Have you wondered about the value of MFA programs or wanted to learn what the MFA candidates learn? Here’s an opportunity to receive enrichment from a recent MFA candidate’s experience–Anne has offered loads of links to journals and writers you will want to know about.

Sheila
I am pleased by the opportunity to talk with you, Anne. So many of us have heard now of low-residency MFA programs. What you learned is what many seek to learn. I plan on getting to questions about the MFA program as training for writers, but let’s start here: What genre do you write in?

Anne
I write poetry and essays. It might be more accurate to say memoir, but it helps me to think of it more broadly while I’m writing. I’m usually trying to focus on someone or something else when the memoir creeps in, and I try not to let it narrow the focus too much.

Sheila
That sounds like an interesting strategy. Please tell us more about it and about what you mean by the notion that the memoir creeps in without narrowing the focus.

Anne
Jim Heynen said something once that always stuck with me about writing “the ignored material of your life.” He was talking about writing fiction and populating your stories with peripheral characters from your own life, the way Chekov wrote characters he knew from his parents’ grocery store. It had never occurred to me to write about my peripheral characters in an essay, but when I tried, I found they gave me back experience that I typically overlooked. Maybe it was incomplete or ambiguous, and didn’t fit easily into a conventional story. Maybe it raised a lot of questions, or revealed someone I don’t fully recognize as me. Whatever the reasons, I’ve found that writing this way allows me to explore more of my interior life, instead of focusing always on  big events and “what happened.” The interior life is the heart of memoir, I think, and what separates it from mere autobiography.

Sheila
I love Jim Heynen’s stories about “the boys” he grew up with in the country. I can see that remembering the goings on among people, whether they are in your parents’ grocery store or a part of your social group can spark writing if you feel a connection to them.

Anne
Yes, if I’m writing about a person who interests me, the balance between looking inward and looking outward is more likely to come out right.  Maybe that’s not the case for everyone, but these seem to be my tendencies, and the wider focus is easier to work with than one that’s too narrow. When I err on the side of not enough self, I usually just need to add a line or two of description so the reader can visualize me in the scene.  But when I err on the side of too much self, the whole piece reads as self-absorbed and narcissistic, and I just have to start again from a different angle. There’s no fixing it.

Sheila
Appearing self-absorbed and narcissistic is just what we fear as memoir and personal essay writers, that’s for sure.  I find that often a writer thinks their work is self-absorbed just because it comes from their personal experience and they are afraid that readers will shake their heads and feel embarrassed or sorry for the author, yet the work actually speaks to others of all backgrounds and ages because it is so true to human experience. How is the writer to know what is self-absorbed and what is moving and of importance to be written? Any tips on how you discern the difference?

Anne
I think any material can be made interesting and relevant—it’s all about getting the perspective right. My level of discomfort while writing is usually a pretty good guide, though it’s a long process, full of trial and error (which is why I think it’s important to have honest friends, first readers, a writing group—someone who will give you a reality check when you need it). If the writing comes too easily, I’m probably skimming, not getting past anecdote, not paying attention to the real reasons I’m drawn to write that piece. If it’s too painful, I’m probably caught in a guilt loop, running over old ground in a way that won’t produce any new insights, so I’ve learned to be wary of that, too. There’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where I can acknowledge any pain, guilt or fear without letting it blot out the rest of the experience, and where I can acknowledge the limitations of that old self without shame. Unresolved shame tends to read as self-absorption—we write defensively, and that shuts the reader out. The defiant tone you find in popular memoirs by (mostly) young writers who detail all their bad behavior and then essentially shrug it off is also one I’d characterize as defensive. It invites you to admire their toughness but not to connect. Another common mistake is to be unreasonably hard on yourself, which only exasperates readers who are far more interested in the complexity of a situation and your responses to it. We don’t read to judge, we read to connect, but it can be hard to remember that when we’re writing about anything that makes us feel vulnerable. It always helps me to put a piece away for a while and then come back to it as a reader, to try to connect with the voice, the persona, and see where I feel that connection clearly and where I don’t. Usually it fades in and out like an underpowered radio signal—the moments that come through clearly are unmistakable, and the rest I just have to keep working on.

