Reflections on the Semester
Over the past few weeks I’ve read many things I would not have naturally picked up. Experimented with written approaches I would not naturally have tried. And have begun to think about my writing practice more as a daily habit fueled by sketches and outlines than finished pieces. The most important aspect has been a move towards writing more creative fiction, an area which I’ve dipped my quill into in the past, but have primarily spent most time with more factual, academic or historical reviews. I enjoy the memoirs I’ve been writing down for my daughter to read one day, as much as I enjoy writing film reviews for The Penn Moviegoer. But this class has exponentially broadened what I might write about, especially in the form of collage and the mining of prior work to create new interpretations, as well as the expansion of subject matter to include the truly uncanny, and the accumulation of interlocking stories and the world-building which they foster. I’m finding that the creative fiction pieces I write have the capacity to build upon each other, strengthening the stories of the past as I write into the present.
An example of this approach is the work I wrote in week five’s ‘Art Monster’ assignment, which became an uncanny tale of historical adjustment under the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. It brought in elements from prior historical fiction I’d written, creating a space where if the reader wishes to go further, that path is made open to them. Similarly, in topic four’s ‘Duality’ prompt, I told the tale of the loss of a twin, but in it mentioned dreams of a man in a white suit. This same man shows up later in week seven’s ‘Themes and Variations’ in a variety of different contexts, which might all be taken from the dreams the surviving twin may have been experiencing. This has happened over and over during the course of the class, where I’ve borrowed from what might seem to be tenuous details of prior assignments and provided answers or at least paths inside which one might navigate a more holistic jigsaw puzzle. As I wrote in response to Quineau’s Exercises in Style, these aren’t individual assignments, they are all part of a single ongoing thread of writing, the submissions for which are only ever temporary stops on a much longer journey towards a craft of more material writing.
In doing this, I’ve taken great inspiration from Offill’s Dept of Speculation and Joe Brainard’s I Remember, both of whom resonated with my own approach of writing into events which feel real, feel autobiographical, but inside of which there are a number of moments where we remind ourselves that we are reading a story, and question ourselves as readers as to what is real or imagined. They both encouraged me to think of my work as conscious historical fiction, not just writing into an event and then changing something at the end. It’s become a framework which I have expanded in class to other parts of my writing, and the growing accumulation of work happening at https://www.anthologymatt.com/labs which has dramatically expanded the scope of what I might write about beyond the previous academic work and film criticism.
The main motivation here is that changing habits as a reader, have changed my habits as a writer. Prior to class, I have rarely ever found myself reading fiction for pleasure. I read a lot of historical accounts, memoir, or books of faith. In opening the door for shorter form fiction, books which might easily be consumed in a weekend, I have found myself with a growing appetite for more. And of course, one finished book begets a recommendation for the next, and the next. I’ve always had a pile of books ready to read next, but now they include a lot more fiction (Alice Notley, Octavia Butler and Mike Davis all showed up from Amazon last week). By opening myself up more to different approaches to reading, I am finding I’m also broadening my ability to experiment with my writing. I’ve really been enjoying the opportunity to build out a body of work in this class, especially when I’m afforded the ability to combine it with visual elements as I did for the themes and variations prompt.
My continued development as a writer asks three questions.
Which short stories are the ones worth revisiting and why?
What form might those revisitations take?
When do these stories grow into something else?
Where these questions take me I don’t know. But I can’t wait to find out what happens next, and am excited to have finally built some stronger muscles towards the writing habit I have been seeking for so long.
