This was originally published in 2016 at the Ex-Puritan. The formatting is messed up on their site, so I’m re-publishing here for the moment so I can link to something readable.
But I can’t imagine a really ideal arrangement until we finish the process of relinquishing cultural habits of male primacy. – Peter Elbow, Writing With Power
It’s Montreal in the early aughts. I’m doing an MA in English and Creative Writing at Concordia University. It’s pretty amazing and fun save for the fact that I am desperately heartbroken and the winters here are colder and darker and deeper than anything I’ve experienced thus far in my blessed Ontarian life.
My best friend in the program is a guy, let’s call him Anthony. Our friendship started because, upon observation of my unshaven legs, he assumed I was gay and would therefore not pose a threat to his long-term, long-distance relationship. So after the workshop one night, we went for Mexican food, and he invited me over to his place after and taught me how to smoke weed (I’m a late bloomer).
Soon we were spending most evenings together, smoking, listening to minimal techno and indie rock that Anthony curated but I was allowed to veto, and talking about girls and boys and books. It was a pretty nice set-up, and kept going strong once Anthony’s relationship ended and he was heartbroken too.
One night we ate mushrooms and sat in bereft silence together for at least an hour. I remember looking out the window of Anthony’s apartment at the sparkling snow coming down, settling in smooth heaps on his small square of patio. Later we talked about how we’d felt very close that night even though we hadn’t talked. We just knew we had each other’s backs.
Of course none of this would have worked if we hadn’t quickly established a mutual admiration for one another’s writing. When I need a quick self-adulation buzz, I still reflect on the time when, after reading a few of my travel vignettes (why?), Anthony called me a “near genius” over Indian buffet. For better or worse, complimenting my writing is a fast way to a permanent place in my greedy, needy heart.
Midway through the second year of our program, I was feeling—then as now—stalled on a novel and very, very down about it. I was trying to slog through some stories, but I had lost my fire. I was—then as now—perpetually in a mild state of panic about the fact that I just don’t “get” narrative structure.
Though I didn’t reflect on it much at the time, when my writing was working, thinking was gone, section breaks and dialogue appeared where they needed to, and got pushed and pulled into order in a similar way—in an entirely intuitive state, during which I got out of my own way.
I know now, from experience and reflection, that I got—and get—out of my own way using various methods including walking, dancing, loud pop music, coffee, low-pressure journaling (then lifting entire passages from said journal and fucking with them until they’re fiction-worthy), and a sort of method-writing where I choose music to get myself in the mood of the scene—in the case of that first novel, music that brought back the feelings of failure and disgust with myself I’d felt during the breakup I was writing about. Then I’d type hard through a veil of tears.
Besides Anthony, there were two other guys in our program whose work was undeniably great and thought-through and crafty, let’s call them Ajay and Tom. They talked about their stories in our workshop like they were building Lego spaceships. Clearly I was doing something very, very wrong. I had come to judge my circular, weepy methods so hard I had stopped writing entirely; in fact, I had not acknowledged them as methods at all.
I see now how the thing I’m working on always kind of opens itself to new information and experiments, then tightens and closes around the new stuff, then the process repeats until the thing is finally satisfied and able to rest. Which, if you hadn’t already noticed and barfed, seems kind of, um, vaginal? (Of course vaginas aren’t barf-worthy, they are resplendent, magical power-blossoms, and I am just a terrible prude.) But at the time, I just couldn’t own it. I was desperate to master these men’s dispassionate ways.
One night at Anthony’s place we were talking about one of his stories, and I was trying to get him to be more honest in his dialogue.
“Yeah, Tom said something similar, like it would move faster if I cut everything that isn’t about the characters’ motivations directly, that doesn’t move them toward their goals. And he said I could cut some of the dialogue tags, too, which I think I agree with.”
“No, that’s not what I mean though!” I said, flapping my hands and feeling that contraction in my chest when I know something, I do, this is somewhere I can help. I wanted to tell him to flip over the soil with a little shovel and see what lurks beneath—an image that comes to me a lot, and is often very useful. I wanted to tell him to sit still with his eyes closed, wait for the dust to settle, and really hear how these characters speak.
Again, I had not yet paid enough attention to what happens when I write to have articulated these things, but even if I had, I never would have said them. They sounded wrong, unhelpful, weird ... female? Gardening imagery? What here was tangible? Where was the meat?
