Workshops, Pride, and Humility

The shoreline begins to recede.

Well, I've sent out in the neighborhood of forty emails in the last two weeks, and had replies to only a couple. Is this the dog days of August? Are we on vacation, or taken up with going back to school? All these things and more, I am sure. Although not entirely sedentary this current life is solitary. In the 1970s, when I spent many hours of my life alone, with just my typewriter, I filled in the need for human contact by writing extensive letters and by running my household as a salon. A place where others could come and talk about music, rock music, poetry, fiction, politics and the Cubs. And I also threw quite a few parties in those days. Mostly for dancing and pot and speed, mixed with copious quantities of beer and hard liquor. I suppose the sort of party everyone has in their twenties.

Of course, I lived with a woman who was in her late thirties and early forties through that time. She worked for a living and I kept house and tried to write novels and generally ran things in what was the Scarritt Occasional Society. Years later, in the mid 1980s, John Knoepfle wrote a long exegesis on writers in Springfield in the 1970s and 1980s and he pretty much left me out entirely. He attributed the Scarritt group to Pat Smith. She had been instrumental in founding Brainchild, along with Sandra Martin and Peg Knoepfle (also Maurie Formigoni). His desire to write me out of the picture had to do with his guilt over having dumped me as a friend because of his wife's insane notions and my own guilt over having had an affair a decade before with a fourteen year old girl.

Well, that happened. But the fact of the matter is that there would never have been a Scarritt except for me. There may have been something else. Pat was a social person, but I did the work and I brought in the writers. It would have been nice to have some recognition of this along the way. My later writing group, The Writers BARBQ, for that I get some credit, though Becky Bradway gets a lot of the credit too. Yet, that group also would never have existed except that I was there to organize it, and to, as they say these days, facilitate it.

So I did those things. I made those phonecalls. I wrote those letters. People would come to my house for oh so many years, on Fridays generally, and I would ask who had material to read, and then we would read and speak to that material. Literally several hundred people over those thirty years. I developed early an ability to move things along. Also I figured out how to critique people without being negative. I believed then and still believe that it is better to encourage the good aspects of people's work and lives and not to dwell on their faults beyond merely mentioning what doesn't work from one's own perspective.

And I always believed in a democracy among artists. There was never one person who was better than the others, even though it is always true that some are indeed better than others. But for a reading group, for a workshop, everyone should be treated equally. Because we are all there to "improve" what we have brought to the table. Sure, there are always some people who come strictly for praise, for appreciation. And that's not of itself a bad thing. So much of this art takes place in a solitary world that getting some affirmation is very important. And since there will probably never be any real money, even for the published writer, it becomes even more important over the years.

But it is actually true that the person who desires to become a writer for the many, for the social aspect of writing (that is, to have an "audience") will inevitably be attracted to true criticism. Criticism that helps that person learn something about their work, their style, their content, and how it affects others. Those people are the people who learn the most, and who often make the most difference in a workshop.

And I think I gave pretty good workshop. Not strung out with the tricks of the trade. Knoepfle in his class had his string of things he told people. But he was always a lazy arbiter of the word. It shows in his own poetry which much of the time deserts its feelings for the sophisticated turn of the phrase. That's okay for him and he has made a career of it. But as someone who was in this world almost entirely for the sake of seeing good art created his workshop classes ultimately fell short.

As it was I ran many of those classes. Yes, John made the money, but I carried the buckets of water in the undergraduate world. Of course I had neither bachelor nor masters and certainly no phd. What did I have that he left me in charge of his class many many times? He knew I could do it. And I could do it. I could do it better than he could. But he always had a constant stream of people who took him under the delusion he could make them famous/get them published. In my entire 18 years hanging around Knoepfle I can tell you he was little help to anybody but himself. And as he aged he became ever more insufferable about his own work which became ever more trite and dependent entirely on an empty cleverness. So it goes in the land of academic poetry. He is not alone in this arc. Look at Kevin Stein.

So I spent my 20s/30s/40s running writing workshops, not for money, but for the love of the work itself. Did I get something out of it? Well, I still have many unpublished manuscripts in my boxes in my basement of people's novels and poems. Some of these stories and words I still pull out and enjoy and learn from. And while the groups continued I would get a certain amount of ego affirmation from them. After all, when someone listens to your critique and then applies it to their work, you can assume there was value there.

My last group lasted from 1986 through 1999. I am still in contact with most of the people in this group. And one of those humans, Martha Miller, published a new novel this year, which I was allowed to read in manuscript along the way. Very satisfying to me.

But now I live somewhere else. Somewhere other than that town, the city of my discontent, as Lindsay nicknamed it so many years ago. And I see few people where I am now, though I have been here ten years. I have few face to face friends. I don't remember the last time I threw a party. I am married to the best person I have ever known, Kimb, and we had our child, Piper, in 2003. The fact that Piper has turned out to be a special child, Aspergers Syndrome, has contributed to the increased isolation that I feel. The next ten years will be getting into the last years of this person's life. I might live twenty, but I would doubt much beyond that. My family history has the men leaving the scene around 80, and I am 61 this year. I will struggle to be there for this child, as she grows to adulthood.

Pretty much this takes up a lot of my existence, family time. And for this time I am very grateful. Those 70s 80s years my son did not get to have much from me I am afraid. Part of that was his mother moving to Oregon and then to California. But much of that came from my blowing off my twenties trying to be a writer and consequently having little in the way of money to help him or see him. Perhaps that is why these days I get little information from him and he and his wife and children have never come here, though we have been there several times.

Now we have the internet. Sometimes that seems like a good way to communicate. But often it feels to me as if I have left out something important. And I am essentially a confessional writer.You would think I have put down everything in one post or another.

Still, this day the end of August in the year 2011, I feel isolated from the whole of humanity. The desire in the body politic to destroy one group over another, mainly a republican conservative desire, is breaking down the essential idea of hope that must be at the heart of growth.

And I miss being with the writers. Often they were pretty silly. I have a box of audio tapes that Cheryl Frank made in the late 1970s. I keep thinking I should make them into cds before they are gone forever. But really, is it worth it? I wonder.

Meanwhile, there is that magician aspect of Tim Osburn. Divine Bear indeed. He lives on the precipice of his own humility. He can never quite bring himself to believe it was all worthwhile. And no one will actually read this. That is the demonstration of what I have become.