Assay’s Academic Year 2016-17 Annual Report

We’ve had a good academic year here at Assay. Thank you, all, for your contributions, for reading the journal, and for your support. As has become our custom, we are offering our Annual Report to remain accountable.

A favor? Please be sure to like us on Facebook and to follow us on Twitter. Thank you!

Activity:

• Celebrating Best American Essays: In the past year, Assay published a fall and spring issue: Assay 3.1 and Assay 3.2. In 3.1, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of Best American Essays with quite a few excellent pieces on the series itself.
• We are thrilled to have been able to release our Nick Nelson’s spectacular Best American Essays Project into the world during Year 3–if you haven’t seen it, it’s here! He archived the entirety of Best American Essays‘ Notables and Reprints in a searchable format.

AWP 2017–Washington DC:

• We conducted our first panel at AWP called Assaying “Our Hybrid Thing”: The Cross-Pollination of Nonfiction Studies and Pedagogy with Assay staff and alumni, including Ned Stuckey-French, Jenny Spinner, Crystal Fodrey, and Taylor Brorby. It was a blast!
• We had a Bookfair Table, too, which was so much fun! Thank you for your support at the conference. Extra special thanks to our Advisory Board members: Dinty W. Moore for staffing our Bookfair table, and Ned Stuckey-French for being on our AWP panel. It was so great to meet so many of you in person and put faces to names!
• Conference Panel Reports: During the 2017 AWP conference in Washington D.C., we published ongoing conference reports. If you missed them, check them out here! Many thanks for these contributions, which make it possible for those unable to attend the conference to benefit, too. When you attend a conference, please consider writing up a panel / reading / workshop / chance meeting for our “In the Classroom” series.
• Stay tuned for the call for panel reports for the NonfictioNow conference in June.

In the Classroom Update:

• Our ongoing “In the Classroom” series continues to publish “Favorite Essays to Teach” and “Writers to Read.” This past year we were also super pleased to feature interviews. See our interview with writer, editor, and professor Marcia Aldrich, here, regarding the fantastic anthology Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women. We featured an interview, focusing on creative writing obsessions that are particularly useful in the cw classroom, with Deborah Poe, here. Be sure to read our interview with Gail Griffin on being an ally in our Spring 2017 issue and on her creative nonfiction essays, here.
  • We are currently working to more firmly integrate In the Classroom into the main website, so stay tuned for that reorganization this summer.

Syllabi Bank:

• We’re here to support your teaching & writing. To that end, we maintain our syllabi bank. If you have a recent course syllabi that you’d like to contribute to the syllabi bank, please do! Expanding this resource will be a priority in Year 4.

Tootsie: Quality Control.

Submissions:

As you continue to consider your own submissions to the main journal and to the “In the Classroom” series, please think about students who might have thoughtful pieces or response papers — and encourage them to submit. At Assay, we are committed to supporting the work of undergraduate, graduate, and emerging writers.

Looking Ahead to Year 4:

We’re looking forward to next year! Assay’s fall journal issue will release September 1st. Our “In the Classroom” series will continue on October 2nd.

In the meantime, we’re reading for our Fall 2017 (4.1) issue, so please send your wonderful scholarship, informal analysis, and pedagogy!

With gratitude,

Renée

Listicle: A Brief International Women’s Day/Day Without a Woman Reading List:

In honor of International Women’s Day/Day Without a Woman, here is a brief reading list:

• A list of nine environmental women writers, here.
• A list of women writers from around the world by the NYPL, here.
• Svetlana Alexievich’s lecture for her Nobel Prize for Literature, 2015.
• Nellie Bly’s “Ten Days in a Madhouse.”
• Joy Castro’s “Racial and Ethnic Justice in the Creative Writing Course” at Gulf Coast.
• Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the mental portfolio of an Eurasian.”
• Zora Neale Hurston, “How it Feels to be Colored Me.”
• An article about writer Dervla Murphy.
• Jen Palmares Meadows, “We Be Bleeding” at The Rumpus.
• Torrey Peters’ “Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay” at Brevity.
• Monet Patrice Thomas, “The Unfaithful Triptych” at Compose journal.
• Sojourner Truth, “Ar’nt I a Woman?”
• Holly Wendt’s, “Leaving Early” at The Rumpus.
• Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”

Listicle: Resources for Teaching Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”

I visited several creative writing courses last week, and Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” was mentioned several times.

• Find the original essay, published in The New Yorker, here.

Here are some resources for teaching and reading this essay:

• Find Lynn Kilpatrick’s piece for Assay’s “In the Classroom” series, here.
• Sarah M. Wells’ article, “The Memoir Inside the Essay Collection: Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth” (on the entire book), here.
• Find Ned Stuckey-French’s commentary on the author, the essay’s form and context, including additional reading resources, here.
• Find Jill Christman’s reflections in Essay Daily, including classroom exercises, here

If you have other resources, please let me know and I’ll add them to this page.

Thank you!

-Renée

#AWP17 Conference Report — Penny Guisinger on “But That’s Not How It Was: Memoir Writers on Pushing Back Against Expected Narratives”

#AWP17 Panel R156: But That’s Not How It Was: Memoir Writers on Pushing Back Against Expected Narratives

Description: When we’re writing about hot button topics such as sexual assault, domestic abuse, and poverty, there are often expectations about how the story should go. These common archetypes can be deeply held not just by general readers and publishing’s gatekeepers, but also by our inner selves. The writers on this panel share strategies for sorting out how society thinks we ought to have responded to trauma from how we actually did, and when and how to resist the pressure to conform to an expected line.

