Tuesday Musings on Writing

The first cliché in writing:
Write what you know.

But how do you make “what you know” worth reading when what you know is, by all accounts, a fairly pedestrian white middle class existence?

I’m 26 years old. I’m married, to a guy I love very much and even better, like a whole lot. We bought a house with a yard and yes, even a white picket fence. We both work at jobs we like in theory but struggle with in practice. We have loving, if slightly kooky, families who want what’s best for us and have no problems letting us know just what they think that is.

This is not the stuff of literary legend.

Sure, there’s plenty of drama to propel our lives forward. Will our couple ever decide what they’re having for dinner tonight? Will THIS be the weekend that the downstairs bathroom finally is finished? We wait, with bated breath, to see if our hero can locate the missing netbook in the abyss of the last unpacked room! :Cue the dramatic music taking us into the commercial break.:

And I think that’s part of where my lack of focus on my creative work has come from over the last few years. It’s seemed doubtful that I had anything interesting to say.

Thankfully, before I can get too despondent about my lack of tortured artist material, I go to work. I have what some might think is an unusual job: I’m a clinician at a juvenile detention center, doing therapy with adolescent males who are awaiting trial on a variety of offenses, from shoplifting to attempted murder. These are kids from all walks of life, though many of them are exactly the cliché you’ve heard before: poor kids with an ethnic minority background coming from a single parent household, usually with a history of substance abuse and/or involvement with street gangs. But it’s not exactly like living in Stand by Me. For as many kids as I help in a day, I’m pretty sure there’s an equal number who want the white girl to step off and stop bothering them. There’s the struggles that one might expect: engaging parents who are fed up with their kids breaking the law, a legal system that penalizes poor kids more than rich kids (and minority kids more than anyone), the bureaucracy of working for the state. And others one might not (ok, the ones I didn’t when I signed up for this): adjusting to working with mostly men and the woefully stereotypical ego trips that ensue, the relative mountains of paperwork coupled with a reticent fax machine, the feeling of taking one step forward, two steps back when there’s not enough of anything: time, money, staff, hope.

When I contrast what my daily life is like with the kids that I spend a good chunk of my time worrying about, it’s pretty obvious that I’d take my life, domestically docile as it is, a hundred times before I’d want to live theirs. But I have the genuine privilege of hearing their stories, getting to see into a world that I could never be a part of otherwise. Stepping into someone else’s shoes, if only for a few minutes, and attempting to see the world from his perspective, and understand the choices that he’s made, is a daily lesson in minimizing judgment, maximizing patience, and keeping a genuine desire to empathize.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what I, as myself, would have to say. Being primarily a poet and living in the age of the memoir (think: The Glass Castle, Running with Scissors, even A Thousand Little Pieces, tenuous though the writer's concept of reality actually was), it's easy to slip into the trap of needing to write from the perspective of ME, from inside my own admittedly narrow experience. But why? In my professional life, my job is empathize, understand and advocate. The ethos of social work has always been giving a voice to the voiceless (which is, of course, another cliche. But when you look at the history of the profession, it's also accurate!). And, at it's bedrock, that’s what writers do. They take the perspective of a character, someone who is all at once completely unique and still (hopefully at least), representative of some part of the reader that they can connect with. They let you see into someone else’s world you wouldn’t be part of otherwise.

So maybe it’s time to get over myself and just write, and see what happens.

The FranzenFreude Twitter Explosion!

In addition to my new venture into the world of blogging, I've also recently joined Twitter. I know, I'm officially three years behind the rest of the world. I held out because, well, to be blunt... it seemed like a purely narcissistic exercise, contained to 140 characters or less. Embarrassingly, the only reason I joined was to follow update's from a friend's sister's trainwreck of a wedding (there were feathers and balloons and vows that included "will you take this beautiful bride" and "her special day"... I won't say more, because it might become my novel someday, and I'll owe Maria some royalty money). But as it turns out, I picked the perfect time to join, thanks to the firestorm of the last few days known as Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult kicking ass and taking names all over the Twitterverse with regards to coverage of women in the reviews by the New York Times.

