On Feedback

channeling your inner Susan

Many years ago, as an undergrad, I attempted to petition to be allowed into a class at the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program. I ended up taking a range of these courses, though I didn’t belong in them—sometimes because of the writing, but mostly due to my immaturity and my developmental disability. My brain had not yet come online; I was still years away from having a prefrontal cortex or being able to understand other people’s points of view. I spent a lot of time crying before, during, and after this class. At the time, I was working 4 am to noon as a pastry chef at a highly dysfunctional diner run by two middle-aged alcoholics, one of whom bicycled to the diner every day, stomping the pedals of his Surly Crosscheck, because he had lost his license from too many DUIs. Afternoons were spent at the College of Public Health as a technical writer for my work-study job, preparing materials for bachelor’s prepared therapists working with alcoholics in recovery in the Great Plains. I didn’t drink then; I had been prescribed a horse-dose of lithium, and had been warned that drinking on top of it would ruin my kidneys and possibly my life.

Everyone else in my class seemed older, more experienced, less emotional, more thoughtful. These people were too cool, went to one of the 43 bars in downtown Iowa City after our class, usually George’s, a dive bar known for nearly free hamburgers, and had traveled outside the Midwest; many of them came to Iowa having already attended some other graduate program, or a prestigious undergraduate institution, or they’d lived in New York or Washington, D.C., or abroad. Some of my classmates had already published extensively. One of them had a Modern Love column come out during the course of the semester and told none of us, it just showed up one day, and then our professor congratulated them in class. Others just wrote about extremely serious topics, big thinky stuff that belonged in places like Harper’s or n+1.

I was not writing things that belonged in Harper’s. I was writing weird, dismissive shit about the ER and my feelings, a job I had recently quit so I could go back to school. It was a workshop class taught by Dr. Susan Lohafer, a professor of the short story who was known for her incisive feedback. Everyone from that class now has a minimum of one book; I think about this at least once a week. I still have all of Susan’s feedback collected in a folder. When I applied to the class, I sent a piece from the ER, about drug-seeking behavior. I made the patients grotesque, unsatisfying. I didn’t know what to say except I had not yet developed real empathy, either, or an understanding of why people might behave one way or another. In the ER, I just saw people as they appeared, which was untrustworthy. Animals were much easier. At the time, I was sleeping on the floor because I didn’t own a mattress, sharing a house with a very nice hoarder and her dog and living off Triscuit and whatever peelable fruit I could get for cheap at the grocery store, plus whatever the line cook made in the mornings for us at work. I wrote the essay in a computer lab at the library because I didn’t have a computer, either.

In response to my submission to be considered for the class, Susan emailed me this:

Hello again, Emily—

Thanks for sending the writing sample. It’s lively and readable, and I enjoyed the chance to see you in action as both an ER tech and a crafter of nonfiction.

If the piece were submitted to me in response to an assignment, l’d note the well-sustained pace, the savvy handling of technical information for a general audience, the astute portrait of ER hierarchies and tensions, the engagingly blase voice (with a good sense of rhythm and a good ear for dialogue), and the central issues of profiling (its inevitability and its fallibility) and the various ways (some pharmaceutical; some emotional; all pitiable) in which ER patients are “seekers.” These are all indications that you could hold your own and make a contribution to the class.

However, I’d also see a glibness that isn’t entirely due to the ER cynicism you consciously deconstruct, but seems more like a superficial catchiness aimed at showing off for the reader. I’d look for some really new twist on the cliches about hospital workers, to convince me that the breeziness had more depth behind it. In other words, I’m not sure I see a maturity that promises a developing vision, a capacity to write about experience in a way that can be read and reread with expanding appreciation. If you were in the class, I would try very hard to push you out of the comfort zone that has produced this piece, and I would look for a much greater investment of thought.

As you can see, I’m of two minds about admitting you, mostly because I don’t know if you are ready for, or want to submit to, these sorts of demands for greater insight and originality. It would not be a happy situation if you were to resent my assessment of your work, or seriously disagree with it. However, the enrollment is on the lower side this term (we have three workshops going at once), so I will leave the decision in your hands. If you are open to the kind of criticism I’ve suggested, if you think you can take it in stride and benefit from it, then you’re welcome to join the class. If not, I’d certainly understand—and wish you well.

Susan

I was so mad, I signed up for the class immediately. This was the kind of person I was, and am; I interpreted this email as a direct challenge. But she was right. Many years later, a version of this essay would come to appear in Cost of Living. There was a way Susan dressed us down, saw us for who we were, what we were really doing, a kind of explanation by excavation, with plenty of room for metaphor. To one of my friends, she said, “Adding to the pile of logs, Bern, is not the same as building a log cabin.” In another piece of feedback to me, she said my schtick was “The world according to Emily.” I was horrified at the time: this meant that I was entirely ill-equipped to write the sort of cool, longform narrative journalism I idolized. I wanted to write a biography of an important place or person, something long-ranging and thick, sold at airport kiosks, ideally in paperback. But I was apparently the sort of person who had to write personal essays and maybe some extremely weird, upsetting fiction (a lot of the short stories involved accidental dismemberment). Once I figured out what a personal essay even was—for a long time I just wrote scenes that resembled fiction. I thought fiction and nonfiction should be identical, with nothing to differentiate one from another. I didn’t know about autofiction, or memoir, or what the rules were. I just knew that I didn’t want to explain anything in an essay, just show what transpired.

Now, in the classroom teaching my students, I think a lot about what Susan did for us in that class. To explain ourselves to ourselves. To help us figure out what kind of writers we were. My side table is lately crowded with books written by people from that class. It’s a bit like looking at your book siblings, reading these books, remembering when Susan would select from the class’s submissions to teach us a lesson that week about what we were doing wrong (I was always doing something wrong, but thankfully she only workshopped me twice; the rest of the feedback, entirely devastating, arrived in private). Many of us have the same agents, or similar agents. It is not often a pleasant experience, finding out who you are, and what you are doing. A part of me will always be disappointed in my work, no matter what I write. I can never get to where I need to go, but I can keep trying. I didn’t realize what Susan was doing for us, then. But I’m grateful for it now.

I try to do this with my students: to be direct, specific, and explain what is missing and why. To see them, if I can, since Susan was the first person who really saw me as I was. To be generous, when possible, to highlight what is really there already—and there is often much to admire. I try to hold them to high standards. To select the workshop materials and the readings based on what I want them to learn and adapt accordingly. Because I need to channel my inner Susan, to push them. I want them to make gorgeous things, to get published, go to graduate school if helpful, to get the editing job. Make the book. What else can we offer, really.

The next one of these is ceramics-focused. Back in the studio soon; hoping to make some weird shit this semester, once I recover from hand surgery and am cleared to use the wheel again. Stay warm, everybody.