AWP 2015, Minneapolis, MN

Confronting Our Fears: Turning Adversity into Art

Jo Scott-Coe

​Jo Scott-Coe’s memoir is Teacher at Point Blank (Aunt Lute Books 2010). Her writing has appeared in places including Salon, River Teeth, Superstition Review, and the LA Times. Her forthcoming book, MASS (Writ Large Press) explores the relationship between the 1966 UT Austin sniper and a Roman Catholic priest. http://joscottcoe.com/

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Michael Steinberg
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Richard Hoffman
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Renée E. D'Aoust
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Meredith Hall

Jo Scott-Coe
Confronting Our Fears

When I talk with my undergraduate composition students about fears related to writing, they express worries about deadlines, difficult texts, grades, and upsetting memories of long-ago mistakes or embarrassment. They also worry about “getting it right,” whatever they imagine “it” to be. Sometimes they frankly want to get their assignments over with.
 
In creative writing workshops, on the other hand, practical fears give way to an added dilemma when participants share stories about intimate, dark, or disturbing subject matter. In local sessions I facilitated for the (In)Visible Memoir Project, adults wrote about topics ranging from childhood memories of being assigned by one’s parent to kill a chicken, being separated from siblings in foster care at a very young age, and surviving a drugstore robbery at gunpoint. All of these subjects led to well-executed, insightful, published works. But upon initial reading, supportive peers tended to focus reactions almost exclusively on the personal content and the author herself, at times making it difficult to discuss the role of, or the construction of, the material as literary work. This poses a delicate challenge for facilitators who want to maintain a simultaneously supportive and constructive environment.
 
I want to make a point that we have to be mindful as seasoned writer-teachers when we work with those who may be new to literary self-disclosure or who may not yet have given its implications much thought. We can caution participants in advance about considering how and to what extent they share material, but some students may not entirely realize their vulnerabilities until the workshop itself takes place. They may also over- or underestimate the receptivity of an audience, leading to premature sharing or self-censorship. The discipline of aesthetic scrutiny does not need to preclude basic decency, and it may be one best practice to ask questions and establish ground rules early on to ensure both participant safety and elicit thoughtful, responsible feedback. While on the one hand we don’t want to patrol too much, we also need to be aware of privileges that are already present (even lurking) in the workshop setting in order to avoid contributing to interactions that can do harm. This is easier said than done, and it is not a “just add water” proposition. One solution can be talking openly with writers about how they can evaluate sources of input, then sort and assess feedback for the most useful impact—without losing ownership and getting derailed. We must also be aware that the facilitator’s role is part of a “hidden curriculum” in workshops, regardless of how we may attempt to decentralize the structures of sessions.
 
Women have shared accounts with me about submitting material in graduate workshops and being wholly unprepared for sexist commentary ranging from the blatant to the oblivious. Their point was not that their works should be exempt from criticism, but that they often had to overcome creative interference. Such writers faced an additional burden if also navigating an intentional or unintentional chumminess between male professors and male peers. These environments, despite ostensibly “biting critiques” for certain participants, did not necessarily offer a benefit to the work, rather placing select writers into a defensive, self-conscious, even fearful, position about subject matter. This situation is more unjust than simply unfortunate, because each writer had already demonstrated the willingness to take aesthetic risks—simply by enrolling, paying fees, and/or being awarded scholarships.
 
Editorial “facilitation” can have a similar feel. After graduate school, I had a strange experience with one editor who probed me with personal questions on the phone prior to accepting an essay I had written about not having children. I did a bit more work on the piece, and when the galleys arrived fairly quickly, I was first thrilled and then shocked that this editor had rewritten language and re-formatted the piece: A. without any discussion or negotiation; and B. in a way that altered my position in the essay, from curious and socially critical to despondent and pleading.
 
I certainly had experienced plenty of editing for publication—for lengthy academic essays as well as literary and commercial articles, and my tendency was to defer as much as possible unless changes affected core meaning. I consulted every working writer I knew at the time: had I missed something here? was this more common than I imagined? (The answers were No and No, and How badly do you want your work in this magazine?) Ultimately, despite the venue’s desirable status, I could not accept the changes, and I attempted to adjust the language back to something I could live with. The editor chided me sharply for even trying, and the contract and publication were aborted. While some writers would have chosen differently, I do not regret my process, my decision, or its ultimate result. I had stood up for my work and faced down my fear of rejection at the same time. (Not long afterwards, the aptly-titled feminist journal So to Speak accepted and published the piece as an “editor’s choice.”)
 
My point is that even in rejecting the therapeutic approach to nonfiction, we have to consider that what can pass as “critique” for the work of women, people of color, religious minorities, and those seen as sexually “other” may at times speak more to the expectations of a specific reader who wants his/her views on a topic confirmed by angle or tone. This occasionally amusing but sometimes jarring reality places an even greater burden on each writer to have clarity of intention even as we are open to change and experimentation. Nonfiction writers must develop a finely-tuned ability to distinguish between the gift of seriously useful editorial guidance, however challenging it may be to hear or to integrate, and outright appropriation (even erasure) of one’s voice or material. This does not have to be a defensive or defiant posture, but it takes time to develop a steady mind.
 
