In Which We Flee The Masters

Savoir Faire

by MICAH RUELLE

“This is an artificial environment,” the professor told the class. “Generally, you all work alone — most writers have to. It’s unnatural to shove all of you in a classroom and have you work together for three years.”

This sentiment has acted as the premise of an argument against Master of Fine Arts Programs. It follows that fine art programs might force incompatible writers (unlike the Beats or The Inklings) into murky waters, diluting individual talent. The romantic in me couldn’t help it, though; I looked around the room at the faces of poets I was sure to see in nearly every class for the next three years.

But I was wrong. I wouldn’t be looking at those faces for the next three years. Two months ago, I left an MFA program in southwest Texas — and no, not for the sentiments above, or for the politicized reasons that Franz Wright and others have against graduate level fine arts programs. I left for “personal reasons” according to all my recent applications to entry-level and retail jobs. A month before starting the MFA, I had just finished a year of intense theological studies in the U.K. and was burnt out before I even started an equally intense course.

I signed my letter of resignation and finally began the break I needed. Christmas break proved to be a reflective time. My thoughts returned to the program — the various writers’ readings, literary magazine meetings, workshops, parties, and dinners. The longer I thought about it, the more I came to realize I had been uncomfortable for most of the program, but I wasn’t sure why. Over the next few weeks, I’d run on the trails by my parents’ house in Kansas. I’d been running the same paths for years, on and off in between school breaks and summers. The familiarity allowed me a safe space to process.

A week or so of running had gone by when I finally narrowed it in: my social dynamics with the writers was nothing like those that I had had with my friends from undergrad, nothing like the other non-profit workers I had assisted, nothing like the theologians I had trained with, nothing like the painters I had lived with, and nothing like my childhood friends from my hometown. My relationship with the writers bordered on enigmatic, but with enough banality during the academic work week to hold the levee.

“Saving face” is a term that is used both in the U.S. and the U.K. For Americans, it’s a term used to reference the act of trying to preserve pride or the pride of others in the heat of a humiliating moment. But the British seem to have a more all-encompassing use of the phrase. For them, it does reference maintaining dignity in embarrassing moments, but it’s also a particular stance or attitude toward social circumstances in general. If you’ve watched any Downton Abbey or have read any Jane Austen, you can see how “saving face” is embedded in social interactions between characters: Mr. Bates concealing the bullying he endures by the house staff in season one, or the secrecy that Darcy preserves until the accusations against his character are made by Elizabeth. The characters that are able to absorb and conceal information are likely to do well in their lives in general, and seems to be an essential quality to earning the trust and respect of others. Perhaps I had witnessed more examples of “saving face” than I had realized prior to starting a masters program, but it seemed to saturate every social circumstance I had found myself in with the writers.

During one of the first MFA parties I attended, I drank too much because I was nervous and like a stupid minor, locked myself in a bathroom till I could sober enough to conserve an ounce of dignity to rejoin the party. When a fellow poet found me, I apparently instructed them that despite whatever state I was in, I was not to be left in the same room as a certain individual, a predatory-looking fiction writer.

My friend later told me that he used our exchange for a poem in his thesis and, “hoped it was okay.” I nodded, and felt weirdly flattered. At least I was disguised as an animal. However, I didn’t begin to question the ethical complications of using real-life material from genuine relationships and transferring it to art until I read my own words on the page of someone else’s poem. I had been quoted while on the phone during a very vulnerable confession in the midst of a panic attack that had long been warming in my consciousness and had finally erupted. At least the quotes weren’t cited. (Ironic, no?)

The social dynamics between all of us felt odd enough. At parties, what could’ve been simple questions and general musings felt like a continual set-up to gather more information. It’s only when you are speaking with a poet or writer that you can doubt the motives when they ask you, “Can I see your room?” It could be a pass. But, for all you know they are cataloging items, a color palette, and essence of a living space for a potential character. For the record, in both interpretations, I advise the answer to that question be “no.”

