Hey there!
It’s been great discussing essays with those of you who join the Zoom meeting on Sunday mornings. I love it! I appreciate your company, your thoughts, your enthusiasm. Great ideas, insights, experience—you all bring so much to the hour.
Reading and writing go hand-in-hand like…
Like what? Help me out here.
Love and money? That’d be fun…sigh! Ha! If only, right?
Like, peanut butter and jelly, or toast and jam…? Both overused. Definitely. Our everyday similes, an easy reach, always in the cupboard.
Like beer and hot cakes? Sounds awesome! Though not a meal I’ve had in decades, since my 20s. I’m sure you all can come up with a few more, and better.
This past Sunday, it seems we were or are all essentially in agreement about how we responded to the three essays in question. It wasn’t our favorite set, for reasons we discussed. Later, I wondered if everyone truly felt the same way, or if the conversation swayed some of us?
In grad school writing workshops, we were required to take work home—we’d take home the pages of other grad students—and comment on them in writing, before coming back to workshop the following week. Then we’d bring our sheaf of pages back, and a famous, accomplished and insightful author would lead a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the work-in-progress, hopefully with clear suggestions for improvement. We’d go around the circle and all have a chance to speak, a requirement really, to contribute to discussion. In workshop, it always sounded as though there was a dominating opinion, with little push-back. But then a writer might go home and read the line-notes and letters from other students, written privately before workshop, and see how widely the responses ranged. That sense of being “on the same page,” in class, was fleeting.
When a writer like Joy Williams articulated an opinion with conviction, there weren’t a lot of grad students who would challenge her. We listened. Some echoed. I think it was great to listen to the ideas of authors who had accomplished tremendous things in a difficult industry. That’s why we were in grad school. But I also loved the notes on the page, writing them to others and reading the letters that came to me, at home, later.
We never have to agree on the essays in question, of course. It’s a conversation!
I love it when we’re in harmony, particularly when there’s work that seems to treat big concerns—including racism, mental health care, addiction, the medical industry, white privilege, police and major power imbalances— in ways that are perhaps lacking in integrity or otherwise letting an author forgo personal responsibility for events and shortcomings too readily. It seemed we all saw the shortcoming, the lack of really speaking to the larger cultural, structural, social problems.
It raises good questions.
In our own work, how do we navigate the leap from personal experience to social criticism? How do we move from describing events to unpacking big ideas? How do we find and articulate the meaning of experience, without shortcuts or resting too easy?
I appreciate you all.
Enjoy the day! Hope to see you next Sunday, online. Open invitation!
M