So I tried to couch my critique in terms we used in class—pace, motivation, tension, I don’t even remember—and I just couldn’t get it out. I felt inarticulate, inadequate, feelings that had become all too familiar to me in the competitive morass of grad school.
But then something else registered. “When did you talk to Tom about it?” I said. “You haven’t brought this story to workshop. Did you guys hang out?”
“We hang out sometimes.”
“Why didn’t you mention it? I mean, I don’t care, it’s just weird you didn’t say. Like, you guys trade work?”
“Yeah,” he said after a tense pause, a strange look of dread and guilt and pity painted all over his face. “We have a little thing Sunday afternoons. With Ajay and Chris.”
All the men in our course.
I spat out, “A little thing,” or something like that. And then I cried. Straight up bawled. Because what did this mean? That I sucked? I was, at 22, a has-been? My chapbook of travel vignettes, rave-reviewed by anyone who mattered in my teeny cocoon of a community, was my one-hit wonder? The first section of my stalled novel that had brought the workshop to their knees with its frank and funny depiction of awkward oral sex (why??) was a fluke, sure to go nowhere, and these boys with their symbols, anti-symbols, allusions, and intricate manipulations of time and space, all of which they could talk about with baffling aplomb in these voices (slightly faster, slightly deeper than their regular ones), and their sentences of a reasonable length, these boys, did they chortle at and lacerate my flailings every Sunday afternoon? Were they just happy to workshop in peace, no fear of me flapping my hands around and trying to say something that to them was entirely useless and missing the entire point of this thing we were trying to achieve?
Or worse and much more likely: did I never come up at all?
I don’t remember if I put this stuff into words, but I know I was talking amid snotty, gross, stuttery sobs. I remember one thing I said very clearly; it clangs through my mind even now: “I want to run with the big boys too!” I said, and cried some more.
Seriously. I said this. What the fuck did I mean?
I was also part of an exclusive club at this time. I was in a French Feminism reading group with a few other women who met once a week at the local Ben and Jerry’s to eat ice cream and talk clits, Freud, and l’ecriture feminine. I loved this group of women, the work we were reading, the support and advice and spirit of inclusion we had fostered. Our group was no secret as far as I remember. Just no boys wanted in.
A digression, but I feel like somehow it fits. What’s stayed with me from all the reading we did is the idea of tearing down compulsory rigid structure in writing; that tight, closed-up forms are phallogocentric as hell; and we have to loosen up and honour the great gaping holes and messes if we’re ever going to get somewhere with this whole patriarchy-smashing business.
I remember at the time kind of hating this idea that women might write or should write differently from men. This was, after all, the same period when I learned that gender is socially constructed. I was reading Judith Butler essays on gender performance that excited me so much I had to get up from my desk all the time and walk around to calm down.
But somehow I couldn’t quite mash all this together with my burning desire to run with the big boys. I don’t think I actually started trying to until sometime last month when this memory of the boys’ club came slicing through my mind like a papercut after a long period of dormancy.
The phase that most writers with enough time and neuroses experience—you know, feelings of abject depression and sureness that the entire enterprise is worthless and anything good you did ever was just beginner’s luck and all of it feels like you swallowed a heap of spiky humiliation gravel that now you have to haul around until you die—hit me shortly after the publication of that first novel.
I went to a career counsellor, fulminated and frothed against writing and myself and, though I begged her not to, she determined I would be happiest if I—drumroll—kept writing. She sent me on my way with some books by that incorrigible Santa Fe hippie Natalie Goldberg, of Writing Down the Bones fame.
Sometimes when I tell writer friends about my love of Goldberg, I am greeted with snorts. I qualify my rhapsodizing, like, “She’s pretty cheesy, but you know ...”
But you know. She saved my ass.
A little later, I was alerted to the goddamn miracle of Lynda Barry, comics wizard and Olympia hippie. In What It Is, she gets pretty mystical and dreamy about how humans access images and gives you practical, easy instructions to do it yourself with a notebook and a pen.
