Issue 11: Lessons from McCormack Writing Workshop

In February, I finished McCormack Writing Center’s Winter Workshop (formerly Tin House Workshop). It was such a nourishing and rewarding experience to luxuriate in the fullness of a literary space, a good and timely reminder of how invaluable that energy is, and the way in which environments creatively inspire me and cultivate fertile conditions where writing may occur.

I was very impressed with the caliber of workshop programming, logistics, and operations of making an event like this happen, but also the intangibles—the simple joy of being in spaces that value and center marginalized voices from the people who actually inhabit those bodies. I attended a “Submission Roulette” panel hosted by A. L. Major and Denne Michele Norris, and it made me realize just how long it’s been since I’ve been in a space that wasn’t predominantly white. Sad! The overall vibe curation was on point, but it wasn’t just vibes, the substance was there too.

I learned so much from my amazing cohort and instructor, Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Her debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, is a poignant and darkly funny series of stories that interrogate themes of being what Shonda Rhimes calls “first, only, different.” In our introductory workshop, Thompson-Spires posed a question for the group: “How do you write work that is both timeless and timely?”

I was reminded of The Situation and the Story, where Vivian Gornick describes one of the more important and useful ideas about writing that I keep returning to. “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story,” Gornick writes. “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

In the opening pages of her book, Gornick illustrates this point by describing a particularly compelling eulogy that resonated with her:

“The eulogist had been remembering herself as a young doctor coming under the formative influence of the older one. The memory had acted as an organizing principle that determined the structure of her remarks. Structure had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language. Expressiveness deepened association. At last, a dramatic buildup occurred, one that had layered into it the descriptive feel of a young person’s apprenticeship, medical practices in a time of social change, and a divided attachment to a mentor who could bring herself only to correct, never to praise. This buildup is called texture. It was the texture that had stirred me; caused me to feel, with powerful immediacy, not only the actuality of the woman being remembered but—even more vividly—the presence of the one doing the remembering. The speaker’s effort to recall with exactness how things had been between herself and the dead woman—her open need to make sense of a strong but vexing relationship—had caused her to say so much that I became aware at last of all that was not being said; that which could never be said. I felt acutely the warm, painful inadequacy of human relations. This feeling resonated in me. It was the resonance that had lingered on, exactly as it does when the last page is turned of a book that reaches the heart.”

This resonance, I think, is what makes a work of literature both timeless and timely. It’s not about what happened on its own, no matter how interesting or funny or compelling. What matters is what an experience reveals, what it shifts, what it changes in your characters. The story begins after the thing that happened. That is where the tension and curiosity of a story lies, where meaning is made, composed in the contradictions, the reflections, in understanding.

My cohort also discussed certain qualities about character development and subject matter. For example, don’t chase timeliness, think about longevity of certain technologies like the difference between TikTok the platform specifically, or the idea of social media more broadly, but ultimately, we agreed the thing that endures is the quality of prose, the craft of language, the beauty in sentences. Good writing. There’s no substitute for good writing.

Over the week of workshop programming, I attended various craft lectures, panels, and generative writing sessions across genres, expanding and deepening my appreciation of the different dimensions of what makes writing “good.” Maisy Card talked about taking the motif of haunting from her short story, and expanding that into the organizing principle of her novels. K-Ming Chang shared the beautiful ways in which animals constantly shape her imagination, challenging the idea that writing needs to be about utility and instead urging us to embrace our obsessions, our extremes, our shame. Chang described “foraging” for your stories and gathering language, likening this process to a warbler with dog fur in its nest. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich actually made me excited for revision (yuck) by challenging the idea that problems with a manuscript are actually problems, and instead to think about them as “portals” trying to teach or show you something.

But the craft lecture that’s lingered with me most, in terms of reshaping my writing and igniting a new form of weekly writing practice was “Resisting Metaphor in Writing” with Julian Guy.

Resisting Metaphor

I love learning across writing genres. In particular, I get a lot out of poetry craft lectures because it’s such a departure from how I normally write, and maybe also since I’m too dumb to understand and appreciate all the precise choices in a poem on my own.