Panelists: Zoe Zolbrod, Lynn Hall, Alice Anderson, Laurie Cannady, and Wendy Ortiz

Conference Report

Wouldn’t it be nice if our lives followed some Hollywood-esque formula? If life’s events lined up in a chronological order that made a clean narrative arc; if it was clear who the good guys are and the bad; if people engaged in consistent and predictable behaviors; if we knew enough not to open that basement door and shakily descend into the darkness below? Wouldn’t that be especially nice for us memoir writers? Not only would the writing be easier, but marketing plans would practically implement themselves, and we would all retire early after selling the movie rights.

This is a nice fantasy, but it’s not what happens. It’s not how life happens. And it’s not how great memoir happens either.

The five panelists participating in But That’s Now How It Was at AWP 2017 shared stories of living, writing, and publishing stories that stubbornly did not follow the formula. Zoe Zolbrod, Lynn Hall, Alice Anderson, Laurie Cannady, and Wendy Ortiz each authored memoirs that captured their lived realities, which are more complicated (and harder to sell) than other, more predictable plot tropes. Panelists shared stories of being people first, writers second, and marketable commodities third, all in the face of pressure to prioritize differently.

Each author’s experiences in the writing and publishing of their book was different, yet also alarmingly the same. Zolbrod’s book, The Telling, tells the story of being the victim of child sexual abuse. She was asked (or told) to recast it as more of a recovery book to make the marketing easier. She resisted pressure to depict this part of her life as a “Gothic horror story” because “life is more nuanced than that.”

Anderson’s book, Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away, about the “unraveling of a violent marriage in post-Katrina Louisiana,” similarly pushed back against publishing categories. She thinks of her book as a love story; one that is funny, beautiful, and about a family. “The story was all of these things,” she said. She ended up turning down a potentially lucrative publishing contract in favor of one that allowed her to tell the story as she experienced it: with nuance and depth.

Laurie Cannady was admonished by a visiting lecturer in her MFA program for having a life that fit “every possible stereotype of a black girl growing up where you grew up.” Further, she was informed that her abuser’s choice to abuse both children and adults was something that just didn’t happen. “What I heard was that my story didn’t exist.” Her book, Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul, says otherwise.

Lynn Hall’s experience of publishing Caged Eyes: An Air Force Cadet’s Story of Rape and Resilience was similar. On the road to publication she was asked to leave out the fact that she was sexually abused as a child. “This is a story of repeat victimization,” said Hall. “The book has three perps. People didn’t like that.” She has also had interviewers chop up her sentences and put them together in ways that make it sound like she blames the Air Force Academy far more than she does. “Markets like good and evil.”

Wendy Ortiz found that choosing a small press was one way around these pressures. Her book, Excavation, is about childhood sexual abuse she experienced as a teenager. But her teen self, refusing to be a trope, thought she was having a love affair, and did not see herself as a victim. That’s the story Ortiz wanted to tell: one with complications and honesty. She did not use the words victim or perpetrator, and larger publishing houses had a hard time with the idea that something we all know is terrible could be, in fact, not that kind of terrible. “I’m not supposed to be ambivalent about this,” said Ortiz. “But I treasure ambivalence.”

Because women’s experiences of violence have become politicized narratives, each of these writers had to navigate conversations with an entire industry that exists to make money first and art second. And while smaller presses can have more latitude, offering shelter, the messages also come from agents, workshop leaders, family members, friends, and the psyches of the writers themselves. Anderson talked very specifically about the internal pushback she created against her own story and the need to address it before she could even write the book.

There’s certainly no single way to get around the problem, but Cannady offered five very specific pieces of advice to anyone at any point in the journey who hears anything that sounds like, “You don’t get to have that story” from any other person. Ready?

1. Fuck ‘em. (This was especially appreciated by the audience, and truly – in the heart of this Assay guest blogger – set an important standard for dropping of the F-bomb at this year’s AWP.)
2. Write beneath the stereotypes. Go beyond what’s “expected.”
3. Write in a way that attacks those stereotypes if they appear in your story.
4. (Also received a lot of nodding and knowing noises of agreement from those present.)
5. Let go of shame. Shut out the voices telling you not to share. Accept questions, but don’t accept berating. (She gave the audience permission to resort to use of mace or hand-to-hand combat, as necessary. We all fucking wrote that down.) (See?)

In her introductory remarks, Zolbrod posed questions that came up for her across the eight years in which she prepared for and wrote the book. They were questions that, it seemed, everyone on the panel had to face at some point during the process. There’s the struggle with the ugliness of associating oneself with one particular life event and its associated labels and connotations. There are questions about who might launch an attack as a result of the story being told. There’s the fear of being called a liar. Further, there’s fear of what happens if the story is not told. What if writers everywhere caved to the pressure and were either silenced or forced into those Hollywood-esque narratives? What if all our recorded stories actually followed that easy-to-follow narrative arc?

Maybe that’s not such a nice fantasy after all.

Suggested Reading List:

Every title by every one of these panelists. Every. Title.

***

Penny Guisinger is the author of Postcards from Here. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Guernica, the Brevity blog, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Pushcart nominated, a Maine Literary Award winner, and twice named a notable in Best American Essays, she is the Founding Artistic Director of Iota: Conference of Short Prose and an assistant editor at Brevity. Penny is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program. 