Sheila
Thanks for that, Anne. It’s important to figure out how to assess your own writing, even if it is also most usually responded to by writers in a writers’ group. We often edit out the best stuff in drafting because we can’t tell the difference between what is important to what we are discovering by writing and what is cathartic but not insightful.

Do you think that your writing changed because of your MFA studies? If so, what did teachers and/or classmates show you that caused a change?

Anne
I started writing poetry in a class at the UW Extension Program in 1992. I was an English major in college but I’d never studied writing, and I found it very challenging. I was trying to write the kind of lyric poem that really moved me, but I had a hard time relaxing into the non-linear, associative logic of that mode. I was also fighting a strong narrative impulse and I thought that just made me a bad poet, so I got pretty discouraged. Then in 2002, I took a nonfiction workshop with Judith Kitchen at the Centrum Summer Writers’ Conference, and discovered lyric essay. The form really worked for me, because it tapped into lyric and narrative impulses at the same time—you had the heightened attention to sound, rhythm and image, but you also had a story, or at least you could if you wanted to. I think the looseness of the definition was partly what attracted me. I wrote like a fiend all that week, and went home with several short essays.

When I told an artist friend about that experience—she’s a painter—she said, “You’ve found your medium!” I don’t think writers talk about “finding their genre” this way, but it’s part of the process for all artists—working through different media until you find the one that you intuitively know is right, that feels like it was made for you. My friend had gotten a degree in photography and only years later discovered her true medium was paint. I had such a gut reaction to writing those essays, the rightness of the form, that for the first time I thought I could write consistently and produce enough to make it in an MFA program.

Sheila
Had you published before the MFA program? Did you during it? After?

Anne
I published my first piece during the program. When Judith was editing her third anthology of short nonfiction,  (she co-edited two with Mary Paumier Jones, and one solo), she asked me to submit something I’d written in her workshop at Centrum, and I did. I was also putting together my application to the Rainier Writer’s Workshop—the low-residency MFA program that Judith Kitchen and Stan Rubin started in 2004—but I didn’t have enough prose pages for the writing sample, so I threw together a piece about my grandfather’s stories, and stuck that in. I’d been thinking about it for years. He told us he’d met Sitting Bull, and been a secret spy for the Navy, and fought packs of wild dogs on his paper route, all kinds of unbelievable things. Every conversation I ever had with him turned on these stories, but after he died no one in the family seemed to remember them the way I did. I was so rushed writing the piece that I didn’t think it could possibly be finished, so it surprised me when Judith said she was taking that one for the anthology. She liked it better than anything I’d sent her, and she was right, as usual. It was finished, but not overworked—a distinction I’m still working on recognizing.

I didn’t have time to send anything else out until I finished the program. It was really all I could do just to turn in my packets. Now I publish two or three pieces a year, but I don’t send work out as consistently or as often as I should, so I’m working on that, too.

Sheila
Are there some pieces you’ve written that are available online? Let me know the print magazines that have published them.

Anne
I have an essay in the Spring/Summer issue of Fugue online. I wrote it last year as a Jack Straw fellow, and there is a podcast of that essay online as well. I was also very fortunate to have to opportunity to record some poems with Elizabeth Austen for KUOW, and they’re available here at also here.

I’ve published in a few print magazines, too: Crab Creek Review, Colorado Review, and American Book Review. I have to admit I’m just as glad to publish online these days, because I think the work is more accessible to a wider audience. At the end of the day, I just want someone to read it!

Sheila
When you enrolled in Judith’s class at Centrum did you already realize that you would be applying to the Rainier Writer’s Workshop or did that happen as a result of a successful week of writing?

