I love workshops.
They have been a part of my creative process… forever. The structure of a workshop, pace-setting by peers, deadlines, feedback, sense of an audience, and face-to-face human time, has been vital to me doing anything. Getting anywhere. Publishing my fifty stories and handful of novellas.
I am a profoundly lazy day-dreamy person. I need an office to make me work, but of course, as a writer you have to build that office from what you have available.
But workshops have shelf-lives; people come and go. There’s drama. Writers are odd, and some of us are toxic and keeping a group workable is a hard and thankless job.
The group I inherited in the 90s broke up after my Clarion, in a mix of personal and professional conflicts. I miss some of those people to this day. And for a time, I was the leader. Writing the most. Talking the most. Hosting the group.
Some of us are no longer on speaking terms. One I still workshop with. Another is a pen pal.
Writing relationships are like this. I guess all human relationships fall into these categories now. Non-people. Facetime people. People as texts, mails, and maybe the occasional voice or video call.
I love the workshop, every workshop I’m in, but as I reach this point in my career, what is the best use of my time? Peer group workshopping? Writing on my own and freelancing in an unrelated field, to make some cash?
Or writing and teaching?
The only professional writers I know have told me this about teaching.
Don’t do it. Full stop. You’ll write much, much less. Your career will be derailed forever and you will be doomed. You do remember how lazy you are, right?
A writer I know, a pro novelist, said this:
There will be one student in every class who will suck the joy from your body the way the salt vampire drained red-shirts on Star Trek. You’ll end up with painful aching extraction rings all over you psych. You will embody, all that is wrong with writing and publishing and teaching and perhaps, all humanity, to this guy–and it will be a guy– who will explain this to everyone trapped in your classroom. This is why he signed up for the course.
My academic friend, the Yale graduate philosopher with the single paper given at the international conference, gave up on academia because he didn’t’ want to have to rely on money from home to live indoors. Also, he couldn’t do sex work. Many Ph.Ds in the humanities rely on sex-work to live indoors while they teach survey courses to freshmen.
A Clarion teacher I chatted with recently mentioned not making a living with their writing / teaching combo career. Top of the field person.
But as I stare down the barrel of my approaching fifty-seventh birthday, I find myself dreaming about it. Listening and lecturing and moderating. Doing the workshop stuff I do in a slightly different way.
My parents were both college professors. Maybe it’s in my blood.
But… nothing in fiction has come naturally for me. Workshops made my own writing visible. Workshops revealed the beating heart of fiction. Workshops allowed me to see a story and the words on the page in a kind of double vision, as a continuous waking dream and as a series of abstract squiggles, reams of disorderly code designed for a fault tolerant information processing platform made of meat.
Increasingly, as I have struggled to become a more commercial writer, the sacred, holy quality of the work, the meaning of it, and its relationship to the meaning of my own life, has taken center stage in my own creative process.
Fucking me up, big time.
Other than the family which no longer needs my undivided attention, there is nothing else in this world more important to me than stories. Other writers stuff. Established writers. Aspiring struggling writers. My own efforts.
How do I put that list in order?
I have to figure this out.