#AWP17 Conference Report — Rachael Hanel on “Attempting the Impossible: Strategies for Writing Creative Biography”

#AWP17 Panel S280: Attempting the Impossible: Strategies for Writing Creative Biography

Panelists: Sarah Blake, Sarah Domet, Kelcey Parker Ervick, Kathleen Rooney, Anthony Michael Morena

Description: Traditional biographers aspire to get out of the way of their subjects in order to render objective portraits. These panelists take the opposite approach, emphasizing the impossibility of ever creating such a portrait and using this not as a failure but as an opportunity for imagination and interactivity. At this event they present examples, research and writing methods, and mixed media techniques for adapting history into literature, offering new modes of presenting the past and the people in it.

Conference Report

One piece of advice from David Shields helped Kelcey Parker Ervick re-envision a biography she was writing: The notes are the book.

When she came across that advice, Ervick was struggling with telling the story of Božena Němcová, a 19^th century Czech writer of fairy tales. Ervick wanted to write about Němcová’s complicated relationships, but so much was unknown. After coming across advice from Shields, Ervick’s focus became clear. Instead of trying to write a more traditional chronological narrative, Ervick decided to look at her notes and realized she could use found texts, handmade images and postcards written by Ervick to Němcová to create the story. The result was The Bitter Life of Bozena Nemcova, published in 2016 by Rose Metal Press.

I attended the panel as someone who is writing a narrative nonfiction biography, but not all of the panelists write nonfiction. Blake is a poet, Domet is a novelist, Rooney is a novelist and nonfiction writer, and Ervick and Anthony Michael Morena use essay to bring characters to life. Still, I found value in all of their approaches to biography even if the end result was fiction.

Blake described her process of researching information on Kanye West to develop Mr. West (2015, Wesleyan Poetry Series). She became intrigued with West when she learned that his mother died around the same time that Blake’s grandfather died. Blake’s primary method of research on West was daily Google news alerts on the singer. Blake noticed parallels between her experiences and West’s, and she responded to those parallels in poetic form.

Kathleen Rooney took an ekphrastic approach to biography when writing about the Belgian artist René Magritte. She’s been a lifelong fan and translated his selected writings in a 2016 book (René Magritte: Selected Writings, University of Minnesota Press). Now, Rooney is telling the story of Magritte through his work, his wife, Georgette, and his dog, Lulu.

“From pictures, we learn how to see and how to be,” Rooney said.

Sarah Domet used the life of St. Agatha to inform her novel, The Guineveres (2016, Flatiron Books). She said her end goal was not simply to retell St. Agatha’s story, but to use her story to develop themes in her novel of the female body and desire. Often, the stories about the lives of saints were told in a way to highlight their goodness as Christian women and to serve as an example. In her novel, Domet offers more ambiguity regarding St. Agatha’s life. She wanted to create an internal portrait of St. Agatha, to get into her mind and speculate on what she was thinking.

“I wanted to wrangle the story from white male Christian biographers, to restore her to her full complexity and humanity,” Domet said.

Anthony Michael Morena also wrote about a saint of sorts, the “secular saint” Carl Sagan. The Voyager Record: A Transmission (2016, Rose Metal Press) is a mix of poetry, flash fiction and essay that tells the story of 1977 recording that was sent out into space to represent the whole of the human experience. Morena said he focused on the “extremely boring details” of Sagan’s life, for example, lunchtime at home with his wife. Most biographies of famous people leave out those mundane activities, even though it’s those details that people will identify with. Morena used Cosmos, a 13-part TV documentary about space produced by Sagan, for inspiration.

Morena and Ervick included themselves in the biographies they wrote. Morena folded his experiences as a New Yorker into Sagan’s experiences growing up in Brooklyn. Ervick found similarities between her life and Němcová’s and wanted to write to Němcová to highlight those parallels. For example, Němcová was not happily married and took many lovers. When Ervick first discovered Němcová, Ervick was in a failing marriage. As she continued to write and research, her marriage dissolved and she fell in love again.

She wanted to explore “the dialectical relationship between two lives and the new possibilities that emerge” from that, she said.

When an audience member asked the panelists how they decided to insert themselves into the narrative of others, Morena said we’re always writing about ourselves, even when it seems that we’re not.

“Even when we’re trying to be altruistic, we’re always drawing that line back to ourselves,” he said.

***

Rachael Hanel is an assistant professor of mass media at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

#AWP17 Conference Report — Tara Betts on “The Written Orality of Hip Hop Lyricism”

#AWP17 Panel F134. The Written Orality of Hip Hop Lyricism

Description: From the early rap record liner notes to the annotation explosion of Genius.com, hip hop artists and audiences have always engaged the written as well as the oral textuality of rap lyrics. However, treating hip hop lyricism as written literature is a fraught proposition. Locating rap at the crossroads of written and oral traditions of African American culture, the panel evaluates rap as a written art that is symbiotically wedded to oral culture.

Panelists: Victorio Reyes, Derik Smith, Tara Betts, Jonah Mixon-Webster

Conference Report

Tracie Morris, former slam poet, author, performance and sound artist, professor and Coordinator for Performance + Performance Studies at Pratt opened the panel by drawing connections between her essay in An Exaltation of Forms (edited by Katherine Varnes and Annie Finch about 15 years ago) and the study of poetics and hip hop. Her opening comments made thoughtful insights about the papers by four panelists—three of them poets in their own rights, two of them Ph.D. candidates, and two of them professors, all of them deeply interested in hip hop. The clear through-line found in the panelists’ varied approaches would be that the voice serves as a vessel for poetry and embodies a number of texts that are subversive, rich, and full of historical contexts.