Anne
Oh, no—Rainier Writers’ Workshop didn’t exist yet, and at that point I thought it was too late for me to get an MFA. I’d only met one person who’d done a low-residency program and she was retired, so I didn’t assume they were for people like me. I was married and we had a two-year-old. We already ate a lot of frozen food and didn’t get enough sleep, so I could only imagine things would get much, much worse if I tried to go to graduate school. But I knew I wanted to keep writing like we were writing that week at Centrum. It was so energizing to be with other writers, and to have Judith’s feedback and encouragement. I’d never encountered a teacher like her before. She hardly knew us but she believed in us completely. It was clear she had high standards, so when she told us there was no reason we couldn’t write as well as anyone we admired, and found passages to praise in each of our pieces, we took her seriously. We dug deep and wrote harder. I was impressed by what the others wrote, and by the generosity of the group as we responded to each other’s work—but we were all just following Judith’s lead.

I thought if graduate school could be like that, I didn’t want to miss it. So I went to Judith at the end of the week and asked her, where could I apply to write this kind of nonfiction?  There weren’t a lot of options. Many of the low-residency programs didn’t offer nonfiction yet. The most well-known programs were in places like North Carolina and Vermont, and I wasn’t willing to travel that far with a toddler at home.  Judith said if I could wait a couple of years, there would be a new program here in the Northwest that would offer nonfiction. That was all she could tell me because she and Stan were still pulling the program together—I don’t know if they’d even finalized their agreement with PLU. That was OK with me—I could wait, and I was just happy to finally have a plan. I went home and had another baby and dreamed about this mystery program, and every so often I’d get a little update from Judith that said, “It’s still going to happen!” Two years later, I applied to the program and started with the first class in the summer of 2004, when our second daughter was 14 months old.

Sheila
Had there been a gap in your writing life before you took the Centrum workshop?

Anne
Many gaps! I wrote steadily for a couple of years after finishing the Certificate Program at UW. Some of us formed a weekly writing group and hired one of the instructors to lead it, so she gave us exercises and prompts, and led the critiques. That kept me going for a while. I got tired of workshopping poems while the ink was still wet, though—we got so focused on “fixing” this line or that word, I found there wasn’t much I could do with a poem after that. I was starting a freelance business around that time, too, and after working 50 or 60 hours a week writing Web content or editing business proposals, I didn’t have much energy for poems. I still went to writing conferences and took classes a few times a year, but there was a period of five or six years where I wasn’t writing as much as I wanted to.

Sheila
What prompted you to get started writing again?

Anne
I had post-partum depression after my first daughter was born in 1999, and my brain basically stopped working. I was so vague, I couldn’t make sense of a thought unless I wrote it down, so I started journaling. Ironically, I had tried and failed many times to keep a journal. It felt so awkward to talk to myself that way—I usually got frustrated after a few days and quit. This time it helped, so I kept at it, even though the writing made me squirm. It was naked and sad. The only words I had for what was happening to me came out of therapy—clunky, clinical jargon that I didn’t like to use. I just kept telling myself, “I never have to show this to anyone.” It was the first time I wrote out of need instead of desire, which felt strange but also kind of good. I had to work at not censoring myself, and that became the project, for a while. As I felt better, it got easier to write freely, without judgment, to just let it be whatever it was: rants, laments, thoughts, notes, ideas, plans, dreams. Eventually I started going back and editing a paragraph here and there, just for the pleasure of making a better sentence. That’s when I realized I’d finally moved beyond therapy and was writing again. It took a couple of years.

Sheila
Thank  you for telling us your story. I know there are many of us who are older than you who know the therapeutic value of finding what is at the bottom of our hearts and minds and I believe writing for publication is a step in that direction–not if you think about publication when you are writing but when an editor accepts your work. The fact that someone outside your own mind and heart has taken your experience in and learned from it or felt deeply because it, means you have grown and realized more about whatever caused you sit down and explore it through writing.

