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jhameiaI follow rattlemag on Twitter so even though I'm not great with poetry I at least get a sampling, and I do like what I see at Rattle quite a bit. Yesterday this poem went up: "Poetry Workshop"
Since I'm now VP of the Malaysian Writers Society, I'm also now adminning the Malaysian Writers Community Facebook Group. And between me, the Chair, the Treasurer, AND the Secretary, we've all been low-key ignoring the group because, well, with 5k members, it's a bit of a shitshow at times. The previous admins were laissez-faire when it came to politicised discussions, and people sort of use the group as a self-promotional space and on occasion they plonk random reviews of their work there, or their own writing.
Most people in the latter category are new to writing, or are slowly coming back to writing. They often write a form of creative nonfiction, or poetry, and on occasion fiction. There's usually a kind of stream of consciousness tone to the writing. They have no sense of structure, and I often find them incoherent.
I find a lot of poetry incoherent because my brain is usually in a mode where I want things I read to "make sense," and while I did use to read and write a lot of poetry, I've kind of lost that sense of connection to poetry. Especially after I started doing more coping with my depression--a lot of my coping methods have me very methodically compartmentalising and interrogating my feelings in order to deal with them, or at least to silence the intrusive thoughts. It takes a lot for a poem or freewriting piece to get me feeling anything, and it took me a long time to really understand that poetry is less about coherence and more about emotional immersion, and that rarely happens.
And I did use to use writing forums as a space to share the writing I produced while dealing with my feelings and my depression. When I re-read my poems of yore, I don't really see a writer who was trying to attain any level of craft, but more someone who wanted acknowledgement. I had a lot of feelings that I wanted seen, and to write it in poetry was to have them seen without feeling like I had just forced someone into a one-on-one emotional vomit session. And in the forum I posted them on, I was considered a "good writer" and now I question if I really had been. I don't think I had been a "good writer," per se, and people voted for me as such because I was prolific and also very active in responding to other people's writing, treating their similarly confessional or experimental work as objective pieces of art. Writing was a way of being visible without being vulnerable.
I notice that I stopped writing this kind of creative confessional poetry when I started journaling more, and finding more friends who had similar mental illnesses that we could take about and share.
Which brings me back to the Malaysian Writers Community and what I am struggling with when I see these works. On one hand, I never get the feeling that these posters want to improve their craft, but rather they start the writing as a way of expressing something inside that they could use therapy for. Because they're doing it just for expression, I don't understand what it would mean to be "constructive" because very often, there is little to praise in the writing. I don't think I could say anything that would actually be useful to them aside from "keep writing." On the other hand, I don't want to tell them to just go to therapy because local therapists aren't really a thing, and if they're anything like I was back in my early days, they aren't interested in therapy.
On my third robot hand, I don't want to leave these posts alone because I don't want the FB group to be treated as a personal journal with a built in audience. That's not what most folks join the group for, and so that's not what I want to encourage. On my fourth centaur hoof, I don't want to discourage them from writing--if this is the outlet they've chosen, then I respect that, and I want them to keep at it. On my fifth tentacle, I can't think of very many online spaces or communities specifically for this kind of writing, which uses the form of creative writing as a shield against vulnerability, with the inherent, unspoken understanding that this is actually confessional writing that is seeking validation.
At AWP '19 (wow! so long ago) I attend a very illuminating panel on alternative ways to workshop, and one of the panelists spoke about how he had to teach a fiction course at a POC-dominant fine arts school. He had a couple of challenges: to adapt the workshop approach to fit what the students expected, and make sure that the workshop was able to make space for the minority perspectives of the students. The regular writing workshop model, however, doesn't prioritise the minority perspective--it's mostly a kind of mob rule against the creative, very prescriptive, and the fact that the person being workshopped has to sit there and silently take it was kind of... not working.
In that school, students presented their project first, speaking about what they had done (or thought they had done) and what they had been trying to communicate/express in their work. The rest of the class had to listen to them first, and then respond to the presenter's specific questions. This gives the presenter the kind of feedback they usually want--is this thing working--and gives them a chance to explain the context the reader would need to understand the work.
