How to love the work

Field notes from an MFA student

Hello all, long time no write. A few people in passing have expressed interest in a Substack piece about my experience at my Masters of Fine Arts program in southern Tennessee (about an hour west of Chattanooga) where I am currently and will be until mid-July. For context, the program is mostly online with a residential six-week session each summer. My thoughts so far:

Like a lot of people who seek to make some portion of their living from writing, I’m a sufferer (if that is even the right term) of Gifted Child Syndrome. There is just about nothing more addictive under the sun (with the exception of some hard drugs I haven’t tried) than the experience of an adult telling you that you’ve really got something, kid or you’re going to be famous someday or, to quote the Wizard of Oz, that you’re the genuine article. The antidote to this kind of complex is actually sitting down and trying to work and then remembering that you’re a mortal being who is sleep-deprived and has to pee. You are not, in fact, the wizard; you’re the man behind the curtain. Then you’re wondering why you’re even writing—voluntarily and with the goal of getting a degree with no guaranteed monetary value—material that most likely no one will ever read. One of the ways to cope with the insanity of this kind of profession is by developing a defensive ego of delusional proportions, which is why writers can be bad to date, work with, or befriend. I think a lot of the famous suffering that writers do (potentially leading to the drink or the grave) is due to the whiplash of these two states of being: grating hard work and self doubt versus a delusional self-confidence to power the former.

As one of my classmates recently said “If you’re not into the Episcopal church on campus, there are seven other churches on this street.”

When I arrived at Sewanee, I hadn’t had to do the sit-down-and-do-it portion of the writing life since November, when I polished all my writing samples and submitted applications. I had forgotten that the work of writing a novel is more than walking around telling people you’re writing a novel. I forgot the art of tempering my ego, of remembering that revision and frustration are not below me, that I’m not some kind of intuitive genius. No writer is a fully intuitive genius whose first drafts are impeccable, with the exception of one award-winning protege here or there (but as Anne Lamott writes, “We don’t like her very much”). A lot of life is work, from your nine-to-five to scheduling dermatologist appointments to scooping cat litter. It feels wrong that something I do in my free time and voluntarily should be unglamorous work, just like everything else. But I remind myself that writing without laboring over some sentence that just won’t work is like living without expecting to die. As Joseph Fasano wrote in a his now-viral poem “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper:” But what are you trying / to be free of? / The living? The miraculous / task of it? Love is for the ones who love the work.

Waterfall on the Fiery Gizzard Trail in Tracy City, TN. I begged classmates to come with me to a swimming hole and then realized the water was freezing and also had snakes.

Whenever I become frustrated that graduate school is not just summer camp for talented girls but involves fleshing out that oh-so-great novel concept that got me here in the first place, I feel like Cher’s dad in the movie Moonstruck. Hoping that he can avoid working on his marriage and disillusioned with the smallness of his work as a plumber, Cosmo starts an affair with a vapid woman who is much too impressed with him. His wife, suspecting the affair, greets Cosmo with these words when he arrives home from work: "I just want you to know, no matter what you do, you're gonna die, just like everybody else.” It is only then that Cosmo decides to be vulnerable and admit that he is scared his life will not be enough. The more I worry that I don’t have enough time in this life to do what I want, the more time I proceed to waste. As soon as I am able to acknowledge the fear, I can get to work. As long as I’m afraid of failure or of scarcity, I will procrastinate on things I badly want to do, and I’ll buy things I can’t afford. Embracing the shitty first drafts all over again is where I am beginning.

Love is for the ones who love the work.