The Generosity of Other Writers
I've been the fortunate recipient of a great deal of narrative generosity over the course of my writing career. It was the influence of one of these, Maryland poet Margot Treitel, who compelled me to write my book, The Geek's Guide to the Writing Life, an "instructional memoir" about living the writing life today. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:My name is Stephanie Vanderslice and I am the opposite of cool. In Western society, this means I’m an outsider. A geek. No, not the kind of geek who can quote lengthy passages from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although I have given birth to people with this talent. I mean that, literally or metaphorically, I’ve never sat at the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria in my life. I wouldn’t even know what to do or say there if I had. I’m okay with this reality. In fact, I’m kind of proud of it. In fact, I think most people share this reality with me. The cool kids’ table just isn’t that big.Just as there are cool and uncool people in high school, freaks and geeks, brains and jocks, name your label, there are also cool writers and uncool writers. Some of this might have to do with talent (Ann Patchett, for example, is very cool in my opinion, because she is such a luminous writer), some with drive (Elizabeth Gilbert, famous as she might be right now, waited tables while she wrote for over a decade), often talent and drive (word has it that Ann Patchett waited tables at TGIF Fridays; Elizabeth Gilbert is no slouch in the talent department). Some of it might have to do with trends (Do you have tattoos? Yes? One coolness point for you!), attitude, good fortune, and the ability to hold one’s liquor. Some of it also has to do with early success, loosely defined as achieving a high profile in the literary world before the age of 40 and publishing a lot of books while pulling down a lot of grants, awards, and residencies along the way. This is all well and good. I’m a great champion of literary culture, even if it means I must endure yet another feature story about the “friendly” competition between two hipster authors for “voice of his generation” bragging rights (pronoun use deliberate; they don’t call them pissing contests for nothing).But what if you’re not in this category and you still feel driven to write? You’ve always felt driven to write, to create, yes, even to publish, to share your work with someone else.This book is for you. I’m calling it an instructional memoir because as a terminally unhip writer who has managed to lead a pretty fulfilling writing life, I think what I’ve learned so far and the stories of how I learned it can be useful for the rest of us, for those who didn’t go to Iowa or Yaddo or grab an NEA grant or a Guggenheim along the way.
In a world of sound bites and people who roll their eyes at blocks of text longer than a paragraph, we’re the people who have lists of 'favourite words,' who gasp audibly at a particularly breathtaking line.
Do I sound bitter? I’m not, really, because the fact is, I never applied to Iowa or Yaddo or tried to get an NEA grant (having gotten my MFA back in the day, when Poets & Writers magazine was still printed on black and white newsprint and the Internet was just a flicker in Al Gore’s eye, I didn’t even know those last two were things you were supposed to aim for, like steps on a ladder). George Mason University, where I got my degree, was always my first choice and I got in to all three programs I applied. Anyway, even if I had achieved some of those distinctions, I still probably wouldn’t be cool. What with all this genome mapping, it’s only a matter of time before they discover that there’s actually a gene for coolness. I can tell you right now: I don’t have it.But here’s the thing—you don’t really have to be cool to be a writer. Even the terminally unhip like me can do it. Lean in here and I’ll tell you the secret, something you’ll read over and over again in this book: leading a writing life is more about doing the writing than anything else. Doing the writing when no one else really cares what you’re doing, because—lean back in, I wasn’t finished—they don’t. It’s also about figuring out a way to make space for that writing in your life and then, maybe finding some success with it, however you define that. Because even though most writers would still write even if they were the last person on earth, publishing a few things, maybe even a book, here and there, proof that we are still connecting with others through our words, is sometimes the extra little push we need to keep us going.In fact, the more I think about my definition of writing geek and weigh what’s “hip” and what is not, the more I think that geeks like us might be especially suited for the writing life because of our enthusiasm for it. Stay with me here. The word “geek” is a synonym for the word “nerd.” Stratospherically-gifted young adult author John Green defines being a nerd like this:“… nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff … Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it … when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is, ‘You like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness.”In this context, being a writing geek is something to be proud of. In a world of sound bites and people who roll their eyes at blocks of text longer than a paragraph, we’re the people who have lists of “favourite words,” who gasp audibly at a particularly breathtaking line. Maybe we mortify friends and family with our lack of irony and ability to control our enthusiasm, but that’s okay. As literature ebbs and flows in the 21st century and threatens to morph into something else entirely, I’d certainly rather be on the side of celebrating it than regarding the miracle of language with eye-rolling disdain.But that doesn’t mean that people like us don’t get a little discouraged sometimes, that we don’t wonder how we’re going to keep all that jumping-up-and-down-in-the-chair intensity burning, to find the time to get it from your head to the page, when the world doesn’t really want you to. When you’re tired from your day job and your friend from college just published a book or bought a big house and you just don’t know how to scrape up the energy and the motivation to keep writing.
