critique
This feels like a dangerous thing to admit to group of people that includes current, former, and hopefully future students, but I started teaching writing essentially by accident. I knew folks at Writing Workshops LA (RIP!) because my mom had taken classes and then taught there, and they needed someone to teach intro non-fiction; despite the fact that I had been freelancing for exactly one year, they asked me to cover the class, and, because I was a freelancer who always needed money, I said yes. That was almost four years ago now.
I got lucky; my first round of students were super smart and chill, and the class went well enough that I kept teaching for WWLA until they were forced to close by a well-intentioned but badly written labor law (lol remember when AB5 was our biggest problem) and then I struck out on my own. Now I teach on Zoom, a class I call Writing for the Internet as well as various fiction workshops.
I have a good handful of students who've taken multiple classes with me, so I know I can't be awful at it, and yet I still feel extremely self-conscious about my credentials as a teacher. Some of that is the eternal I don't have an MFA stuff (yes, I could solve this by getting an MFA but you tell me where the money and time come from), and some of it I think is just, like, my disposition, man. The fact that no one exactly taught me how to write, and also how I'm not sure I believe that writing can be taught, exactly.
I mean, I'm not like, intentionally defrauding everyone. I just always feel like a teacher should be someone who has answers, and my whole deal is that I have none. I have anecdotes and suggestions and many, many thoughts; I have strategies others have tried and liked. I have accountability and encouragement. I try to think of what I do as making space and offering resources more than instruction per se. That helps and then sometimes it doesn't.
Anyway this is the looongest way of saying that I was extremely in my feelings when I interviewed Matthew Salesses about his new book, Craft in the Real World, which is about how we might reimagine MFA programs away from the fundamentally colonialist gag rule workshop model and toward something bigger and more inclusive and empathetic.
Because there's also part of me that's grateful I don't have an MFA, to be honest. There are certain bad habits or old styles I never had to unlearn. I taught one (1) gag rule workshop; we spent the whole time discussing what turned out to be a simple misreading of the text, so that the person being workshopped got zero (0) useful advice from us, and after that I decided I wasn't going to do that anymore. Ta-da! There's a lot to be gained from not feeling like you're part of anyone's storied (ha) tradition, and I think that goes double for me as a YA writer. Lotta people don't think what I do is art anyway, which means I get to do it however I want.
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I also interviewed a bunch of people whose books came out this week! Denise Hamilton, who edited a collection called Speculative Los Angeles, as well as Catie Disabato and Courtney Summers and Anna Carey. Catie's book is called U Up? and it's about ghosts and bars and magic and the prickly entanglements of found family in your late 20's; Courtney's book is called The Project and it's about reimagining who joins cults and why; Anna's book is This is Not the Jess Show and it's about discovering that your mother hasn't just been writing a blog about you; she's been livestreaming your life since you were born. They're all excellent and I recommend checking out at least one, if not all four.
Last not least: I do have one spot left in my March Beginning Fiction workshop-- uhhhhh anyone want it?