Guy anchored their lecture on a writing exercise from the poet Marie Howe, who asks her students to provide ten observations of the actual world without using simile or metaphor each week. “Howe says her students struggle deeply with this task,” Guy said. “To sit with the is-ness of life hurts, she says. It’s a kind of endurance I am deeply fascinated by. How does metaphor obstruct deeper, clearer observation or emotion in writing?”

Marie Howe: It hurts to be present, though. I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.

Krista Tippett: Really?

Howe: They find it really hard.

Tippett: What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?

Howe: Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

Tippett: It does.

Howe: It hurts us.

Tippett: You naming something.

Howe: We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point.

This call to resist metaphor really struck me. The idea of just sitting and enduring a piece of life—an object, a face, a person—and to simply observe what you see right in front of you is really challenging, and we don’t have many opportunities to do this.

For Guy’s generative exercise during the session, I chose to sit with a film photo of my partner I had taken during New York’s big blizzard in January. I found myself struggling to stay in the current moment observing the photograph in my hand, instead of going back to the moment captured in the photo. A person is just colors and shapes, when recorded in plain observation. I now appreciate how hard it is to describe color and shape on its own, not comparing it to anything else. And I have since concluded that I really need to up my dictionary game.

Writing simply and plainly made me realize just how much I rely on comparing things to other things for descriptions in my writing. While of course simile, metaphor, and other figurative language has its uses and can stir up strong emotion, overuse dilutes their meaning, and in their absence, it forces further precision.

It is an intriguing practice, because somehow, in the act of rendering real detail, some of these specifics can become their own image, and it’s cool to see the way that the plain language itself becomes a metaphor. Other times as I’ve practiced my weekly observations and resisting metaphor, I start writing about something I felt pretty emotionless about, like the objects on my bookshelf. And in describing it, I found deeper emotions and interesting meaning pop up and reveal itself. For example: “The dust outlines an empty space on my shelf where a photo frame used to sit. You can tell something was there.”

This is the work of a writer, to find that balance in meaning and how the work conveys one image or another. The practice of resisting metaphor is a reminder to be precise with my language, that sometimes there’s no other likeness or comparison, and you just have to say the thing plainly.

“In grief, metaphor obscures emotional clarity and buries truth,” Guy said. “Pushing away metaphor allows us to really cut even deeper.” They shared a Jack Gilbert poem to illustrate the power in simple depictions of the bare bones of grief. (Gilbert also recorded his own reading of this poem, which is haunting and beautiful to listen to.)

“Married” by Jack Gilbert

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came
there was no way to be sure which were
hers and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
this long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Keeping a writer’s diary

I’ve taken Virginia Woolf’s advice to keep a diary and “use it as a writer,” continuing to hone my craft of observation by writing plainly, noticing and seeing and capturing specific details. Woolf used hers to do what she called “practicing her scales,” writing “nonsense by the ream” to experiment with creating different effects. “The habit of writing thus for my own eye only was good practice,” Woolf said.

Playing around with a few sketches—doing your scales—lets you try something new when there’s nothing at stake. In my fiction, I’ve found pedestrian details help to ground my characters in real, everyday experiences that can help the reader relate meaningfully or feel more deeply for the characters. The purpose of Woolf’s version of a writer’s diary was to sharpen the eye and ear, to warm up the mind for writing. So far, the act of practicing my scales has led to sparks for more stories (lol) but also helped to reveal a new direction in a work-in-progress.

Resisting metaphor is a push for presence. Are you attuned to the world around you? Taking in this, noticing that? In case you find yourself inspired to try, here are some of the prompts Guy shared:

• Marie Howe writing exercise: Sit with a thing, for five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour. Describe that thing in as much detail as possible, resisting metaphor and enduring its being.
• A week’s events: Write ten sentences about what happened this last week, resisting metaphor and writing in exact, plain language.

I think it’s good to restrict yourself creatively every now and then, to force yourself to step outside of your patterns.

Vive la résistance (of metaphor),

katie “Just Say It” zhu 🗣️