AWP 2015, Minneapolis, MN

Confronting Our Fears: Turning Adversity into Art

Introduction by Jo Scott-Coe

Michael Steinberg

​Michael Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre, has written/co-authored five books and a play. His memoir Still Pitching won the ForeWord Magazine/Independent Press Book of the Year. Shorter works have been cited as “Notables “in Best American Essays. Steinberg is a writer-in-residence in the Solstice/Pine Manor MFA program. http://www.mjsteinberg.net/

Richard Hoffman

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Meredith Hall

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Renée E. D'Aoust

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​Jo Scott-Coe

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Michael Steinberg
​Confronting Demons, Staring Down Fears: Transforming Our Deepest Misfortunes into in Literary Works

If you’re thinking that this is the usual story of dysfunction and abuse, then I’m doing a poor job of telling it.--Barbara Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God
                                                            
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When I was a beginning writer, I attended a summer workshop where a student in the group presented a narrative about being struck by lightening while on a camping trip. The piece was filled with evocative details and specifics, all of which vividly described how terrifying this near death experience was. The writing, in other words, was compelling and alive. You could literally feel his confusions and fears.

The workshop leader, a somewhat acerbic writer, saw this as a teaching moment. He said something to the effect of  “…you should all hope that you’ll get hit by lightning some day.”

At the time, I was irritated by what seemed to be a flip, mean spirited, response. Most of the others in the class, as I recall, had similar reactions.

That shows you how much I knew about writing (and about teaching writing) back then. But now, some twenty plus years later, I think I understand what that writer was trying to teach us--about our writing, not about our lives.

As writers (and teachers) of autobiographical work, we know--that even in the best case scenario--our own and our students’ most compelling work will often emerge when we take risks; in this case, that is, when we stare down and write about our most terrifying demons and fears. In workshop we refer these as “hot buttons.”

What qualifies as a “hot button” can range from having experienced serious traumas--abuse, incest, life threatening illnesses, major disabilities, and devastating losses; like, for instance, the death of a child, partner, close friend, and/or parent--to less ominous, but still deeply disturbing moments of humiliation, shame, and regret.

And yet, just as writing about emotionally disruptive experiences can generate powerful, compelling work, we know that it can also produce personal narratives that consist largely of direct confessions and disclosures.

More often than not, when my students write about traumatic experiences, their writing tends to read like a litany of  “here’s what happened to me” grievances. And because so many of us can identify with others’ misfortune, the group’s collective response is almost always to be sympathetic.

It’s a human/humane impulse, to be sure. Given the fragile, personal nature of the writer’s disclosures, those responses--and understandably so--are sincere expressions of compassion and concern. Sometimes though, the critiques feel like group therapy sessions. Which creates a dilemma for workshop leaders and students alike.

As empathetic as the group’s reactions might be, the truth is that those responses aren’t directed at the writing itself. In these instances, I’ve noticed that that the majority of participants rarely offer specific suggestions and/or strategies that can help the writer best shape his/her thoughts and feelings into a fully dimensional, carefully shaped narrative. Which is, after all, what we hope we’ll take away from a rigorous, challenging workshop.

As writers and writing teachers then, we all know that writing about a life is a very different undertaking from living one. And yet, this distinction seems to elude a good number of writing students, undergraduate and graduate alike.

So then, what can writing teachers do to create a workshop environment in which, without sacrificing our humanity, we’re still helping writers and would-be-writers to find shape and meaning in their most painful difficulties and misfortunes?

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Seasoned writers and teachers know that our personal hardships are raw materials for exploration and discovery; in other words, for creating an evolving (and hopefully coherent) narrative. And yet, that way of looking at things. I’ve found, is a very tough sell, especially in workshops where when my students are writing personal narratives. The suggestion that one’s life is raw material for his/her art often comes across to many of my students as a deliberate insult or affront.

As a matter of fact, a number of them have said things like--and I’m paraphrasing here--“How can you be so callous and insensitive? How can you say that my deepest traumas and most painful losses are ‘raw materials? Those things actually happened to me, to my family,” they’ll claim; “and whenever I think or write about them I’m forced to re-live all that suffering and anguish.”

Valid concerns, to be sure. But I'm thinking here about some comments Virginia Woolf once made to someone who’d asked her if it wasn't too depressing and painful to write about the kinds of unsettling, disturbing, experiences she evokes so powerfully in her best work.

Woolf’s alleged response to the question (and I’m also paraphrasing here) was to suggest that writing about these misfortunes was exhilarating, not depressing. Which, I believe, inadvertently points out the differences between what my colleague, Bill Roorbach calls “being the writer at the desk” as opposed to being the person who’s having to re-live the frightening, sometimes overwhelming experiences that compose the body of the narrative.

Roorbach is suggesting here that the “writer at the desk” is a version of the adult narrator, the narrator, that is, who’s creating and crafting the story. That narrator, I must point out, is no longer the former or younger self who lived through all of that anxiety, fear, and emotional chaos.

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In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick writes, “The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one…Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned…This narrator becomes a persona….what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen to serve the subject.”

That last phrase “to serve the subject” highlights the difference between writing a straightforward narrative that’s mainly composed of confession and disclosure (in other words a “here’s what really happened to me” story) and crafting a narrative and narrator that best suit the story being told.

That awareness and that distance--both in real and emotional time--allows us to bring a fuller, more experienced, and (hopefully) wiser self to the writing--the persona, in other words, that Bill Roorbach calls “the writer at the desk.”

It would follow then, that whatever confession and disclosure a writer includes in the narrative ought to be designed not simply to take us through the events and what they felt like, but, more importantly, to serve the writing; that is, to reflect, speculate, and interpret what those events and feelings mean.

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I often tell my students that writing about their emotional and psychological wounds wont heal their pain or salve the scars. Nor will it reverse the losses or remove the sorrows and regrets. It doesn’t, in other words, alter the reality of what happened and how. And it shouldn’t.

Far from being a literal retelling or a re-experiencing of what really happened, the hard earned writing that emerges from the impulse to explore and try to comprehend our darkest moments often comes as an unexpectedly gratifying surprise.

Yet at the same time, I believe that if we honestly interrogate our darkest experiences as well as mine our anxieties and fears in service of what Annie Dillard describes as “fashioning a text,” we’ll at least be giving ourselves a chance, perhaps our only chance, to redeem our sufferings and losses.
 
By combining language, thought, and imagination to shape a piece of writing, we’re attempting to transform our most threatening fears and devastating setbacks into something meaningful, and in some cases, even beautifully wrought—namely; a fully realized, coherent, convincing piece of writing in which the narrator struggles transparently and honestly to make some larger sense out of all that personal suffering, chaos, and confusion.

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Confronting Our Fears, Continued.

Jo Scott-Coe
Confronting Our Fears

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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