Earned Letters

Sweet Saturday 

In a heated debate recently, someone said to me, “Well at least I didn’t have to go to school to learn how to be a writer.”

It was early when this insult was hurled my way, and my mind wasn’t working as quickly as it normally does, so I found myself at a loss for what to say back.

I didn’t go to school to learn how to be a writer either, but I can see how one might make that assumption. An MFA program has far less to do with growing a seed of talent and more to do with learning how to work with deadlines, writing crap, recognizing it’s crap and then rewriting it until it shines, and learning about theory and craft.

I have always been a writer. It has been at the very core of my being for as long as I can remember thinking about my being. Trying to make a career of it, to actively push for publications, enter contests, write this blog, all of these things are scary as shit. There’s a lot of competition out there, and there’s always going to be a better writer. And it’s subjective as all get out! What one editor or publishing house hates, another might love … so there’s no metric to the success, no formula that one can follow. It’s most certainly not like the corporate scaffolding that so many folks maneuver to earn and achieve higher titles and larger salaries.

Maybe that’s the stem of the insult – maybe because this gig does take so much shameless self promotion, so much pretending to believe in oneself, promoting one’s work, maybe it seems like I took the easy way out. It’s easy to lose validation as a writer when the rejection letters roll in daily or when someone says something like this to me. I’ve come to terms with the rejection letters – they’re just a part of this life, and at least someone is reading my work! But this insult has stuck with me and tried to burrow into me in a very real way. Sure, I didn’t need an MFA to tell the world I’m a writer. But I did need the discipline that comes from having fifty pages due every three weeks, from knowing I’m accountable to someone, somewhere for my words.

I’m sharing all of this because this argument came on the heels of my Pushcart Nomination. I stood there confused, listening to reasons why I don’t know what I’m talking about with regard to being a writer, thinking to myself, “Yeah, but I just got nominated for a Pushcart … and even if I don’t win, that has to mean something, right?” Unfortunately, validation only holds value when one wants to assign worth to a particular accomplishment. So for me, the Pushcart nomination is huge – it shows me that the world sees me. But for others, it’s just another “thing” that I “learned” to do in my MFA program. I guess that’s okay; it’s all a matter of perspective.

But it’s really sweet when these kinds of perspectives begin to offer me glimmers into the true nature and core character of folks. Raw moments of truth like that are rare; now, not only do I know where I really stand, but I know how I’m viewed and to what esteem I’m held.