Writing With Abandon

Reflections and ramblings about life as an educator, writer, reader, knitter, and over-thinker. Trying to do the writing only I can do.

Tag: a writing date

  • Could you have known?

    Dear 2021 Amy,

    Do you remember that first writer’s workshop session?

    It was just after 2pm on a weekday in August. You had a class of just 13 students, no co-teacher, squeezed onto the rug of that tiny room. Everyone was wearing masks, including you — yours was fabric, a light blueish-green with stripes that your dad’s bandmate’s wife had made. You could feel your breath warming as you spoke; you yanked the mask down slightly to be heard over the loud air conditioner, looked down at your lesson plan:

    Session 1. We Are Writers

    You hugged your notebook to your chest, which you had just decorated the weekend before at a friend’s house. You cut out patterns and letters from magazines. Your name — A-M-Y — on the front, your two words — JOY and CONNECTION — on the back, a quote from Jason Reynolds — “Writing is like any other sort of sport. In order for you to get better at it, you have to exercise the muscle.” — collaged between images that spoke to you, photos of family and friends. Under your chair, behind your legs, 13 fresh composition notebooks sat in a bin, waiting to be handed out.

    “Good afternoon, writers,” you started, feeling the hum of those words take flight and dip into the ears and minds of the students before you. “This year, we will write for many purposes and audiences. We will embark on this writing journey together.”

    Ana’s lesson plan said: “(Make a big fuss handing out NBs.)”

    So, of course, ever the good student, you did, handing each notebook to a pair of reaching hands as you told them that next week, they’d have the opportunity to decorate their notebooks with photos, drawings, quotes, and more.

    You settled back into your chair, leaned forward ever so slightly.

    “Today I want to teach you that the only thing writers need is a pen, paper, and a beating heart. We write about what we know, what we see, what happens to us or others. Everything we experience can become a story if we capture it in our notebooks.”

    Could you have known then that you were giving them the tools they’d need to write their own slices of life?

    Could you have known then that this lesson is timeless, that “today and every day,” you really can “see every idea that pops in your head as a possibility for a story”?

    Could you have known then that Ana would become much more than a mentor, a writing partner, a friend?

    Could you have known then that you would have so many more magical moments with those students, and the next group, and the next, and the next?

    The half groups in 2022, in the bright windowed corner room. The writing conferences where a student’s pen started racing across the page before you stepped away. The independent writing time when you were writing too, and it was so silent you could hear a pin drop because you’d forgotten to put on the music, but it didn’t matter because everyone was in flow.

    Could you ever have known then that by teaching kids to believe themselves to be writers, you’d be helping the writer in you find her way out onto the page again?

    Could you have known then that you were speaking as much to yourself, the dormant writer, as you were to them, the writers-to-be?

    I know now, so I write to the you of then:

    Writer’s workshop will, without a doubt, change your life.

    Yours, always,

    Amy

  • Ramblings on Memoir

    As a middle schooler, I wrote stories about fictional characters, manifesting events that I hoped would unfold in my life (I remember one specifically about a girl who goes to a lake in the summer with friends, her crush telling her he liked her, them sharing a kiss on a boat one afternoon). I wrote fiction because I didn’t know how to write about my life other than writing in my diary. I had file after file of stories on my eMac computer, most lacking endings. 

    In high school, a few of my teachers had us write stories in the style of an author, which was my favorite way to show my understanding of a novel (like writing a “grotesque” a la Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, or writing in the style of Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway, the sentences verging on run-ons, lyrical and open). One teacher had us write page 200-something of our life memoir. I wrote about taking the crosstown bus to see my sister and meet my niece/nephew for the first time. 

    My friends and I became obsessed with freewriting after our teacher, Annie Thoms, had us get in the habit at the beginning of her writing workshop each day: set the timer, 10 minutes, only one rule — Don’t. Stop. Writing. Gemma would message me prompts on iChat in the evenings, a spattering of seemingly disconnected words — rose, schoolbus, blood, feather, bag of chips — and I would give her one in return — water bottle, field, purse, knife, lamp. We’d set our timers and see what would come out.

    In college, I went to school for creative writing and literature, thinking I’d write the Next Great American Novel. What I found was that I was much more interested in writing creative nonfiction than anything else. In my fiction classes, I’d end up writing memoirs thinly disguised as stories, and I wouldn’t get away with it. 

    “The craft is good,” my fiction professor would tell me when it was my turn for feedback, “but it doesn’t read as fiction.”

    I was lucky to take a class with professor and writer Kirsten Lunstrum, who encouraged my genre-bending and personal narrative writing. The first personal essay I wrote for her seemed to climb its way out of me, my fingers racing across the keyboard as I hurried to catch it all. I later took an independent study with her where I practiced more memoir writing and dipped my toes into fiction in a safe, brave space. But she left before my senior year, and I never got the mentorship — nor had the confidence — I felt I needed to finish with a strong creative writing project. I set aside my 30-page personal essay about me, my sister, and my mom, and focused on my literature thesis. I dropped the final required creative writing seminar and graduated without the double major. 

    I carry a lot of shame around that decision. 

    What was wrong with me that I couldn’t write actual fiction? What was wrong with the other creative writing professors that they couldn’t see the value in memoir? 

    I didn’t feel “good enough,” whatever that meant. And I stopped writing, for a long time. I’d come back to it in spurts, as the files on my computer prove to me:

    • STARTING MAY 2013
    • Starting oct 2017
    • One file from 2019 in a folder titled simply: “ramblings”
    • Three files in a folder titled “2020 Writings”

    But mostly, I let it slip away until I started teaching writer’s workshop in August 2021.

    Two weekends ago, Ana and I met up to record a few podcast episodes and go on our first writing date for a while at Books and Books. We ate delicious sandwiches, I purchased some books and a new notebook, and then we set out to write. I opened up my laptop to the fictional story I had started a few days earlier (my “novel,” I was calling it — no name, no real direction, just a feeling). I typed a few sentences and then felt it creeping up: the imposter syndrome. The “not good enough.” The you-don’t-even-know-how-to-write-a-short-story-so-why-would-you-try-a-novel? The if-you-can’t-write-a-fictional-story-are-you-even-a-writer-at-all?

    “I’m just going to read,” I told Ana, my cheeks flushed. Her fingers were racing across the keyboard, clacking away as she typed at a story that had materialized in her mind, big magic blooming.

    I opened up Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell, finding comfort in his encouraging words: “Start writing, and the draft will come.” 

    Later, I found discomfort in a podcast episode Ana sent me — a man telling his listeners that before you write it, your novel needs to have an elevator pitch, otherwise it’s probably not a very good one. He had some good advice, but most of it was lost in a sea of other advice that made me feel very, very small.

    “I don’t have an elevator pitch,” I told her. “I don’t know what my novel is about.” 

    I didn’t write for a week. 

    Then, a few days ago, I opened up the other book I’d purchased: Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos, a writer who had taught at my college the year before I arrived. My friend Bob always told me I would have loved her classes. 

    And her words lit something up in me. 

    “But my own story wouldn’t leave me alone,” she writes in the first chapter. “It called to me the way I have since come to recognize is the call of my best stories, the ones that most need to be told. So I wrote it” (Body Work 7).

    I could feel again the sensation of that first story I wrote for Kirsten’s class, how it nagged at me until I got it out, how it flew out of me effortlessly. I know writing does not always come that easily — trust me, I do. 

    But I also know what it feels like to have a story that won’t leave me alone. And for me, that’s never been fiction.