So this week, the author was Steven Church, who is a nonfiction writer. He teaches at University of California Fresno, and he's published three books and a ton of essays. I'd read his book Theoretical Killings, which is a fantastically weird genre-bending conglomeration of essay and fiction and essayistic fiction. It is awesome. He definitely plays around with genre in Theoretical Killings, but other essays I've read by him are more "traditional" personal essays. They are awesome. HE is awesome. Let me tell you a little more and hopefully you'll see how useful this was for my writing and my project.
Last night, me and five other grad students in the MFA creative writing program workshopped essays with Steven. I don't know why, but I was SO NERVOUS about the workshop. We had submitted an essay to him and to each other, so we all showed up having read each other's essays. As soon as I sent my essay, I was second guessing myself all over the place, wondering why in the heck I sent that essay, thinking it was a piece of crap, he was going to eat me alive, I'd get shunned, things like that. I was having some major intimidation issues. But as we started talking to Steven, I felt so at ease around him that the whole workshop experience was a complete delight. He is the most down-to-earth person, very real, not like a lot of self-important writers. He seemed honest and willing to help us and discuss writing with us. From the workshop last night and the reading and Q&A today, I took some notes that I want to remember as I head into the field and continue writing:
- The best essays come when you pretend you're talking to someone--nonfiction is a conversation between the reader and the writer: This is something I've definitely noticed as I have studied personal essays. They are personal because the writer is much more transparent in telling the reader what's going on. I think a lot of people (including myself) are drawn to this genre because we like to think we can know the author from what they write, and with personal essay this is largely true. He also said,
- Genre is fundamentally arbitrary but important: There is a seemingly never-ending debate about genre, and the rules of genre, and what makes one thing an essay and another a short story and another a poem, etc etc. I appreciated what he said because I think genre is important and I like to write in my genre and such, but I know I have room to experiment as long as I let my reader know what stuff I'm making up, a process that Church calls signposting (or letting the reader know what is imaged and what is real).
- Do some research when writing an essay: I love essays with a research element. I think research is fundamentally important to essay writing because essaying has so much to do with exploring and being curious about the world around you, and as Church said, often the best essays are essays with research in them. He says he often starts out an essay with an idea or with some research instead of with personal narrative, and then the personal narrative usually just shows up.
- "Kill your darlings" or "dismember your baby": These slightly disturbing adages (the "kill your darlings" adage you might have heard before) mean that during the revising process, you have to look at an essay as a whole and decide what's important to that essay, and sometimes you have to cut things you initially loved or cut things up and scramble them around. Basically, don't be married to a first draft. This is something I need to practice more. When I'm writing, I have a hard time going back and taking out parts that I may love but may not be essential or necessary in the essay. But the good thing about it is that you don't have to necessarily throw those passages away, just set them aside, and if they fit into a different essay at some point and time, great!
Anyway, I really learned a lot from Steven Church's visit. It's always important to get the perspective of multiple authors, and it's something I crave. Even though I become weirdly nervous about it sometimes. I have an inferiority complex, okay? Really, though, as I start my project, this and other bits of advice from Church and other contemporary essayists will be very valuable, because they have experience in the publishing world, experience that helps me know what I can do to improve as a writer and eventually publish my essays.
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