in their hazy element. If you would have once told me this would one day be one of my favorite ways to teach I would have never believed you. But there’s a lesson here too: You figure out how to make things work despite plague, despite fire. Workshop should be where you don’t give up. where you do the opposite of give up.

I asked my husband to send me a photo of the totem pole in our neighbor’s yard so I could show you all. “Bad news,” he texted. “It rotted, and they pulled it out.” Shit, I thought, there goes my metaphor. Instead of the totem pole he sends me a photo of a large hole where the totem pole once was. I zoom in on the hole and realize that might be a good place to workshop too. I think if we really tried hard we could all fit inside that hole. We can all sit in a circle inside that hole where the tree broke, where what remained of the tree was carved into a story, and where the whole story rotted and was pulled out at the roots. I’ll go inside the hole first. Everyone else follow. Don’t be afraid. We’ll sit in a circle, and talk about what we want to write, and what we think we can never do but must. I’ll go first. We’ll go one by one.

But really, at the end of all this, all I can say with total certainty is that we should’ve helped Barbie up.