Ananda Lima writes about writing in her book Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil. One chapter is a compilation of her fellow writers’ feedback on one of her stories–without including the story in question. So meta. (I like this book a lot. It’s like Carmen Maria Machado meets Pond. Read it this month.) Anyway I’m not here to review the book it just made me think about…well…me…and…New York City. When Ananda writes about being on the subway with a stack of drafts or walking out of the writing workshop into rain. The city in the cold. The city in the spring. The nodding and smiling at someone in the workshop who gives negative feedback. Nothing taught me how to accept critique the way writing workshops did.
About a month ago Arthur Nersesian, the instructor of my NYC writing group, friended me on Facebook. I got rid of Facebook a long time ago but then I got it again–but this time there’s no pictures or friends or information. I just wanted to be able to see what’s on Marketplace. And for a long time no one seemed to find me there. But then all the sudden a month or two ago, everyone friended me. I don’t know how they found me. I’m not accepting them. I’m sorry if it’s you but I’m not here to socialize I’m just here to shop. Follow me on Instagram if you want @anne__archy.
Anyway, the confluence of events–Ananda’s book, Art finding me on Facebook–is making me think about that workshop. How magical it was. I don’t know if I knew how magical it was at the time–sometimes it’s hard to know things are magic when they are happening. I started going to the workshop after I met Art at a party at a book store. It was at his apartment in the Lower East Side. Which was on the third floor above a Chinese restaurant. The stairs creaked. I was almost always the youngest writer by ten years. It was on Mondays. I went almost every Monday for years. We all did. How magical is that?
I took many sections of my book to that workshop. I took a lot of weird stories to that workshop. I’ve been re-reading some of them recently. There’s this one that starts with a young woman who is shoe shopping and at the check-out counter they tell her that for every pair she buys a person in need gets one shoe. I think I was trying to write how silly it was to try to disguise capitalism as something generous. I didn’t finish it. I wrote a few apocalypse stories and one where trying to find the vending machine at the airport is a satirical journey. I like some of the stories I wrote before, but I don’t think I can go back to them–I think I was too different then. I mean, what’s the expiration date on your own writing? It stales after a while. Maybe not for readers but for yourself. It’s hard to like it as much. I think? And while writing is probably one of the least “trend-based” arts there are trends and they are changing.
The book I just finished writing had totally wrapped me up. It shaped my life at the time I was writing it. What I did mostly for the last four years is edit. I EDITED FOR FOUR YEARS. Also I LOVED IT. Also IT MEANT EVERYTHING TO ME. And now I’m trying to remember how to write. How to just write. But also I need to learn how to write when I’m not in New York anymore and I don’t have my Monday workshops in LES. For now I take my cues from Ananda. For now I write about writing, and about anything really, and about how weird it is to be here.
Anne Foster 