Writing Workshop Is Not Group Therapy

I'm delighted to have a guest post on Brevity's Nonfiction Blog called "Writing Workshop Is Not Group Therapy."

Here's the an excerpt: 

It's easy to read a memoir or essay and feel as though we know the author, even though all we really know is what the writer shared with us on the page. This false sense of familiarity is one thing when we read published work by authors we may never meet. But in a creative nonfiction workshop, this faux intimacy becomes a slippery slope.

We all know that writing workshop can be an emotionally charged environment to begin with. Add in stories of personal trauma, and you’ve got a veritable Slip'N Slide of intense moments and awkward interactions just waiting for you to lose your footing.

How can you keep your balance and avoid any more uncomfortable moments than necessary?

Make this your mantra:

Writing workshop is not group therapy.

(Say it with me.)

(And if it helps, you can sing it to the beat of MC Lars' "Hot Topic is Not Punk Rock.")

Don’t let a writing workshop turn into something it’s not meant to be. Here are some tips on how to stay grounded.

1) No problem solving—unless it relates to writing. Remember that you are in workshop to discuss the craft of writing and the world on the page. You aren’t there to coach a writer on how to heal from a traumatic childhood, a dance with addiction, or a spiritual crisis. You are not in workshop to help anyone slay their personal demons, unless those demons deal with writing better scenes, understanding narrative arc, or improving sentence rhythm.

Keep reading for all 7 tips on how to keep a writing workshop from spiralling into a group therapy session.

And as some readers have pointed out, these tips apply to any creative gathering in which the focus is meant to be on the art and craft of the work rather than the emotions and experiences of the creator. 

(p.s. Do you know Brevity Magazine? It's an online literary journal that publishes short nonfiction. I highly recommend it if you're a writer or reader of flash essays, one-moment memoirs, or any short creative nonfiction (CNF). The Brevity blog is a great resource for all kinds of things related to CNF.) 

Loquacious: "Contingency" by Jennifer Bowen Hicks

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

I love the mind and words of today's guest writer, Jennifer Bowen Hicks. Jen and I met in grad school, but it wasn't until my final on-campus residency that I spent much time with her. As I got to know her through her writing and our conversations, I came to respect her superb ability to think deeply and surprisingly about any number of topics. Jen has a lovely depth of spirit filigreed with a wry sense of humor. During a lecture she gave at VCFA, I found myself laughing aloud in a quiet room as she dead-panned some hilarious lines. (I briefly worried that I was being inappropriate until she thanked me, in an aside, for laughing at the joke.) As you'll see in her essay below, her mind makes fascinating connections and leaps, and her exquisite use of language seamlessly weaves together the various strands.

Contingency

By Jennifer Bowen Hicks

It's not the loveliest of words. It's not enamored, an Eastern Iowa hillside, open palm of a word with hints of amour. It's not malevolent, a word that's prettier than it ought to be. Contingency with its starched "t" smacks of paper stacks that have been nine-to-fived by a silk tie guy who knows Facts and enforces them with a red pen. Contingency both forebodes and plans; it's helpless and hubris. It's ________ in the event of____________, unless of course, _________.

If it's true for teenagers, it's also so for words: birds of a feather flock together, and contingency hangs with the likes of budget and contract and public affairs. Think: cost-benefit analysis, emergency medical plan, custody arrangements. I hate these things.

More to the point, I dislike uncertainty. Maybe it's because I was born into contingency, weighing 4 pounds and whimpering with my sad set of lungs. From the first breath my life was contingent on the next good breath (as all lives are, I suppose). Because tomorrow seemed tentative, my Catholic grandmother arranged for bedside baptism as a contingency against hell. I tell this story mostly for drama, because I turned out to be not half-dead, just a smaller than average screamer who needed her diapers cut in half until she could grow into them. But that pause! Before my mother and grandmother knew I would survive, they must have suffered joy mixed with trepidation. Hello, wail in the pitch of a brand new you, and imagine in that same greeting as far as anyone knew: Goodbye.

Maybe it's part of the bargain for every living-dying creature on this planet, but I feel I've spent my life saying Hello-Goodbye. My biggest complaint against new people and places is that they’re one too many, another one to lose. My parents divorced at an early age, and I never saw my father again; I never attended the same school for more than two years; my husband and I have hopped around the country so much we can box up a house and say farewell with our grumbling eyes closed. Now when I find a new friend, a knee-jerk dread enters simultaneously beside my delight. Will we move again? Will they? When my sons make me laugh with their dance moves or a funny joke, I feel equal parts joy and sorrow. What will their leaving look like someday? How final will it feel? Hello-Goodbye. My heart, in other words, makes contingency plans for losing what I love, even as I love it.