In your experience with your writing, what do you think the most important part of the MFA program was for you?

Anne
It really built my confidence. My mentors were all writers whose work I read and admired, and they gave my writing more serious attention than I thought it deserved. I expected tough criticism, and what I got—mostly—was encouragement. Not that they ignored the problems, but they tended to focus more on what was working. That approach really taught me to treat a draft as a draft, to see that the messiness and false starts and detours are necessary. And unimportant. The key is to find the places where the writing is strong and vivid; those are your guideposts to the next draft, which will keep you moving toward the piece you really want to write. You have to have enough faith in the process and in yourself to keep going, and that’s why their encouragement was so valuable to me.

Sheila
Yes! Responses can be both enthusiastic, interested and encouraging while still being perceptive about what a piece of writing still needs before it is fully manifest. Can you describe this kind of response–how  you were able to go beyond enjoying the enthusiastic readings your work received to learning what else your writing needed to reach the goals you set for it?

Anne
My mentors might point out specific lines, images, or scenes that worked for them, but mostly they gave me their reading experience as a kind of running commentary through the draft—noting where they felt confused, gratified, angry, loved a phrase, thought something rang false, etc. That was instructive as a method. I’d already learned to put a draft away for a while so it would be less familiar and I could read it with detachment. As I compared my mentors’ responses with my own, I started to see subtleties of tone and style I’d missed before, to recognize patterns, places I’d shy away where I needed to go deeper, shifts in language or tone that signaled fear or laziness, some kind of obstacle. For me, the phrase “of course” is usually a red flag—it comes out when I want to sound more sure than I am and that’s always worth examining. I also have a weakness for adverbs; I use too many of them when I’m trying to pump up the drama in a scene. Anytime I find myself trying to pump up the drama, I have to ask why. I use too many commas. My mentors’ feedback helped me recognize these kinds of tics and habits, and I got better at editing myself.

They also gave me their thoughts on how a draft might “open out” in a different direction, even into a different kind of piece. Sometimes I didn’t agree, but often they saw an impulse there that was limited by choices I’d made, that signaled I might be missing an opportunity, and that’s always worth examining, too. When the subconscious is engaged in the writing, you leave all kinds of clues for yourself in the language and images. These clues can suggest new directions and offer a way to shape the piece and the reader’s experience in surprising and satisfying ways. I learned to look at the places where the writing was strongest and try to use them as touchstones, not only in terms of artfulness but also vision—to hold onto a sense of what the piece aspired to, the fragile ideas not fully realized there, as I continued to work.

A draft can feel set in stone, and it’s easy to get caught up in editing and re-editing it when it would make more sense to start fresh, find a new angle of vision, and write another version. I remember how Kent Meyers’ talk about his writing process shocked me at the first MFA residency—he said he would finish the draft of a novel, put it on the shelf, then start again from a point somewhere in the middle of the story and write a completely new draft. (On a typewriter!) He does this many times over for each book. The story (memory, idea, impression) lives in your mind, he told us, not on the page. A draft is just one version of the many you could write. Put like that, it seems kind of obvious, but I still struggle to internalize that idea and revise accordingly. I mean, I struggle with all of it—writing is never easy! But the big difference for me pre- and post-MFA is this idea that a draft is just one version of the many you could write.

Sheila
Did being an MFA student alter the way you think about yourself as a writer?

Anne
It made me realize that I am a writer, regardless of how much I publish or what kind of recognition I get. It’s what I do. I panicked after graduation because I was so depleted that I couldn’t write and didn’t want to. The first month or so, I didn’t even have the focus to read, and I was afraid I’d be one of those people who get their degree and never write again. It happens. I was all gung-ho to edit my thesis manuscript and I just made a mess of everything I touched. So I went back to my notebook, and journaled, and eventually got going again. I think I’ll always need to write. But I understand now that there has to be a balance, some fallow time. I also need to replenish, to walk and read and daydream so I have something to bring to the page.