When I began writing what would become my first book, Teacher at Point Blank, I struggled a long time to reveal ugly feelings and situations related to students and colleagues in my former workplace, which also happened to be my high school alma mater. I was questioning the myth of the suburban “good school” and speaking from a position as a woman in a pink-collar field that was more Stepford Wives than The Prime of Miss Jean Brody. But I was also seeking a literary rather than public policy approach.
 
One of the first essays I started was also the essay that took me the longest to finish. Especially in the beginning, it was re-traumatizing to comb through and recount bizarre experiences with different students from just a few years earlier. I wanted to dramatize, without simply recounting, what it was like to be harassed in a classroom, to experience physical vulnerability in a profession that was highly scrutinized, to get things wrong and also to feel terribly exposed. I had heard “You teach? You must love it!” so often that I had a difficult time trusting a more nuanced response. I wanted the work to be realistic, but I wanted to shadow identities other than my own. I had other fears, too: Would revealing worries and miscalculations or mistakes of my own undermine my credibility with future students?
 
One doesn’t address—or even fully understand—a writing problem like that in a week’s workshop assignment or even in a year. I sought feedback from professors and advisors, often outside the workshop setting. One handed the piece back to me with a shake of her head: “You’re really having a problem, aren’t you?” she said. That was certainly an understatement. We met privately and she had no direct suggestions, other than to assure me that she didn’t want me to write about anything I didn’t want to share. It was kind advice, but it was not exactly a strategy.
 
I let the work sit for nearly a year without much looking at it, and meanwhile wrote essays exploring complicated and sometimes dark subjects that felt somehow less raw or less close: the suicide of a high school classmate, my parents’ weird divorce, the sudden accidental death of a student I’d taught, the death of a former teacher and colleague, aspects of my own sexual history, fetishes of educational “success” and data, even a case of student-on-teacher sexual harassment that travelled all the way to the California Supreme Court.
 
As months passed, two voices emerged that ultimately helped me finish the essay that was giving me such trouble. One was the mostly straightforward narrative voice, explaining the key moments that led up to my leaving the classroom. But the other skein of the thread was a voice that contextualized my position as a white, female, 30-something teacher in a “good” suburban school with privileged clientele. This voice had many layers, weaving in discussions of Neil Duncan’s research about sexual bullying in England; of films (Grosse Pointe Blank, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Conrack, even Eyes Wide Shut); coverage of the Haidl rape trial in Orange County; and many accounts, some from news and some from my own interviews, some mundane and some extreme, of other teachers caught between fantasy and an often jarring reality they were expected to ignore—long before any gun went off and the armada of news vans arrived.
 
Turning to texts was a big help during this time. Reading and re-reading shaped my perspective on technique and possibility. All the works that helped me most were simultaneously personal, political, and self-transcendent. In nonfiction, I was drawn back to the work of Gloria Anzaldua, whose Borderlands defied conventional expectations, mixing prose and poetry, English and Spanish, the personal and the historical. Richard Rodriguez’s Brown and Days of Obligation offered complex loops of insight and unpredictable associative leaps that defied easy categories. One advisor directed me to Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, a powerful fist of a book written almost entirely in second person. There were new books at the time which I welcomed and admired simply for blasting through romanticism—whether about prisons, in Ted Conover’s Newjack; or war reporting, in Christopher Hedges’s War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning; or even restaurants, in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (a book that had been a gift from a student). In the end I can see how, almost twenty years earlier, Julia Kristeva’s split-form essay “Stabat Mater” had made a stronger and more permanent impression on me than I’d realized at the time.
 
Over a three-year period of revision and reworking, I discovered techniques that helped me compose (and decompose) “personal” stories in ways that readers might not expect, while also keeping me from clinging to a predetermined “insight” or “outcome” (whether my own or someone else’s). I was not only discovering how to tell what happened, or what I did or didn’t do biographically, but I was excavating meanings I had not necessarily known or understood during the chronological “moment” of experience. I experimented with non-I points of view when writing about material that was very, very close. It fascinated me how juxtaposing seemingly impersonal material with intimate stories could not only widen the scope and relevance of my work but also make the personal seem closer by contrast.
 
Not all editors, workshop leaders, or even peers will necessarily encourage the approach that best enables our voices to flourish. Even a successful result will not suit certain publications. We may not know, in the beginning, where our work will find readers. Certainly not all experiments turn out well, for many reasons. Some essays will take three hours to complete; others will take three years, maybe longer. Some will languor in manila folders or electronic files, in desk drawers or on computer desktops. But nothing is wasted if we can value process as much as product. This is our best defense against the fears and uncertainties that so easily cloud our short-term vision.
 
We each get to choose whether, when, and how we will voice our most difficult stories. As writers we have the privilege and the challenge of engaging these questions in our own pages. As teachers and mentors, we must remember that students may not answer these questions as we do, but we can help make room for their risks and experiments; we can also share our own moments of discovery, silence, and struggle. Ultimately, empathy can teach us that we need to refine our skills not only as literary “surgeons,” but as midwives, too.

Confronting Our Fears, Continued.

Michael Steinberg
​Confronting Demons, Staring Down Fears: Transforming Our Deepest Misfortunes into in Literary Works
Meredith Hall
​Trust The Camera: The Importance of Scene Making in Writing Literary Memoirs
Richard Hoffman
Turning Adversity into Art
Renée E. D'Aoust
​A Bridge from Life to the Page
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