Poet Christian Wiman says contingency means "subject to chance.”"To me it means, "subject to change." A quicksilver state of unknowing. The electric second of quiet just before a dog bites. Wiman, who is dying of cancer, says, "Christ is contingency." Though I'm not Christian, I'm startled by the grace and courage of this assertion. The charged stillness, just before the shattering—in that waiting? —a holiness?

"What you must realize," Wiman says, "what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all." Wiman's contingency, inextricable from love and faith, is that there is no contingency.

Instead of reluctance, for a split second with a book in my hand, I allow awe. When Wiman's contingency tugs at my heartsleeve, I feel a flash of reverence. Wiman's contingency—just a word after all, a vessel—is imbued with a new spirit, his own. Such is the miracle of language. Post-Wiman, contingency, catches the corner of my eye as a container of light-refracted glass, less dog-bite pause, more grateful gasp. Wiman, facing his own death has been reborn before he’s even died, into a word. Contingency holds a piece of this poet who now labors in me, sanding softly the contours of my deepest aversion.

Dirk Wittenborn says, "We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you." This surely also must mean, “We are the sum of all words we have ever read; you change the words and the words change you." Wiman redefined one word—less shirt-and-tie, more light and paradox—and that word might just alter me. Hello-Goodbye: exactly and wow. Whether Christ is contingency I can't say, but I do believe while we're planning in semi-darkness for the sun to rise or cease—on a relationship or a market share or a day or a life—we can access permanence through our words. Our contingency against contingency is language itself, that humble tomb that holds so many births and resurrections.

** ** **
Jennifer Bowen Hicks teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Her work can be found in journals such as The Iowa Review, North American Review, Defunct, and others. She's received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board for her prison work and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize, and a Loft Mentor Series Award in Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she rears two children, too many hens, and occasional prose.

Loquacious: "The Diphthong 'Thang'" by Jodi Paloni

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

During the editing of this guest essay, Jodi Paloni told me, "I took out the parts you suggested and guess what I found? Sex!" This does not surprise me at all.

Let me explain. Jodi and I met in grad school, and it seemed like every reading we attended together inevitably featured someone (usually a man) reading a piece that involved a sex scene (usually badly written) or descriptions of the female form (usually vulgarly expressed). It became a running joke between us, and now we can't help but think of the other when we hear certain bawdy slang terms. Jodi mock-threatened to write a guest post in this same vein, but I'm pleased to say that she's done something delightful and not at all in bad taste: written a useful essay on the craft of writing with a fun and sexy flair. Jodi's short stories often center on the tension that occurs when innocence flirts with something darker, a penchant you'll see in the fantastic examples she created for this essay. Here's looking at you, diphthong, you sexy thang!  

The Diphthong "Thang"

By Jodi Paloni

Lately I am taken with words that sport the illustrious diphthong. Sounds kinda sexy, right? Because they are. A diphthong is a vowel team that creates a monosyllabic gliding, slippery sound, or simply stated: two vowels, one sound. Consider words like roil and embroil, enjoy and destroy, blouse and scout, pouch and slouch. Consider frowning clown, or even simpler words such as boy and out. They make your lips purse and curl and pucker.

They cause the tongue to slow down.

Take a word listed above and find a non-diphthong replacement. Roil: churn. Enjoy: delight. Blouse: shirt. Then think about how you want your word to heighten the landscape of your sentence and to what effect. Consider the following:

When the borrowed doll slipped from her hand into the muddy river, her stomach roiled.

When the borrowed doll slipped from hand into the muddy river, her stomach churned.

The word that fits best depends on the passage. Do you want the character's experience to linger in the slithering sounds of the word roil, as if a moment longer could prolong the denial of her consequences? Or do you want the character to face her mistake with an abrupt realization, an abruptness that the word churned, with its harsh and final sounds, conjures up?

Here's another:

He imagined the feel of the fabric buttons sliding through the narrow slits of her blouse, as if practicing the art of undressing would help to calm him when his actual opportunity arose.

Exchange the word blouse for shirt. Blouse creates a slow-moving, sensuous action, which is what this sentence is about. (It also alliterates with other words that have that same slow, sensuous feel: blossom, blowing, blood.) Shirt, on the other hand, implies, to me, an everyday quick-and-dirty that may take little imagination at all.

Or, consider a combination of sound-play:

She stepped from the river having rescued the filthy doll, her shirt clinging to her torso like the vines on Aunt Edith's house, the vines that twirled the ladder giving her nightly access to my room.