Sheila
Please tell us about your writing practice as it is now that you are post graduate school and post depletion. How do you go about replacing the ongoing circumstance of having mentors you admire respond enthusiastically to your writing?

Anne
I spent years trying to come up with the perfect schedule so I could write at the same time every day, or the same number of hours every day, but that never worked. Every day is different, so I just concentrate on making it a priority. I do though write most weekdays, while my kids are at school. I close the door to my office (a.k.a., the guest room) and turn off the phone. I try not to look at email, at least for the first hour or two. If I’m distracted thinking about other things I need to do, I figure out when I can deal with them later and then try to put them out of my mind. I set a timer for the tasks I don’t want to do. I don’t really like free-writing, but I get good drafts from it sometimes, so I can do it for 20 minutes. If I dread revising a really ugly paragraph, I can do that for 20 minutes too. I set an alarm so I can lose track of time without forgetting to pick anyone up at school at the end of the day, which I have been known to do.

I always have a lot of projects going, and sometimes I worry that it’s unwise to start new ones, because I’m very slow to finish anything. But the long trajectory works for me: I’m able to put a piece aside for weeks or months and then come back to it, having thought about it and journaled about it without looking at the draft, so it’s more in my head again. Maybe this is just how long it takes, or maybe this is how long it takes for me at this point in my life, and that will change. When I start comparing myself to other writers, I always reach a point of thinking: my pace is sustainable and maybe that’s all that matters right now. I just try to work steadily and believe it will all add up.

I send work to some of my MFA friends, and they send work to me—not on a regular basis, just whenever we feel like we need another set of eyes. We’ve gotten together now and then for writing retreats, and I love having the chance to write together and to share work. I just joined a writing group for poetry, which I’m very excited about. They’ve been together more than twenty years and are really wonderful poets, so I’m enjoying discussing work with them, and of course, it helps to have a deadline! (We meet monthly.) I’ve thought about finding a nonfiction group as well. When my kids were smaller, I worried about the time commitment—you have to do a lot more reading to prepare for a prose critique, usually around ten pages per person—but now I could probably manage it. It always helps to be accountable to someone.

Sheila
Before I let you go, Anne, can you give us a list of what you are reading now and of books you found helpful as a writer?

Anne
One book I’m very excited about lately is Eavan Boland’s A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet. She mixes memoir and criticism—it’s essentially a reading memoir that traces her own development as a young poet through some really insightful readings of other women poets. This hybrid form is one some of us were thinking about in the Rainier Writers’ Workshop and trying to figure out how to do. Boland is extremely good at writing concretely about the ephemeral, so she can chart the subtle shifts in her thinking, and her insights into other poets’ work feel both personal and accurate. For me, there are many moments of recognition, things I’ve felt but never been able to articulate. That’s the mark of great memoir and great criticism, so the book succeeds on both fronts.

Two books I read recently and loved were Marjorie Sandor’s The Late Interiors and Lia Purpura’s Rough Likeness. (They’re both on the Rainier Writers’ Workshop faculty; Lia was one of my mentors.) I’ve just started reading Judith Kitchen’s new collection, Half in Shade: Family, Photography and Fate. Her ability to “get beyond the edges of a photograph” in writing about them has always astonished me. She read many of these essays to us in classes and at residencies as she was working on them, and I’m thrilled to finally see them collected. Two books I reread often are A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean) and Speak, Memory (Vladimir Nabokov). All of these books inhabit different points on the spectrum between essay and memoir, but they’re all lyric, which is what really matters to me. I can read them over and over for the sheer tactile pleasure of the sentences, and they speak to a range of experience that no other language can touch—the personal, private, interior life. These are the books that inspire me.

Sheila
Tactile is an interesting word to use to describe a sentence. How does Nabokov use the sense of touch? Can you share a favorite sentence with us and describe the impact on you?

