Twenty or so years ago, I was working on earning my MFA in creative writing with a concentration in nonfiction. I’m not sure how it works these days, but back then we had to choose our genre of focus from among the big three (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) when applying to the program. The three years prior, I had lived in Thailand (where my dad is from) and one of those years had been in a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border. Needless to say, the topic of my thesis was based around my experiences teaching (primarily English with forays into science) and living in the refugee camp. Was it a memoir? Was it reportage? Was it something else altogether? I still don’t really know, much to the chagrin (at the time) of some professors.
I didn’t feel like I had a lot of support for my work other than from a few generous and caring classmates. I was naive and what I took as constructive criticism was actually silencing me and cutting me off from creativity. I was encouraged to write into a very narrow ideal. The path to that ideal shaved off most of what made me unique and human. At the time, I wasn’t aware that this was what was going on. In various ways, my professors called my writing disorganized, messy, disjointed, floundering and more. I internalized that.
Since I graduated, I’ve had moments and stretches of writing and even publishing, but it was always a struggle for me. That narrow idea of what constitutes good writing struck with me and yet I was unable to shoehorn myself into that particular glass slipper. Rather than cut off my heels and toes to fit, I’d stop writing altogether for long stretches. (Although isn’t that a sort of self amputation?)
In the past five years or so, I found my way back to writing just for myself in my journal. I would, on occasion even find my way to some sort of “finished” project to submit somewhere. And I had stretches of blogging (not this one, clearly, but one that I’ve since closed down). But it was always a struggle. I’d attempt to organize the messy, disjointed thoughts in my mind into something that would be acceptable or at least accepted. I caught dozens of arrow-like rejections. Internalized those too.
A year or so ago, I swore off blogging even and let go of my last one. I kept writing for myself in my journal. But as for writing beyond that, well, let’s just say the rejection was coming from inside the house. So much had I internalized the comments about my writing, that I did everyone a favor and just shut it down myself.
Over the past year or so, I encountered a few people, books, and communities that have started to rewrite that internal monologue for me. It’s been a slow process for me; the internalizations are bone deep. And so it was that limping and soul weary, I was called to the doorsteps of a few writing mentors. First, I joined a virtual writing community for women writers of color called The Sanctuary and created by Lori L Tharps. I took a poetry writing virtual class with Ariana Brown (and went on to do a mentorship with her). Both women are writers, champions of writers, and soul healers amongst many, many other things. And both have created spaces where I’ve been able to undo much of the damage done by my MFA. I am eternally grateful to them and I highly recommend any and all writers look to the resources they’ve created. Both Lori and Ariana eschew the concept of the lone, solitary writer furiously typing away in her room of her own. (Check out this podcast for Lori’s succinct take down of Woolf’s ideology). Rather, both of them preach the gospel of community. I was at first averse to this, so ingrained were the “go it alone” ideals of the MFA classroom. Falsehoods, all, of course. No writers that we studied were ever really doing it all by themselves and the most self aware never professed to. Ariana and Lori back up their words by offering workshops, virtual spaces, classes, mentorships and more which support writerly community. Of course, the most obvious place to find writing community is in books.
And so I have also been reading and this too has been healing. I just finished Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir by Deborah A Miranda and I am undone. Or maybe not so much that I am undone as the false lessons that I internalized in school are undone.
Above, I mentioned that my MFA program split up writers into three genres: poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. This division becomes comically arbitrary in the hands of a writer like Miranda whose book (which is marketed under “memoir”) forays into prose and poetry alike alongside graphics, fiction, primary source historical documents, letters, and more. Even Miranda’s own sleeping dream becomes source material. The end result is a three dimensional mosaic pulling pieces from unexpected times and spaces.
I wondered, as I read, whether anyone ever told Miranda that her work was disorganized and disjointed. I’m guessing yes. And so it is that seeing and experiencing something like this in print is particularly healing to me as a writer who has felt constrained by this sort of commentary.
The other thing that Bad Indians does so masterfully is to tell the story of the individual and the collective simultaneously. This, too, goes against so much of what we are told about what memoir is. My thesis for my MFA was about my time teaching and living in a refugee camp but it was also (attempting) to tell the stories of my students, co-workers, and those I was living amongst. But in order to complete my thesis, I felt I had to choose: either the story of the individual or the collective. It was not a choice I could make. Through these experiences, writing became a chore. It was neither liberating nor exciting to be always trying to hammer the stories I was telling into a western framework. By revealing what is possible when we move outside of this, Miranda’s work is re-invigorating for a writer like me.
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