The hard sounds of the underlined words, stepped, rescued, twirled, nightly, deliver action. The passion of the current moment (no pun intended) suggests a future possibility in the dark of night. Torso, house, and access are the soft words here. Shirt keeps the movement tense and up-close. Exchange shirt for blouse, and slow it down. By playing around with both soft and hard sounds, you can push and pull, speed up and slow down, seduce or ravage, all in one sentence.

All of this, of course, is subjective. The writer is the artist. Each word and every combination will inspire unique pleasure in the reader.

I will add that I also admire diphthongs because they stretch the rules of basic phonetics in which one letter makes one sound. Breaking rules can be sexy, too.

** ** **

Jodi Paloni's writing appears or is forthcoming in Whitefish Review, R.kv.r.y Quarterly, Carve Magazine, upstreet, Monkeybicycle, Spartan, Shadowbox Magazine, and The Lascaux Review. In 2012 she placed second in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She lives and writes in southern Vermont and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Jodi curates the forum 365 Short Stories in 2013 in which she reads and comments on one short story a day at Rigmarole.

Loquacious: "Praxis" by Rachelle Mee-Chapman

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

Rachelle Mee-Chapman was one of my earliest Internet crushes. I became smitten with her and her blog, Magpie Girl, in my early days of blogging. Since then, I've had the pleasure of spending time with her online and in-person. I consider her a friend, a colleague, a mentor, and a soulsister. She is also one of the contributors to Lanterns: A Gathering of Stories, and I'm delighted to be a speaker at her Soulsisters Gathering this coming October. Her depth of kindness, spirit, and vivacity shines through in all of her work and writing. In this guest essay, she beautifully combines a meditation on the word "praxis" with an invitation to step into a life of action. (I first heard the idea of "orthopraxis" ("right action") from Rahcelle a few years ago, and it's been an important concept for me as I've navigated a shifting view of the world and my role in it. I live so much of my life in my head, so the reminder to move from thinking into action is always a good one for me.)

Praxis

By Rachelle Mee-Chapman

prax·is
[ práksiss ]

1.    performance or application of skill: the practical side and application of something such as a professional skill, as opposed to its theory
2.    established practice: established custom or habitual practice

Praxis. The application of a skill. The establishment of a practice. The creation of a custom. The polar opposite of theory.

I love saying it.

The pop of the "p" right from the start. 

The roll of the "r," softening its challenge.
The crisp charge of the "x" keeping things going. 

Then the closing hiss of the "s," suggesting a continuing process.

Everything about the word "praxis" makes me think of forward motion. Of doing. Of action.

I didn't know anything about praxis for the first three decades of my life. You see, for a long time I lived in my head. I studied philosophy, and then theology. I talked about ideologies and paradigms, systemic establishments and theoretical models. I devoted myself to figuring-things-out for one big reason—I didn't want to get "it" wrong.

You know. "It."  Life.

I didn't want to get life wrong.     

At the core of this approach was a desire for control. I wanted to know what the results would be before going in. I didn't want to fail, or look inexperienced; to make a mistake or to be laughed at. I wanted to think it through, and when I had it all figured out, then I wanted to begin.

Maybe this was because in the tradition in which I was raised, "failure" was synonymous with "sin." Doing something wrong wasn't just part of growing up, it was a moral failure that could—if you didn't say the right prayer—result in eternal damnation. Or maybe it was just because I was an anxious kid, then a nervous teenager, and finally a young adult who was mostly okay at faking confidence. Probably it was all-of-the-above plus a good deal more.

Because of these influences, my college years found me dedicated not to orthopraxis—the exploration of right-living—but rather to orthodoxy, the study of right-thinking. I was committed to finding and keeping a set of beliefs that would keep me in the "right" arena. I thought that if I spent my time in right-thinking, it would indisputably lead me to right-living.

Kind living.
Fair living.

A way of living that was nice to everyone, but completely empowered, and of course, full of justice.

What I didn't know about orthodoxy and real life is you can't get there from here.

Sure, right-thinking can help you decide in which direction to turn. It can teach you good assessment skills. You can become very good at picking things apart. But what all that thinking doesn't do is actually get you to living.

You see, most of living doesn't happen in your head. A lot of life requires movement, exploration, forward motion. Life requires you to skip and to trip; to climb up and to fall down; to ride your bike with no hands, and to scrape your knees.

Life requires you to do more than think. It requires you to act.  

My younger self wanted to get everything straight in my head so I could go out and start my life. What I didn't know was that in order to leave the ivory tower, to walk past the castle walls, you don't need orthodoxy. Orthodoxy won't get you out the door. No, what you need for the messy, tumultuous, upheaval of real life is not right thinking, it's right action—orthopraxis.