When Victorio Reyes Asili opens the panel, he discusses how hip hop not only has connections with the ancient oral legacies of global cultures, but that hip hop also has ties to the internet’s beginnings via the transcription of hip hop lyrics, so hip hop is not just performed, but also read. Asili particularly discusses how Regina Bradley notes the close timing of OHHLA being started in the early days of the internet and how the poetry of hip hop has been transmitted via technology:

“Think of all the word doc files, notepads, mp3s, and 8-track recordings, a nearly limitless ocean of compositions all sharing one thing in common; they are all composed in a related poetic verse. And these verses that we experience as listeners to a poetic, musical performance are also verses that we seek out as text, text that we read, share, and annotate. When we read these texts, we honor the lyrical skills of Hip Hop’s craftspeople. As the legendary Rakim put it: ‘I like to be read.’”

In making these connections to past oral traditions and the perpetuation of hip hop through technology, Asili sets the stage for Derik Smith to discuss the parallels between the presentation of hip hop artists with Black Arts Movement poets and preachers. He begins by mentioning “figures like Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Ntozake Shange and Nikki Giovanni, who in the Black Arts era created populist poetics that was meant to help conjure a social and cultural revolution” but quickly references Kanye West and Notorious B.I.G. sampling Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets respectively. Rather than relying on the same underlying disdain of “porkchop preachers” and the Black church as a pacifying force, Smith articulates how hip hop artists find another approach in the work of preachers:

“Instead the poems needed to vibrate with the Dionysian power that was best exemplified in the oral artistry of the black preachers—and so, in their Oedipal battle against the patriarchs of the black church, BAM poets became versions of the preachers they sought to overthrow and replace.  They did this because they wanted to connect with the black folk classes who had for so long ignored the black artist-intellectuals who were wrapped up in the tar-baby of the Alabaster page. Listen to what Baraka wrote in 1970, “Simple faith, like church people say, that’s what we want—hard rock emotional faith in what we are doing. The same way your grandmama used to weep and wring her hands believing in Jeez-us, that deep deep connection with the purest energy, that is what the Nationalist must have” (Raise, Race 143). Realizing that it was the ritual and inspirational power of the church that galvanized the masses, these new intellectuals committed themselves to an ecstatic, liturgical and eminently oral poetics that emulated the art of the preachers in its moans, repetitions, elongated vowels, antiphonal cadences and additive oral formulas.”

This idea of how the poetry sounds impacts the narratives and how they are received. It also makes them easier to remember, so when Jonah Mixon-Webster discusses the power of ad-libs as a onomatopoeic device and a method to make side commentary or create rhythm. Mixon-Webster describes ad-libs as “Those glancing quips that peek through a moment of pause between a lyricist’s bars. The little phrases echoing from the background, the ones you find yourself waiting to chant along with,” and mentioned several examples, most notably Lil’ Jon known for “YEAH!” and “Okaaaaaayyyy!” However, the overarching idea of crafting memorable moments paired with concrete details and pleasurable sounds is more prominent in his talk:

“Now moving forward to what is also pleasurable about the adlib, we see that has much to do with its manipulation of the written and oral/aural textures of a phrase. Though as we’ve witnessed, many rappers may utilize similar lexicons, yet it remains that rappers are still able to use the affirmative in a way that can be felt and nuances.”

Tara Betts concluded the panel by beginning with an anecdote while writing and working in a coffee shop where she is listening to Nicki Minaj and Beyonce in October 2016. During the same time period when Nicki Minaj bowed down to Ms. Lauryn Hill as an act of deference. In doing so, Betts frames her essay with discussing how women’s voices in hip hop have been limited in some ways, but these two women found success that is not only empowering for young women, but also subversive in their rhyming bars and their sung vocals. Betts discussed how both women assumed different roles, and in the case of Minaj, different characters and personas. She then drew connections between their functions as emcees with Roland Barthes’ essay “The Grain of the Voice” and other Sound Studies scholar Adriana Caraveros’ essay “Multiple Voices.” In doing so, Betts explains how Barthes’ feminizing of the voice limits the capacities of women like Hill and Minaj who have expanded the possibilities for the female voice in hip hop. She mentions how Morgan Parker and Barbara Hamby have referenced Beyoncé and Lil’ Kim, so there is an emerging thread of women raising their voices in this genre’s craft.

***

Tara Betts is the author of “Break the Habit” and “Arc & Hue” as well as the chapbooks “7 x 7: kwansabas” and “THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali.” Tara holds a Ph.D. from Binghamton University and a MFA from New England College. She currently teaches at University of Illinois-Chicago.

#AWP17 Conference Report — Marissa Landrigan on “Imagining the Essay”

#AWP17 Panel R169: Imagining the Essay

Description: Imagination, which might be defined as unfettered curiosity, a hunger for inner adventure, and a willingness to incarnate in the other, is at the heart of the essayist’s craft. On this panel, four essayists/teachers of the form (representing personal, lyric, narrative, and hybrid subgenres) discuss ways to imagine into one’s work by reconceiving structure and time, inviting contradictions and collisions, attending to the strangeness of fact, and moving aurally and physically with language.