Anne
By tactile I mean that the way Nabokov invokes all the senses gives his sentences a pleasing texture—at least that’s how I experience them. Maybe another way to say it would be that all the sensory details create a physical impression, sentences that feel solid and sculptural. He had synaesthesia, which I understand as a “crossing of the senses.” A synesthete’s brain is wired so the stimulation of one sense causes the automatic and involuntary stimulation of another, and he makes use of this as a very effective technique in his writing, though I don’t doubt that it also mirrors the way he perceived the world.

He wrote very eloquently in Speak, Memory about his “colored hearing,” and the very specific associations he had with the sounds and shapes of letters of the alphabet:

The long a of the English alphabet…has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ivory. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites….Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound a shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mix of azure and mother-of-pearl…

Even in a description that’s mainly visual, other senses always figure:

…a chair of thin iron, with its spidery shadow lying beneath it a little to one side of center, or a pleasantly supercilious, although plainly psychopathic, rotatory sprinkler, with a private rainbow hanging in its spray above gemmed grass, spells a Parisian park…

This passage evokes temperature (cool), and atmosphere (bureaucratic, sterile, and unpredictable—this was Paris during the War, around 1940) and is overlaid with a kind of magical otherworldliness, which stems from Nabokov’s nostalgia for his son’s early years, which makes him “wish to remember every small park” they visited. That’s an incredible amount of information to pack into the description of a chair, a sprinkler, and some grass!

He even describes emotion in sensory terms, which feels accurate to me in that it’s at once concrete and abstract:

Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by the quality of my relief.

His description may not exactly match my experience of relief, but he puts it in terms that I can imagine, and so manages to share an experience that is, in fact, purely private. You can see why I learn something more every time I open that book.

Sheila
Thanks, Anne. All writers have got to learn to be sensitive readers and to go with what they feel a body connection to!Any ideas to share with those who won’t be able to participate in an MFA program but are serious about their writing?

Anne
Read everything. Study your favorite writers and try to figure out why their sentences work on you the way they do. Close reading is key to learning to edit your own work, and a large part of what you learn to do in an MFA program. Whether we were writing critical papers or discussing drafts in workshop, we were learning to do close readings of the work. Our mentors were giving us close readings of our own work in their comments. That’s a skill you can never hone enough.

Take classes whenever and wherever you can—if it sounds interesting, try it out. There are many ways to write, and exposure to a lot of different teachers will help you find what works for you. You’ll also meet other students of writing, and start to build your community. These are the friends with whom you can share work, start a writing group, and trade ideas about what to read and where to submit. In my experience, it takes a long time to find the people with whom you have a deep affinity, but it’s worth searching them out.

Also, go to readings. Buy books. Support the literary magazines. Join the larger community of writers and readers to preserve a place for literature in the culture. We need each other!

Sheila
Practical and sensitive advice! I love the way the writers in my small group online classes of five participants bond and offer one another close readings as do I. It is a special gift to give a writer.

Can you tell us about your current writing projects and where we might look to find your work?

Anne
I’m currently working on a collaboration with Seattle painter Ann Vandervelde, writing poems in response to a series of her paintings on environmental themes. It’s challenging, because although I like to write ekphrastic poems (poems that respond to art), I’ve never worked with pieces that are as abstract as Ann’s.  But that’s what’s fun about it, too—we just make it up as we go along.

Sheila
It is good to take note of the fun as well as the alive creativity of working in a way that allows you to make it up as you go along. That reminds me of how you said you worked when you were putting together the piece about your grandfather for your graduate school application. Following the energy is one way to find what is most vivid and fresh.

Thank you so much, Anne, for sharing your experiences with us and for your view into the writing life. I know Writing It Real members, though most often older than you, will resonate with your words about how necessary writing is to you. And we will be following those links to read (and hear) your words. Again, thank you so much.

Anne
Thank you, Sheila! It was a pleasure.