Immersed in Learning

I’m off to Los Angeles today for my master’s degree residency at Antioch University. It’s 10 days of seminars, lectures, workshops and readings, and while it’s exhausting, I am very much looking forward to engaging with other students and embracing the academic life. I’ve learned so much these past six months. I’m writing a memoir, and have had to dig deep within for insight and understanding. There was a time when I almost gave up. But with gentle encouragement and direction from my professor, I’m on the right track and feeling good about my progress.

As I wrote several months ago, I was stuck on how to structure the book when I first started the master’s program. One of the gifts I received in my first residency was the realization that there is no one, right, way to do this, and I didn’t have to have it all figured out. I could just write and the structure would come as it needed to, organically. Also, that experimentation was OK! It freed me to explore my experiences and reflect on them, plumbing them for meaning and depth.

Memoir is not a simple recounting of facts and happenings. It’s not an episodic account of events. It’s reflection on those events that allows the reader to come away with greater insight into the human condition. And perhaps some understanding of a universal truth the reader has experienced in his or her own life.

I have 18 months to go on this journey, and I am very enthusiastic for where it is taking me. It’s a two-year low-residency program, meaning I work from home during the six months between residencies. The professor/mentor is available by phone and online during that time. (If you’d like to know more, visit Antioch’s website.)

I’m switching from creative nonfiction to poetry for the coming six months, but will continue to work on the memoir. I also have a “field study” to complete, which is a project or internship with a non-profit organization of my own design. I’ll write more about that in coming days, and I’ll post here as often as I can over the residency. For now, wish me luck! I’m off to LA!

Last Call for Memoir Workshop

I have just one spot left in my workshop on memoir this Saturday. Are you writing a memoir? Do you know the best way to present the information? What is the story in your life? Join us this weekend for an exploration that will inspire and motivate you. See the workshops page for details.

Lessons Learned

I’ve discovered some surprising things about doing a master’s degree at this point in my life, which is to say, mid-life. First, I have had to slow down – way down – to focus on it, and that has been a blessing. Second, as I’ve slowed down, it’s opened up space for considering questions like, What is life? and, Why am I here?, and, What lessons should I learn from events that happened to me as a child?, and, How can I apply them to my life today?, and, finally, How can I make my life be more about service to others?

This is the third month of my first six-month “project period.” I am in a low-residency program through Antioch University, Los Angeles, and each project period follows a 10-day residency. So, every June and December I go to L.A. for 10 days, during which all the MFA in creative writing faculty and students gather for lectures, seminars, readings and workshops. At the end of the residency, you are assigned a faculty mentor (you get to submit a first, second and third choice), whom you work with for the subsequent five months.

My mentor is Donald Morrill, associate dean of graduate and continuing studies and the Dana Professor of English at the University of Tampa in Florida. He’s the author of four nonfiction books and two collections of poetry. While there are three core faculty on the L.A. campus, the faculty mentors for this program come from all over the country, as do the students. The five other students in my mentee group are from Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Nebraska and Illinois.

Each week we all check into an online forum to encourage each other and to discuss books we are reading as a group. Each month I send 20 pages of new writing and two book annotations to my professor and he responds with suggestions and comments. I am getting so much out of this already, including the realization that, as daunting as it seems, writing 20 pages of new material each month is doable. (I say that now, but it’s only the third month.) When I go back to Los Angeles in June for my residency, I’ll have completed 100 pages of my memoir. Also, I love reading the books I am about the craft of writing, and I’ll share some of my thoughts about them here as well.

One other aspect of this program that I really like is the opportunity to “genre jump.” As a creative writing student, you are asked to declare an emphasis. So, since I am writing a memoir, I am a creative nonfiction student. But one can choose to do one of the four project periods in another genre (the other two are fiction and poetry). So, in June I will genre jump into poetry for six months. My goal is to perfect enough of my poems (I’ve been writing poetry steadily for the past five years or so), to put together a collection to submit to a literary publisher. Then I will return to the memoir for the remaining year of the program.

There are other requirements of the MFA, which I’ll blog about next week. Meanwhile, you keep writing, and I’ll do the same.