Panelists: Rebecca McClanahan, Lauret Savoy, Lia Purpura, Ander Monson

Conference Report

I’ve always loved talking, thinking, and writing about the essay’s imaginative power, and the four writers serving on this panel are among my favorite practitioners of the form, so I was incredibly excited to attend this panel. Then, Ander Monson walked into the room wearing a Predator mask. I knew this was going to be good.

Rebecca McClanahan (the panel’s moderator, or, “liberator” as she said she prefers) began by declaring that, contrary to any perceived threat, “the imaginative essay is very much alive.” I certainly wouldn’t argue otherwise after leaving this panel, wherein each writer articulated and reflected on the vital, pulsing, wriggling nature of their work.

McClanahan focused on what she called the primary element of the essay: movement. She said that, in investigating what she admired about some of her favorite essays (citing Barbara Hurd’s “Moon Snail” as an example), she discovered the most of the shifts and turns in a good essay could be described using active verbs. The essayist may pivot, collide, zoom in or out, straddle expanses, and more. In a piece of writing not driven by plot, McClanahan said, “the rocky landscape and terrain of the mind” is more than enough to create movement. She encouraged us to welcome “ifs, ands, and buts” into our essays to create this kind of dance, and ended by saying that the most important question an essayist can ask herself is “at what point am I most divided?”

Next up was Lauret Savoy, who brought to the podium a stone and began: “I’d like to say a few words about ghosts and silence and race and the fugitive pieces of memory and history.” Savoy characterized her own work as uncovering the strata of history, told and untold, and spoke to the imaginative necessities that work often entails. She reminded us that, though we all know history is a privileged narrative, this means some stories have been intentionally eroded and obscured. The imaginative act, then, is to uncover and excavate and put the eroded world back into language.

It was during Savoy’s presentation that my sense of what this panel could be about began to shift. I came largely for craft ideas, and McClanahan’s discussion of movement was an excellent exercise I tried in my class the following week. But Savoy, and then Lia Purpura, reminded me of the larger world and the role the essayist can play in our culture.

Purpura began with a statement that underpinned most of the conference: “Well, everything’s changed, hasn’t it?” She continued by admitting to a recent struggle with the question of how and why we teach the imaginative essay in a cultural and political climate that seeks to decimate language and truth, and spent her time discussing some specific strategies she has found to guide her teaching since the U.S. presidential election. Namely, Purpura said she has been worked to make explicit a discussion of the values we uphold by writing creatively.

Living like a writer, Purpura reminded us, means resisting passive reception, and unchecked consumption; what, in the era of Trump, could be more important? But beyond simply knowing these values are a part of her class, Purpura discussed the idea of teaching specific practices that feed her students and develop their minds. She spoke, for example, of the practice of keeping a journal, not just for the purpose of strengthening one’s writing ability, but as a place to experience and explore shades of perception, to questions of oneself, to welcome doubt and uncertainty. Purpura also spoke of learning to work with art time — the slow, meandering progress of a mind creating — rather than urgent striving for simple production.

Overall, Purpura said, the values at the heart of imaginative behavior are the very things that make us human, and can therefore be a form of active resistance, a “place where the deepest roots of civically important values — empathy, curiosity, questioning — are planted.”

I scribbled like crazy during Purpura’s segment of the panel, grateful for the sense of significance she lent to our writing and teaching work. And even the panel’s closing speaker, trickster Ander Monson, walking to the podium with a mask on his head, continued to reiterate the importance of what we do.

Early in his presentation (after being forced to remove the mask so he could breathe and be heard), Monson spoke about the cinematic technique from the original 1987 Predator film wherein the camera periodically occupies the perspective of the Predator. This, he said, is the central technique of the essay: imagining ourselves into another’s perspective. He praised the “cognitive work it takes to imagine yourself inside another,” to see as another, to speak and tank a different way. And, ultimately, he reminded us that when we occupy these different imaginative spaces in an essay, we are really just exploring playing different versions of ourselves.

What could be more important, in a world that seeks to shun and silence any form of difference, than finding a way to maneuver ourselves into those silenced spaces? Of giving voice to the other and working to build empathic connections across divide?

I left feeling inspired and invigorated, to be sure, but also charged with a sense of responsibility, a reminder that the essay’s imaginative power — always valuable — may be a crucial element to preserving our humanity in these dark times.

***

Marissa Landrigan is the author of The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat (Greystone Books, April 2017), and her essays appear in numerous journals including Orion, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing at the University of Pittsburgh – Johnstown.

#AWP17 Conference Report — Katie Hatcher on “What Writers of Color Want White Editors To Know”

#AWP17 Panel S142: What Writers of Color Want White Editors To Know

Description: In 2017, what message does an all-white masthead send to writers of color? Beyond the content of their work, what issues must these writers contend with in publishing? Four writers of color and one white editor explore real and perceived tokenism, the pressure to change a story or voice to fit an editor’s racialized assumptions, the continued erasure of writers of color in the canon and awards systems, and the highs and lows of working with editors in the face of these and other challenges.

Panelists: Deesha Philyaw, Dennis Norris II, Patrice Gopo, Lisa Factora-Borchers, Jennifer Niesslein

Conference Report

In 2017, we’re all working together to become a more unified, supportive world. So when I saw that AWP was hosting a panel entitled “What Writers of Color Want White Editors To Know”, I knew it was something I needed to hear. The result was a candid, frank, and necessary discussion that gave some insight to this young, white aspiring editor as to how to cultivate not just diversity for diversity’s sake, but how to work to create an industry where the marginalized are made central and mastery of voice is paramount.