The try and the attempt.
The repetition and the habit.

The tradition and the custom.

The rhythm and the beat.

This is what orthopraxis gives you: 

the breathing room to attempt, 

to try, 

to actually get out there and live.

So this is what I'm thinking, right now, for you, my friend.

Maybe you don't need a perfect set of beliefs, or a watertight creed, or a systematic theology.

No, maybe what you need is a space to practice. A little bit of room so you can discover—by doing—the right and the wrong. So you can live in the grey. So you can make mistakes, and fail—and be glad you failed—and then do it all again anyway.

That is the gift of praxis.

Are you ready to practice your right-fit life?
Can you shift away from thinking and into doing?
Will you try, and fail, and try again because the proof is in the practice?

I think you are.

I know you can.

I hope you will.

(Amen? Amen.)

** ** **

Rachelle Mee-Chapman is a non-traditional minister to relig-ish types and folks who identify as SBNR (spiritual but not religious.) She's teaching new skills and practices in the big tent at this year's Soulsisters Gathering. You can also join her online soulcare community Flock, or learn more about her correspondence coaching plan at Magpie Girl: Care for Creative Souls.

Are You an Armchair Critic? (guest post)

I'm taking a little summer beak through mid-July. During this time I'll be hosting some great guest bloggers and sharing some of my favorite posts from The Word Cellar archives.

Today's guest writer is Rachelle Mee-Chapman. In this post she writes about "So You Think You Can Dance," the only competition reality show that I love and watch regularly. But more importantly, Rachelle shares some helpful ideas about the transcendent value of experiencing art rather than critiquing it.

** ** **

The intersection of Art and Spirituality is my favorite corner. I've been able to spend quite a bit of time there lately and my tired soul is getting filled back up, Up, UP.

Dance is the art form that’s feeding me the most — so much so that The Hubs just accused me of being a dance addict. (Guilty as charged.) So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) is back on which means I can watch Sonya Tayah choreograph, and Melanie Moore dance. The competition for "America's favorite dancer" has it's obvious shortcomings — dramatic announcements, choices based on "good television" rather than artistry, and worst of all, the hot tamale train. And yet, in the U.S. it has brought dance to our attention like nothing before. Before SYTYCD, America's dance vocabulary consisted of MTV hip-hop and the occasional trip to the ballet for The Nutcracker. Now millions of viewers are learning about ballroom, contemporary, jazz, broadway, and all kinds of street dancing ("whacking" anyone?). Not to mention the occasional foray into Bollywood, demonstrations of Thai dance, and even an ill-fated attempt at Russian folk dancing.Learning to appreciate different art forms expands the scope of our charts and the depth of our souls. Through SYTYCD we are indeed becoming more expansive. And because SYTYCD is a competition we are simultaneously learning to be an Armchair Critic.

Critique can be a valuable tool. It can hone your art and improve your skills. It can also take you out of an artistic moment and leave you sitting in the critic's Herman Miller.

(If the video isn't working for you, try clicking here.)

I recently watched this performance choreographed by Stacey Tookey. I thought it was lovely, and I watched each dancer with rapt attention. But when the judges spoke later about it’s depth and impact, I realized I had only seen it in critique-mode. Because this is a a competition I was watching each dancer, looking for good lines, impeccable timing, authentic emotion. The piece was designed to be seen as a whole, to be experienced as a moment – not as a tool for honing my dance critique skills.

By watching this piece in an analytical frame of mind, I traded true beauty for the fictional role of "Clever Critic." I left the corner of Art and Spirituality, and in doing so I missed what could have been a transcendent moment.

When we take on the role of The Critic, we remove ourselves from the position of Withmate. We are no longer journeying with someone, but instead we are directing their course. When critique is asked for explicitly, it is helpful. Indeed these dancers would not be at such a high skill level if they had not been offered critiques. But when The Critic is our default position it harms both ourselves and those whom we are picking apart.

As I approach dance in the coming weeks, I intend to do so with a wondering and learning heart. I intend to look at each piece as a whole. To engage in the story. And to spend as much time as possible sitting on the front stoop at Art and Spirituality.

What about you? What helps you quiet The Armchair Critic so you can "Be Here Now?"

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Rachelle Mee-Chapman, a.k.a. Magpie Girl, is a spiritual director specializing in "care for creative souls." She works with visual artists, writers, musicians, chefs, and other folks who are unlocking their creative core. She does this by being a writer, podcaster, and by serving as the hostess of  Flock: a nesting place for restless souls.