Maybe a year after that, I found a book called Writing with Power by Barry’s fellow Olympian, Peter Elbow, in a cardboard box in the parking lot of a grocery store. Flipping through, I saw he had a brief chapter on the experience of nausea when one sits down to a blank page. Obviously I brought it home. This guy gifted me an approach, what he calls the Open-ended Writing Process, that got me working, finally, relentlessly, on my second book.
All of these gurus reminded me, or maybe helped me notice for the first time, that the body is involved in the writing process, that breathing and stretching and relaxing have a place. They all encouraged me to think less, to actively access an intuitive space. They gave me a vocabulary to help me observe, communicate, and ultimately vibe with my own particular process.
So, to paraphrase Goldberg, what is it that I’m really trying to say?
What I’m really trying to say is that first of all, I do not give two shits what various holes and bulges are between your legs. Gender essentialism is for monsters. When I look back on those French Feminists who confounded me so hard I see—perhaps too generously—their theories as less connected to any “reality” of biological bodies, and more to the way binarized sex and gender are inscribed and enshrined in Western European languages and all the normative narratives we are taught to live by. It is the way bodies are written and understood that creates the issue, not the way that they are. The way language is constructed and often used to privilege things pertaining to the “classic male form” (tight, neat, rational, tidy, hole-free) and to undercut things that are messy and ragged, weird and confused, fertile and wild—traits associated with non-masculine gender expressions all the time. Of course all of the above descriptors apply to everyone in all kinds of ways; one could—and should—marvel forever at the astonishing diversity of actual, embodied human experience.
What am I really trying to say? Right.
I don’t think it’s because I’m a cis-woman that I write in this circuitous way. I know plenty of women who have Lego-spaceship-style practices. Probably there are guys with more open-ended processes too, like Peter Elbow for example (though it’s noteworthy he’s the only male I’ve encountered in this go-wild genre of writing instruction, where there are loads of women right now, Elizabeth Gilbert arguably leading the charge. Is it possible it’s still pretty embarrassing for a hetero-cis-man to admit that he freewrites like fuck and bops around his studio swinging his arms and weeping rather than just sitting there pounding out paragraphs with a big, furrowed Franzen-brow? I honestly, really don’t know).
But I do think that when those boys built their club around the shrine of craft and ruthless criticism, then left me out, it laid bare something for me that—in retrospect—fucked me up. I lost, for that period, the lifelong fight against the feeling of being slightly-less-than that is my birthright under patriarchy. I think it had something to do with why I tripped and fell into the literary scene with absolutely zero chill.
Those early years of writing I felt like I was doing it so wrong, all this flailing and weeping and repeating in the dark, feminine shadows. I yearned so hard to work from the type of age-old teleological outline that mirrors so perfectly a cis-gender male blowing his load. I wasted a lot of premium brainspace yearning for that. I still do, plenty of days.
So. What I’m really trying to say is that as much as my work sometimes needs an injection of something hard and rational and ruthless, there would be nothing to inject, there would be nothing, period, if it wasn’t for the time spent flailing around in the bloody, spurty mess, surrounded in detritus that needs to be washed away before the little body of the thing is revealed (sorry). Even those born with a super-laser-structure-brain, I bet they do a tiny bit of aimless walking in the woods to get where it is they’re going. It may not loom so large that they feel a need to name it, but I think naming it really can’t hurt, no matter who you are.
I am still good friends with two of the guys from the secret boys’ circle, and I exchange work with them on occasion. They are excellent, prolific writers, and I am super-proud of both. They both identify as feminists and are pretty good at it sometimes.
I saw Anthony recently, and for the first time in a long time had a good caterwaul about the state of my novel and generally my writing career. (Confession: my dread about this piece is that readers will think my girly methods are shit, like, “where’s this blowhard’s second book?” but, look! Just because I finally accepted my backwards, woolly process—and thereby maybe myself? —does not mean writing is not still hard as fuck.)
Anthony was, as always, super-supportive and understanding, and as-ever advised me to give no shits what others—my parents, other writers—think. He is a very good friend.
I also mentioned I was working on this piece about his boys’ club way back then, and you should have seen his face drain of joy.
“I didn’t start that!” he stammered. “I was only in it.”
I laughed and assured him that I knew this.
We’re all in it.
Now how do we get out?
ahhhhh, so good. hits me in the feels. *flailing* someday we will go for cocktails again and talk about writing - maybe? if you would like to?