The panel was made up of four writers of color, one of whom is also an editor. These are people who know what they’re talking about, who have experiences that they draw from in dealing with the mostly-white world of publishing.

The panel was proposed and intended to be moderated by Jennifer Niesslein, editor of the web magazine Full Grown People, who unfortunately was unable to attend. The idea for the panel came out of Jennifer’s desire to better understand the needs of writers of color. She could see that writers of color are often tokenized and marginalized, and she wanted to amplify their voices. In Jennifer’s absence, one of the panelists, Deesha Philyaw, stepped up to moderate.

Deesha is a freelance writer; her book, Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, was co-authored with her ex-husband. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and contributes to The Rumpus. Her co-panelists were Patrice Gopo, whose work can be seen in The New York Times and The Washington Post, Dennis Norris II, whose fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly and Apogee Journal, and Lisa Factora-Borchers, a writer and editor of the anthology Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Assault and has written for Refinery 29, The Feminist Wire, and Bitch Media.

In light of the subject of the panel and subsequently this article, I feel I should also identify myself. I am a white woman in my mid-twenties. I was born and raised in Mississippi before moving to London to get an MA in Publishing. I now live in Pittsburgh and intern for the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction. I feel the need to explain my background in order to expose and acknowledge my own biases and privilege. It’s the reason I attended this panel: I am aware of my privilege and I want to understand ways in which I can use it to amplify the voices that aren’t always heard.

The panel opened with a question that white writers don’t often have to consider when submitting their work to a publisher: What message does an all-white masthead send to you?

Dennis was the first to answer. When he sees that a magazine, journal, or publishing house’s leadership is mostly or entirely white, he’s “going to take a long pause” and consider whether he wants to send his work there. He feels that it signals that there is less space for his work at these publications and doesn’t want to waste time and energy by sending his writing to them.

Patrice agreed. When she sees that the leadership for a publication is all white, or even that they’re just a list of unidentifiable names on the publication’s website, she feels it’s likely the submission won’t be successful and that she won’t have anyone on her side, especially in a large company.

Lisa has sat on both sides of the desk, as a writer and as an editor. When she is looking for somewhere to submit, she is “strategic and protective” of her work. “It’s a form of self-care and pride,” she said. Lisa asserts that the writer has to believe in their work and find an editor and publisher who believes in it too, so the writer knows they’re making every effort for them.

As an editor, Lisa understands that an all-white masthead does send a message, even if it’s unintentional. If a company doesn’t make it clear that part of their vision is promoting diversity and equality, then they are “missing out on complex writing” and their talent will be “watered down”.

Fortunately, there is a way to communicate to writers shopping for places to submit their work that your publication is on their team. On your website, you should be intentional in your mission to inclusion and equality. Craft your mission statement to reflect this. If you do have people of color on your leadership team but the page introducing your masthead is a list of names, include head shots next to everyone’s name and title. And, especially, highlight your writers of color and what they bring to your publication.

As one might imagine, the writers on the panel all had experiences to share in which race came to bear, and most of the anecdotes were not particularly positive. Each writer agreed that often they were called on to be the “black perspective” on a subject, or that their work was chosen to be published merely to fulfill a quota for diversity in a publisher’s list. But they also had positive experiences to share.

Patrice gave us three characteristics that are helpful for a white editor to have.

1. A willingness to collaborate. She said that she has had authors push their perspectives on her work and attempt to change her writing to fit the narrative they want to portray. This is not helpful to the writer, nor is it helpful to the reader, who won’t be getting an honest representation if the editor has his or her way. Being willing to truly listen, collaborate, and provide a platform for the writer is imperative to being a good editor.
2. A sense of humility. White editors should acknowledge their bias and the fact that they won’t always understand the perspective of the writer.
3. Show that you value the work. Whether with monetary compensation (equal, of course, to the amount paid to white writers), or with nominations for awards and distinctions, show that you didn’t publish the work because the writer isn’t white, but that you truly find their work inspiring, exemplary, and worthy of recognition.

Lisa suggested that, when working with white editors, writers of color try to work exclusively with intentional editors who will be helpful in guiding them through the editorial and publishing process. Her experiences with editors such as these were positive because they “payed attention to the promise of [her] work” and gave her “thoughtful comments” and constructive critiques to help really improve her work. On the flip side of this, she’s had experiences where the editor gave her almost no feedback, simply telling her, “This is great”. Lisa noted that not only did this not help her hone her craft, but it made her feel like she was ticking a “diversity” box on their list and that her work wasn’t really valuable to the publication for anything other than that.

Another suggestion from Patrice, which all the panelists agreed with, was to read broadly. Step outside of your comfort zone with books. Dennis brought up the many reading challenges that have been circulating daring readers to read books that push their boundaries and broaden their understandings. Reading is known to increase empathy, and reading about experiences that differ from your own helps you better understand someone else’s worldview.