I've been thinking about this a LOT. I've been in writing workshops where I watched assumptions made of my writing, and heard of many nightmare workshops where people in the dominant culture, white folks mostly, just focused on an inconsequential cultural point, or misunderstood the cultural nuances entirely to give a pretty useless reading. I know there are posts out there on making the most of our beta readers, and part of which is giving them a set of questions to answer and prioritise in their reading. I wonder whether that would ever become standard in the workshop model, particularly at institutional level.
So I'm trying to adopt this approach in the FB group, asking folks to give context for the piece of writing they want feedback for, and to make them articulate what kind of feedback they want. I do worry that this isn't what they want, and that ultimately they just want to be told "nice writing" so they can move on with having been acknowledged, that my line of questioning is actually more discouraging.
rattlemag on Twitter so even though I'm not great with poetry I at least get a sampling, and I do like what I see at Rattle quite a bit. Yesterday this poem went up: "Poetry Workshop"Since I'm now VP of the Malaysian Writers Society, I'm also now adminning the Malaysian Writers Community Facebook Group. And between me, the Chair, the Treasurer, AND the Secretary, we've all been low-key ignoring the group because, well, with 5k members, it's a bit of a shitshow at times. The previous admins were laissez-faire when it came to politicised discussions, and people sort of use the group as a self-promotional space and on occasion they plonk random reviews of their work there, or their own writing.
Most people in the latter category are new to writing, or are slowly coming back to writing. They often write a form of creative nonfiction, or poetry, and on occasion fiction. There's usually a kind of stream of consciousness tone to the writing. They have no sense of structure, and I often find them incoherent.
I find a lot of poetry incoherent because my brain is usually in a mode where I want things I read to "make sense," and while I did use to read and write a lot of poetry, I've kind of lost that sense of connection to poetry. Especially after I started doing more coping with my depression--a lot of my coping methods have me very methodically compartmentalising and interrogating my feelings in order to deal with them, or at least to silence the intrusive thoughts. It takes a lot for a poem or freewriting piece to get me feeling anything, and it took me a long time to really understand that poetry is less about coherence and more about emotional immersion, and that rarely happens.
And I did use to use writing forums as a space to share the writing I produced while dealing with my feelings and my depression. When I re-read my poems of yore, I don't really see a writer who was trying to attain any level of craft, but more someone who wanted acknowledgement. I had a lot of feelings that I wanted seen, and to write it in poetry was to have them seen without feeling like I had just forced someone into a one-on-one emotional vomit session. And in the forum I posted them on, I was considered a "good writer" and now I question if I really had been. I don't think I had been a "good writer," per se, and people voted for me as such because I was prolific and also very active in responding to other people's writing, treating their similarly confessional or experimental work as objective pieces of art. Writing was a way of being visible without being vulnerable.
I notice that I stopped writing this kind of creative confessional poetry when I started journaling more, and finding more friends who had similar mental illnesses that we could take about and share.
Which brings me back to the Malaysian Writers Community and what I am struggling with when I see these works. On one hand, I never get the feeling that these posters want to improve their craft, but rather they start the writing as a way of expressing something inside that they could use therapy for. Because they're doing it just for expression, I don't understand what it would mean to be "constructive" because very often, there is little to praise in the writing. I don't think I could say anything that would actually be useful to them aside from "keep writing." On the other hand, I don't want to tell them to just go to therapy because local therapists aren't really a thing, and if they're anything like I was back in my early days, they aren't interested in therapy.
On my third robot hand, I don't want to leave these posts alone because I don't want the FB group to be treated as a personal journal with a built in audience. That's not what most folks join the group for, and so that's not what I want to encourage. On my fourth centaur hoof, I don't want to discourage them from writing--if this is the outlet they've chosen, then I respect that, and I want them to keep at it. On my fifth tentacle, I can't think of very many online spaces or communities specifically for this kind of writing, which uses the form of creative writing as a shield against vulnerability, with the inherent, unspoken understanding that this is actually confessional writing that is seeking validation.