Memoir: Not just a 'recital of events'

Tomorrow my second packet of writing and book annotations is due to my graduate school professor. Yikes! Earlier this week I was feeling energized and confident I could get another 10 pages written (for a total of 20 due). Today, I am struggling to piece together what seems a jumbled mass of images, memories, snippets of dialogue and characters.

I am writing about a childhood trauma – a car accident that nearly killed me when I was 5 – and trying to link it to decisions I made as an adult that turned out to be not so great. But going back to that time has proved difficult, if not painful. Trying to mine those memories for insights that will connect with others is the challenge. How did my experience affect my family? How I related to others? What others expected of me? How to weave all those pieces together?

In The Situation and the Story, the Art of Personal Essay, Vivian Gornick writes: “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

So, then, what have I come to say? I thought I knew, but every time I try to grasp it and write it down, it wisps away like a dandelion seed carried on the wind. It feels as if it’s there, under a sheet of thin ice, just out of reach. So, here I sit today, writing scenes, preparing dialogue, opening my veins. But I can’t seem to bring it forth.

Gornick, again: “The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement toward it – that counts.”

Aha! The “movement toward it.” That opens up the possibility, the potential, of connection. What did enduring 17 surgeries from ages 5 to 19 have to do with who I became? How has my adult insight at middle-age changed my understanding of those experiences, and how can I write that so that others can relate to it?

“…(M)emoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription,” Gornick says. “A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Trust in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required.”

Now, I’m moving toward it.

What is your experience in writing memoir? How did you approach it so that it did not become, as Gornick says, simply “a recital of actual events”?



Need Motivation to Write? Go Back to School!

“That’s an interesting idea,” my agent friend said.

Interesting, yes, and admittedly unusual. I had just explained to him that I decided to do a master of fine arts in creative writing program, primarily to force myself to finish the memoir I’ve been trying to write for three years. Over those years, I finished a first chapter and pieces of several other chapters, but hadn’t been able to find much traction, despite the urgings of another agent friend in New York who said he’d be interested in representing it.

I would tilt at it occasionally, but mostly I was drawn to the things that seemed more urgent at the moment: freelance projects and my book on publishing, housework, the needs of my teen-age daughter. All of those things seemed to constantly trump my effort to get to the one writing project I told myself (and everyone else) was my top priority.

What to do?  

I’m a deadline-driven writer, the product of more than 20 years of daily newspaper writing. I never missed a deadline then, and I haven’t missed a freelance deadline since. But giving myself my own deadline didn’t seem to work. So, a year ago I thought: I’ve always wanted to go back to school and get my master’s. Why not make my memoir my thesis?

With my daughter heading off to college last fall, it opened up the space and time I believed I could devote to a low-residency program. So I applied to Antioch University in Los Angeles, which is only 90 miles from my hometown of Santa Barbara.

Low-residency means I spend 10 days in LA every June and December, then work online and by email with a faculty mentor during the intervening months. A cousin in LA offered to let me stay with her during the residencies, which made a prolonged stay there affordable. So, I applied to Antioch’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and began the program in December. Antioch’s MFA was named one of the top five low-residency programs in the country by The Atlantic Monthly, so I’m in very good hands.

It’s been many years since I was a college student, and I found myself both overwhelmed and exhilarated by the residency. In many ways it was like a weeklong writers conference, where more than 100 students who are passionate about writing gather for workshops, lectures, seminars and readings by both students and well-known authors. After four days I wasn’t sure what day it was, but I loved every minute.

Now, I’m preparing my second submission of writing and book annotations for my professor. During the five months following each residency, I will work on specific project goals. I promised (signed a contract!) to write 20 pages of new material for my memoir every month. I also have to read two books and write annotations on them every month. I had to research how to write an extended annotation (like a book review, really). And there are several major papers and projects required over the course of the next two years in addition to the memoir work.

My next packet of material is due to my professor next week. I’m feeling a little panicked about it, but determined to get the writing done. My first month’s material included most of what I had already written. Now I’ve got to come up with new writing. I have to. That’s the key. And I will. Because I haven’t missed a deadline yet.

I’m going to blog every week from now on about my progress, and also about what’s happening in the publishing and writing world. Stay tuned! And let me know if you’ve employed any unusual methods to force yourself to work on a long-term project.