Guest Post: On Believing in Your Writing Life
Here’s a guest post from Joumana Altallal, who suggests ways to cultivate the life of a creative writer, with or without an MFA. Enjoy! ~ AMC
During graduate school, my cohort mates and I would often joke about which jobs would allow us the best chances at writing once we completed the program. After spending three years immersed in a kind of subsidized writing life (department-hosted lunches with visiting writers, monthly readings, scheduled workshop times), it felt worrying to re-emerge in the world.
Of course, Master of Fine Arts programs rightfully face immense critiques (their historical origin as sites of American propagandist writing, the inflexibility and often exclusionary nature of traditional workshop dynamics, the ways they inadvertently encourage the same kinds of writing, etc.). But the tradeoff meant I could give myself no excuses not to write. So, when someone said the dream post-MFA job is a postal worker—the walking, the solitude, the containment of the job’s duties only to the hours you worked—it made sense.
An art workshop led to a small breakthrough: playful writing
Collage by Joumana Altallal
I’m not sure whether anyone pursued this particular path—we were pulled away from our program once the pandemic hit—but other friends did apply feverishly to writing residencies, and some even went on to stack them in such a way that they could hop from one residency to the other to avoid establishing a home base. Some applied to academic jobs or taught in other capacities, and others, like me, could only respond to a growing need for stability. So, the same week my program ended, I’d already accepted a job entirely unrelated to writing or teaching writing.
I felt I had something to prove. I wanted to be taken seriously as a young person in the world (I felt embarrassed to say I was a poet). I wanted to make money. I wanted relatives to understand what I did for a living. I wanted to prove I could be successful in a socially understood way. I did not want to struggle. In the beginning, I made room for my creativity—I went to open mics in the evenings, I took time off to attend residencies, I experimented with different art practices, I hosted workshops. But slowly it became more and more difficult to keep up. I was caregiving, living back home, struggling with my mental health, anxious about loved ones living in precarious situations. I was exhausted and uncomfortable and angry. I slowly stopped believing that I could write.
Returning to Writing
I wish I could attribute this clarity to a single day (I woke up not feeling like myself and I just knew…), but in fact it has taken me nearly five years to understand that to have a writing life, I need to cultivate it. As a child of refugees and a self-appointed worrier of large proportions, I’d long convinced myself to only do things that Made Sense. Of course, in writing, desire is paramount, as is pleasure, anguish, care, despair—all unbound by a linear understanding of time. That is to say, writing disrupts how we’re taught to think of time, and likewise, when the writing comes, it comes no matter what else is around.
Three Ways to Cultivate a Writing Life
Lately, I have been trying to recreate the best parts of an MFA program without actually needing to attend one. I don’t believe that any writer needs an MFA. In fact, most writers never pursued one—either because these programs didn’t exist, or because they were able to cultivate their own writing lives. I’m not a consistent person, and wouldn’t say I’m particularly disciplined, so I include this list not as an exhaustive (or exhausting) to-do, but rather a pick-your-own-adventure of skills that the MFA taught me:
Engage with the craft of writing
The main thing that differentiated my writing pre-MFA compared to post-MFA was my ability to look at any piece of text (including and especially my own) as if it were a pastry whose components I could understand just by looking, touching, tasting, and smelling it. To take this metaphor further, I recently bought Nicola Lamb’s cookbook. In the writing world, I would identify Lamb’s cookbook as a craft book. It’s a rich guide containing various components, tools, and techniques of baking with the goal of acting as both a reference and a means to understand the how behind the way things are made. In writing, The Art Of series is one I return to often when I want to understand how a writer approaches a particular technique in their own writing. Of course, there are many others—Alina Stefanescu maintains a list of craft essays for writing memoir and creative nonfiction.
Read widely
In college, I took a poetry workshop with Rita Dove, and one piece of advice she gave me was to read a writer’s first book alongside their most recent. As a young writer, it was easy for me to get stuck reading exclusively new work, or even worse, to feel intimidated by the writing of a brilliant author. Not only did her advice remind me to look at the ways that a writer’s work shifts, grows, and changes over time, but it also made me a better reader and more generous with my own work. Now, I try to read across time and genre/topic (if you’re a poet, pick up a YA novel, or a cookbook, or a book about insects, woodworking, or sports), I read translated works (check out Words Without Borders), and writing published by small independent presses (Tilted House Press, Action Books Press, Ugly Duckling Presse). The joy can be found in the discovery.
Attend readings/art shows
Follow your local library, bookstores, and art galleries. Show up to events and listen. Take notes, or don’t. All of this counts as writing. And if this feels too difficult, bring the work to you. My dear friend and brilliant writer/ interdisciplinary artist, Ashwini Bhasi, is an avid listener of David Naimon’s literary podcast, Between the Covers. Every week, Naimon invites a writer on the podcast with whom he has an in-depth and immersive conversation. After listening, write toward the conversation, or call your friend and tell them about it.
Joumana Altallal is an Iraqi-Lebanese writer and artist living in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her recent work appears in Poetry Foundation, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Mizna. Joumana is currently working on her first poetry collection.