Just like music conservatories and art schools, writing programs are one way for generations of writers to find and support one another.
This book is here, I am here, to help you.The truth is, when I look back over my last 30 years and settle my gaze upon the naive, dewy-18-year-old writing geek I once was, I can’t believe I’m still here, doing this, that I still get to do this (although I’m telling you now, you don’t need anyone’s permission), that I even get paid to teach writing to young people. While I am tempted to say how lucky I am, because that’s what everyone seems to say about life in the arts, really, luck didn’t have that much to do with it. Whether I was mindful of them or not—honestly, I think I became more mindful as the years progressed—a lot of the steps I took to become the successful writing geek I am today were fairly deliberate. As a result, I feel certain that while the writers at the cool table may be few, if you read this story/guide and follow my lead, the satisfying life of a writing geek is well within your grasp.If you don’t believe me, now is a good time to tell you about one of my mentors in writing geekery, Margot Treitel.Margot Treitel was my best friend Hannah’s mother. When I met her in 1989 I was graduating from college and standing on the cusp of a writing life. For graduation, Margot, a widely-published poet, gave me a copy of her chapbook, The Inside Story, which contained poems about her early years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, about family life, about growing older. I didn’t know then that chapbook or book-giving is symbolic for poets; a sign of respect, but I did feel validated. How I wish she and her husband, Ralph, had lived long enough that I could have returned the favour with one of my own books.Well-known in the Maryland literary arts scene and beyond, Margot and Ralph Treitel, both writers, founded the Little Patuxent Review in Columbia, Maryland in the 1970s as a way to build the arts scene in the Mid-Atlantic—and build it they did, with readings, festivals, public access TV shows. In fact, the review was revived ten years ago in their memory and I have even had the honour of being rejected from it—but I’ll keep trying.Ralph and Margot lived in a townhouse in Columbia, Maryland, and until Ralph’s debilitating stroke, he held a day job with the Social Security Administration while Margot raised their daughters and continued to write, publish, and perform her work in hundreds of venues. Their lives were modest but rich, so rich in art. Books and videos (they were also movie buffs) lined the walls. African art mixed with Victorian settees.Since I was pursuing my MFA only an hour and a half away, Hannah and I often used her parents' home as a central meeting place. While I witnessed one kind of writing life when someone like Robert Stone or Tim O’Brien blew into town via my MFA program, holding court for a few hours at a bar like the Tiki Lounge in Washington, the lessons I learned at Ralph and Margot’s home were more powerful and lasting.
Margot lived in that grey area, in the in-between, and she showed me that it was possible.
Author Carol Lloyd, whose book, Creating a Life Worth Living: A Practical Course in Career Design for Artists, Innovators and Others Aspiring to a Creative Life, I recommend highly for anyone considering a literary life (published in 1997, it is telling that it remains in print), points out that we have a rather black and white, either/or way of viewing success in the arts in America. Either we achieve success on the level of Stephen King or Elizabeth Gilbert, that is, making a flush living purely through our art, or we are abject failures, mopping the tile floors at Burger King. This fatalistic attitude eliminates the grey area, the in-between where it’s possible to pursue art and make a living, although they are not always the same thing. But the grey area—for an artist, a writer, the grey area is everything.One of my writing teachers, Richard Bausch, used to remind us to cherish the relationships we were forming in our writing classes because once we returned to the “outside world,” we’d once more find ourselves among the masses of people for whom writing and reading, words, didn’t mean as much as they did to us (always a people pleaser, I took advice so far as to marry one of my classmates). He was right about this, of course. Just like music conservatories and art schools, writing programs are one way for generations of writers to find and support one another. Margot and Ralph were another way. When I was with them, I felt as if I had found some of my “people” (it helped, of course, that their daughter was my best friend, and as a dancer and actress, her artistic nature was one of the many qualities that drew me to her). People who lived and breathed the literary arts and also raised families without starving. People who didn’t think a standard career—medicine, finance, law—was the only professional aspiration worth having. Margot lived in that grey area, in the in-between, and she showed me that it was possible.Everyone who wants a career in writing or the arts should have a Margot Treitel in their lives. That’s what I’m trying to do with this book. Be your Margot Treitel.