I'd be lying if I said I spend much time thinking about what does and doesn't make the pages of a newspaper I don't even read. Especially lately when it comes to reading, I pick things I like and don't spend a lot of time thinking about what "category" they fit into, whether it be genre or literary vs commercial fiction. And I've consumed more than my fair share of stereotypical "chick lit"... you know, the books with bubblegum pink covers that are invariably about some desperately-seeking-love-and-glam-accessories woman traipsing around Manhattan in high heels of masochistic proportions. But I was genuinely surprised that anyone would lump writers like Picoult and Weiner into that category.

I've only read one Picoult book and wasn't wowed. To be fair, it was My Sister's Keeper, and I may have fallen victim to my own high expectations of the book after all the raves I'd heard. Curtis Sittenfeld met the same fate for me with Prep. (Who, I might add, fits oddly into this debate since Sittenfeld IS such a literary darling.) But Sittenfeld redeemed herself for me with American Wife, and I hope I can pick up another Jodi Picoult that will change my perception. But, putting personal taste aside, her books are universally known for being thought provoking and getting at themes of life, death and redemption that those in the "New York glamazon-wanna-be" genre wouldn't touch with a ten inch liner pencil. Yes, it's commercial, but it's commercial because it's readable and relevant. Is that such a bad thing?

And I'll shout loud and proud that I'm a HUGE Jennifer Weiner fan. Her books are some of my favorites, the ones I leave under my bedside table because I want to read them over and over. The characters are like friends, relatable and, most importantly, REAL, no matter the ridiculous situation that Weiner had presented them with this time around. They're emotional, irrational, and flawed... and fabulous because of, not in spite of, that.

Because I'm so personally invested, it stings a bit to hear hear her work denigrated as "chick lit." Yes, it's about women, likely FOR women, and touches on "feminine" themes... motherhood, romantic relationships, bonds between sisters and daughters. But are books that center on masculine themes "jock lit"? Male authors don't seem to get pigeonholed as easily as female writers, which is really the whole point of this entire twittercize. (A stretch? Probably.)

I wish commercial success and critical acclaim didn't have to appear to be diametrically opposed in the publishing world. Does being taken seriously have to equal taking yourself, and your readers, TOO seriously? To the point of coming off as elitist or, dare I say it, snobbish? I used to be the type of person that read LIT'rature and wanted to deconstruct it, understand it, make a brilliant point about it. Now, I just want to enjoy it. And by enjoy, I mean have something that captures my imagination and my emotions, whether its fleeting (as with the more glamazon iterations of "chick lit") or more enduring, like I see in my favorite authors: Ernest Hemingway, Khaled Hosseni, Wally Lamb, Nick Horby, Barbara Kingsolver and yes, Jennifer Weiner. And I think it's from a place of maturity where I can say that sometimes, I just want to read what I LIKE, not what's supposed to be EXCELLENT. And for me, for now, that's good enough.

A different kind of education

August is winding down, which immediately calls to mind going back to school. I was a student for 18 years straight, from kindergarten through the end of my MSW in 2008. So much of my identity was tied up in that notion, for a couple of reasons. First of all, despite working along with going to school since I was about 13, it was all I'd known. Secondly, I was pretty good at it! I love learning, the process of uncovering something you didn't know was there. This may or may not make me a giant nerd... and I'm ok with that. :-) Plus, there's a certain security in being a student. If you screw up, hey, you're just a student! You're still learning. There's no expectation of expertness, or having all the answers.

Since I finished my formal education a little more than two years ago, I've been really focused on transitioning OUT of that life... trying to feel more settled, more expert, more focused than I was as a student. And I think I've settled into a place where I feel more confident, more permanent. But, to use a cliche, there's two sides to every coin, and along with feeling more settled comes feeling less spontaneous, less creative. I used to be a pretty dedicated poet, but I haven't written any new material since my first year of grad school. I used to read to discover, uncover, extract meaning. Now I read for pleasure. There's nothing WRONG with that, per se, but it's very different than the person I used to be.

So this is my attempt to reconnect with those pieces of me that are more creative, to engage my brain and my emotions in a different way. I want to think and write about my favorite poems and books, and maybe get up the courage to put some of my own work out there, once I start writing again. 

In its basic form, social work isn't that different than the process of reading and writing. I watch and listen, and try to elicit insight, put pieces together, find something someone hasn't found before that will change the whole perception. Bogged down in the day to day, it's hard to see the art in what I do, but I hope by reconnecting with my more obviously creative pursuits, I can re-energize my professional creativity as well.

So there you have it! Congrats for making it this far, and I hope that if people stick around, they can add their own thoughts here!