A question came from a writer of color who has become frustrated with all of the time and energy she has spent explaining privilege and prejudice to white people, in particular to publications with white leadership and white editors. She wanted to know how to handle these questions in the future and, half-jokingly, asked if she should start charging for the service. The answer from the panel was simple and unanimous: Just stop. It should not fall to people of color to constantly explain white privilege and the systems that keep it in place. In 2017, white people have white people for that. If the questions are coming from a sincere place, it is likely that the questioner has white friends who can answer them and guide them through their privilege—and there is always Google. There are multitudes of articles and think pieces like this one, this one, and this one, that can help you understand your own privilege, what to do about it, and what to do with it.

The overall lesson from the panel was this: Try. Try sincerely. Make an sincere and open effort to seek not only diversity, but strong voices to tell a strong story. At any publication, it’s the editor’s job to curate and cultivate the list they publish. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the editor more than anyone else to be intentional about finding writers of color with honest, powerful voices that deserve to be heard.

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Katie Hatcher is an avid reader, somewhat reluctant writer, and aspiring editor. She currently interns for Creative Nonfiction Magazine and has an MA in Publishing from Kingston University.

#AWP17 Conference Report — Kim MacQueen on “Digital Pedagogy for Beginners”

#AWP17 Panel: F124. Digital Pedagogy for Beginners

Description: From podcasts to Twitter essays to .gif novels, digital storytelling is on the rise. This panel is aimed at instructors interested in experimenting with this fascinating and challenging material, but unsure of how to begin. Panelists work to demystify the world of digital pedagogy by offering their experiences integrating new media into writing classes. Panelists also suggest examples, assignments and discussion topics appropriate for literature, creative writing and composition courses.

Panelists: Aubrey Hirsch, Faith Adiele, Brian Oliu, Adriana Ramirez, Erin Anderson

Conference Report

Five faculty members currently teaching digital storytelling in various forms at different institutions shared stories of both success and failure during this lighthearted, completely engaging Friday morning panel. If any one tagline can be said to encapsulate the discussion — which seemed designed to simultaneously pique instructors’ interest and calm their fears about the daunting amount of software they might have to learn in order to float a great digital storytelling class — it would be this one: Put the writing first.

“Remember who you are,” said Adriana Ramirez. “You are not animators, you are not documentary filmmakers. You are not graphic designers. Your focus is writing. Remember who you are and what your students want from you, which is to learn how to write.”

When she was first getting into digital pedagogy, Ramirez said, she “wanted to be all of these things. I would sit down and do all of the online tutorials for all of the software and I wanted to be able to do everything. And it’s not possible to do all of that and be a writer who writes.”

One way to stay focused, she suggested, is to avoid trying to achieve mastery of the tools students use to create their digital projects.

“Keep in mind that your classroom is a space where you’re teaching writing. It’s not a space where you’re teaching students how to use software. I give my students an audio clip of Sylva Plath reading ‘Daddy’ and I give them the piece of software Audacity, and I say, ‘Okay, you’re going to remix this. You have an hour.’ And they have no idea what they are doing. I throw them into the pool, into the deep end.”

The approach, she said, makes the classroom space feel like a place for play, breaks the tension and lowers the stakes.

“I find that play opens up all creative possibilities,” she said, adding that “some students will find that one effect that makes Sylvia Plath sound like a chipmunk that I did not know existed, and it brings me great joy.”

Still, Ramirez noted, sometimes things don’t go that well.

“Some of your students will not take to this. We have this idea that anyone born after 1995 must be a computer wizard. It is not true….” she said. “They’re people. Just because just because they’ve been glued to an iPad since birth doesn’t mean they know how to make things with it.”

Erin Anderson described assignments she uses in her flipped Pitt classrooms to introduce students to video essays in the style of Eula Biss and John Breland’s “Dust Off,” and other digital projects.

“I think there’s a bit of a danger when we approach the media as this tool that we just import our writing into,” Anderson warned. “Audio doesn’t really work quite the same way. Writing for the page is very different from writing for the ear.”

Writing for the page, Anderson said, allows the reader to go back and look at what they’ve seen a few pages ago. But someone listening to an audio essay ideally should be led “to follow you along the path as you’re going through an audio piece. It involves a lot more signposting.”

Aubrey Hirsch noted she was first drawn to digital storytelling after seeing Dinty Moore’s Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge, an essay told entirely through Google Maps, first published in The Normal School in 2010.

“I thought, wow. I didn’t know you could make a story like that,” Hirsch said.

She talked about the importance of helping students to realize what they’re learning about digital writing as they’re learning it, rather than emphasizing successful completion of projects that not all students are ready for. She advocated assigning written reflections on “the process of their creation, how they feel like their story and their chosen form for the story work together.”

“I ask them to tell me about their triumphs and pitfalls, because sometimes they’ll go pretty far down a road with a certain platform and it’ll completely fall apart, and they’ll have to start over and do something completely different. Which I think is great,” Hirsch said. “I want them to have that trial and error, and then I want to give them credit for having done that.”

Brian Oliu described elegant efforts toward his intention to educate students about literary citizenship using social media.

“My goal for my students is to make them recognize that the writing world is an active place that they are welcome to join,” Oliu said. “We don’t wish our students to write as a means to an end, or simply to get a good grade in a course.”

Oliu’s students actively engage in social media, whether they’re tweeting lines of stories in progress, publishing poetry on Yelp.com or following Augusten Burroughs while he live-tweets HGTV shows. The medium helps students educate themselves about their chosen vocation and realize the most celebrated writers are often just like them: “They too struggle with writing. They too order pizza. They too watch sporting events.”