At AWP '19 (wow! so long ago) I attend a very illuminating panel on alternative ways to workshop, and one of the panelists spoke about how he had to teach a fiction course at a POC-dominant fine arts school. He had a couple of challenges: to adapt the workshop approach to fit what the students expected, and make sure that the workshop was able to make space for the minority perspectives of the students. The regular writing workshop model, however, doesn't prioritise the minority perspective--it's mostly a kind of mob rule against the creative, very prescriptive, and the fact that the person being workshopped has to sit there and silently take it was kind of... not working.
In that school, students presented their project first, speaking about what they had done (or thought they had done) and what they had been trying to communicate/express in their work. The rest of the class had to listen to them first, and then respond to the presenter's specific questions. This gives the presenter the kind of feedback they usually want--is this thing working--and gives them a chance to explain the context the reader would need to understand the work.
I've been thinking about this a LOT. I've been in writing workshops where I watched assumptions made of my writing, and heard of many nightmare workshops where people in the dominant culture, white folks mostly, just focused on an inconsequential cultural point, or misunderstood the cultural nuances entirely to give a pretty useless reading. I know there are posts out there on making the most of our beta readers, and part of which is giving them a set of questions to answer and prioritise in their reading. I wonder whether that would ever become standard in the workshop model, particularly at institutional level.
So I'm trying to adopt this approach in the FB group, asking folks to give context for the piece of writing they want feedback for, and to make them articulate what kind of feedback they want. I do worry that this isn't what they want, and that ultimately they just want to be told "nice writing" so they can move on with having been acknowledged, that my line of questioning is actually more discouraging.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-01-17 10:33 pm (UTC)This is interesting; it has made me think about workshop dynamics a lot today. I can see a way this could be adapted to the workshops with which I'm familiar. The rest of the participants write their first-reading critiques as they go through the manuscript the first time, and give those critiques to the writer at the end of the session, so the writer gets those perspectives, which are helpful in knowing whether one has communicated what one meant to communicate to the uninformed reader. During the critique session itself, they don't bring up any of those critiques; they listen to the writer and then respond with the knowledge of what the writer intended.
Knowledge won't necessarily mean understanding, natch, and most workshops will contain some writers who are never going to be each others' readers. I am completely clueless about whether this would be as valuable to the FB group as it looks to me, but from the outside (culturally WAY outside, I know), it looks thoughtful, kind, and useful.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-01-26 05:56 pm (UTC)I'm really curious how your approach goes.
I imagine that, for some people, if they have to ask for a particular kind of response, then that response feels less authentic and meaningful to them.
Example A:
"Here is a poem I wrote"
"It's great!"
Example B:
"Here is a poem I wrote. I alternate between two different metaphors for love; does that feel jarring and disorienting or does it feel more like you are smoothly alternating between two different views of the same thing?"
"The alternation works really well -- I felt like I was being carried back and forth between two perspectives in a way that showed how both of them were true"
I personally would value B more because it is more specific, but I think there are people who really don't like having to ask for things and feel uncomfortable talking about what they want, and feel intuitively that other people should Just Know what to say/do so that everyone will be comfortable. And I figure those people would prefer A because it is less work for them, including less work trying to think from other people's point of view about what they might find interesting or confusing in a piece of creative work.
And thank you for sharing the Shipley poem.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-02-02 04:43 am (UTC)Option A I think is useful for folks who want "general impressions" and to see wide reactions, to assess "are people getting the impression I'm hoping they get." I know I've done it that way for that reason. But I also notice that it tends to be the option for newer writers still feeling their way around the writing thing. I don't want to look down on readers who prefer it but I find when they do, it tends to be very generic feedback, like, "I liked this." (That's it, that's all, lol) So I think it's useful for general validation! Which has less to do with craft, and which the poem speaks to a lot.