Faith Adiele brought the panel home with a reminder to all writers that digital storytelling can and should reframe the whole writing and reading experience not just for teachers and students in classrooms, but for everyone, globally.

“New media ain’t new,” she said. “New media allows us the opportunity to return to ancient forms of storytelling, which are rooted in the global self.”

“I’m really trying to make my students feel that these are types forms of storytelling that resonate with what we learned around our mothers’ kitchen tables, and that they do belong to all of us,” she said. “This stuff interrupts nonlinear, Western modes of storytelling. So it’s an opportunity to really question what is storytelling about, who’s your audience, and how does writing in digital spaces then change how we’re read as well as how we craft our narratives?”

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Kim MacQueen lives in Burlington, Vermont. She is currently a student in the Bay Path University MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She serves as a faculty advisor in Champlain College’s Communication and Creative Media division, teaches in the Professional Writing program and is managing editor of the Champlain College Publishing Initiative. She is the author of the novels Out, Out and People Who Hate America. She has published short stories in The Southeast Review and Creative Loafing Atlanta; her essays have appeared in The Morning News, The Fiddleback and The Stonecoast Review.

#AWP17 Conference Report — Kristine Langley Mahler on “Home: A Four-Letter Word”

#AWP17 Panel: F119. Home: A Four-Letter Word

Description: Home is a loaded word, a complex idea: it’s a place that’s safe, sentimental, difficult, nourishing, war-torn, and political. It’s a place we escape and a place we create. This panel of women writers discuss the ways in which they confront home in their work, including writing within and rebelling against the idea of home as a woman’s place. What choices do we make to reveal, deconstruct, and imagine homes for our characters? In what ways do our homes inform our real and imagined selves?

Panelists: Sonya Chung, Rachel DeWoskin, Kelly McMasters, Hasanthika Sirisena, Elissa Washuta

Conference Report

9:00am, on the second full day of AWP, in a little room tucked in the corner of the basement warren of the Marriott Marquis, Kelly McMasters moderated this panel of four women, all of whom are contributors to the forthcoming anthology Wherever I’m With You (Seal Press), which should be available in November 2017. McMasters commented on the wide variety of approaches that these writers took when discussing what “home” means—the essays all look at home, but acknowledge that it is a complex concept.

Elissa Washuta introduced herself in Cowlitz, naming her mother and father and her grandmothers, and reminded the audience that we were currently on occupied Piscataway land. Washuta read from her piece for Wherever I’m With You and spoke about the difficulty she faces in attempting to identify a home when her lineage is full of fractures. Washuta is an enrolled member of the Cowlitz tribe of Oregon/Washington, though she grew up on the East Coast. When Washuta moved to her current hometown of Seattle, she found that by being closer to the land her ancestors have learned from, land had become a source of knowledge for her: when she calls Seattle home now, it’s because the ancestors are there.

Hasanthika Sirisena chose to speak extemporaneously about home, which is a conflicted subject for her, saying, “I made a conscious decision not to have a home.” Sirisena is Sri Lankan and grew up in North Carolina, knowing many people who were in America only because their homes had been taken by the governments of their home countries. The twenty-five year civil war in Sri Lanka caused enormous upheaval and a mistrust of home for Sirisena since home was used as the building block of a nationalist ideology—Sirisena reminded the audience that home isn’t necessarily the safe space we think it is. Later, Sirisena spoke at length about how her mother was “the bravest person I know” for creating a home in North Carolina that did not sacrifice her mother’s identity.

Sonya Chung confronted the idea that a woman’s place is in the home—and that home is not always a happy place. Chung’s parents left their homeland and experienced the trauma of settling into a new place, which reverberated through Chung’s childhood in various permutations. Chung incorporated her unsettled feelings about home into the main character from her novel Long For This World—the woman is a photojournalist who only feels at home when she is between places. Chung spoke about the search for home which had plagued her, and the necessity she found to transgress boundaries in order to find a version of “home” which suited her—Chung found it “unusual to live somewhere without pining for another place,” but her current neighborhood is at a crossroads between two neighborhoods, and she finally feels satisfied.

Rachel DeWoskin shared her experience living in Beijing as a child and how she viewed her “house [in America], which had been so central, like a tiny green Monopoly house—so insignificant” in reality. That distance between perception and realizing one’s smallness in the vastness of the world remained with DeWoskin, who noted that if you stay somewhere too long, you can’t see where you are anymore—she said she had to leave both America and China in order to see what her home was. DeWoskin starred in a Chinese soap opera called “Foreign Babes in Beijing” (which cracked the audience up), and DeWoskin told a story about how the directors wanted her character to wear a long fur coat—though she was supposed to be an American college student. When DeWoskin mentioned this disconnect to the producers, they told her that it was, in fact, what the audience thought American college students wore, and DeWoskin realized that “If 1.6 billion people have an idea about my home, even if it isn’t how I see it, that has value.” DeWoskin noted the moral nuance of having been an insider—a Beijing resident—while playing a conspicuous interloper, and ultimately concluded that her “home was contained in the English language.”

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Kristine Langley Mahler has nonfiction recently published or forthcoming in Quarter After Eight, Sweet, Rock & Sling, and Tahoma Literary Review. Her work was awarded the 2016 Rafael Torch Literary Nonfiction Award from Crab Orchard Review, and she is currently researching a grant-funded nonfiction project about immigration/inhabitation on native land. Kristine is a nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel and a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.