To the former situation, you need only read a little of Sylvia Plath’s bio to begin to see that romantic relationships have trouble surviving the battle of writerly egos. (Also, see the marriages of Hemingway and Gellhorn, along with Fitzgerald and Sayre.) Not to mention the running tagline, never directly expressed, but understood: the MFA is where women go to get divorced, and where men go after they’re married.

As for the latter, the creation of a private space is essential for sanity since the writing will continue to oust you in workshops. Preserving a space is, more than anything else, an act of self-preservation. Once, a few years ago, I had visited an author’s home. He had placed a baby-gate between a room and the dining room. When I was about to climb the gate that I assumed was for his kids, he gently stopped me and said, “I’m sorry — I don’t let anyone in my writing space.” It’s a view that, as eccentric as it sounds, I am beginning to understand. The need for a physical and mental space that was mine, that I could measure somehow, never felt more necessary to construct.

Herein lies the complexity of an MFA program: writers extract ideas for characters, situations, dialogues, experiences, etc. from real life to inform (consciously or unconsciously) the creative process of making their art. While out in public, writers can observe and take mental notes anonymously and discreetly. However, when writers are amongst each other, the carnivorous pursuit for raw-life material can be sensed during exchanges after workshops, at parties, and before and after readings. Writers understand that they are watching and being watched, and in an MFA, this experience is looped. Artists understand that their lives are free game to other artists, which means that we are all in the line of fire of having our quirks, speech patterns, facial expressions, and behavior converted and used for someone else’s art.

It’s not all bad though. I know I am making us all out to be a brood of vipers. And we’re not. Well, not all the time, anyway. After you have just sent your writing to the workshop slaughterhouse, they’ll offer profound feedback, usually accompanied by a beer. And it’s not limited to hard times, either. One of the most profound moments of my life occurred rather inconspicuously at MFA Halloween party this last year.

The hosts had been generous, constructing Martha Stewart inspired creepy-crawly snacks and concocting an alcoholic punch that almost glowed in the red hues of the lights. Nearly all the guests came in full-costume and a six-pack. If you had driven by the house, you would’ve spotted a cowboy, Wonder Woman, and Annie Hall all smoking on the porch while an intoxicated Bumble Bee stumbled up the steps. Since my Stepford wife dress proved defenseless to the cold, I camped out with Ke$ha and the cat on the couch to keep warm. I was just starting to unwind from all the hype and was standing in line to use the restroom when a very sloshed Buddy Holly found me. Prior to that evening, I could only account for one moment when this friend had been vulnerable with me, despite sharing classes and free time on the weekends. So it came as a surprise when he put his hand on my shoulder, and gave me one of the most profound compliments I have ever received about my work. It is one of the few compliments I have accepted fully, as an almost-prophesy. And it has since acted as a source of encouragement as I continue to work independently.

Despite my reservations, I hope one day be able to reenter an MFA program when I feel ready. But, what I miss already is the thrill of being amongst people that love — foolishly perhaps — but completely, the same thing I do. One night at a party, a writer pulled a book of e.e. cummings off the shelf and after the first poem was read aloud - we were all clapping and screaming for more. I’ve yet to see this happen during an art gallery, university, or bookstore reading. Where is all that joy hiding?

A week before Christmas, I got a whiff of what my life would be like post MFA when visiting a bookstore with a friend I had known since junior high. The 2012 Best American Essays was on display, and in my excitement said, “Hey, maybe I should buy it for my dad.” She laughed and said, “Who would want that?” I was surprised. My friend is a knowledgeable person, and someone who supports the arts. She, herself is an artist - a painter who studied art in college. After the initial surprise, I felt a sudden sadness wash over me. It hit me that my social circle had been small, and that there had been a familiarity in it. We had been a bunch of loners, grouped together artificially — maybe more like a pack of sardines than any kind of family, but it had been dysfunctional and strangely nice. I had been one of ten other people who would’ve at least entertained the thought, and maybe would’ve leaned over to me to say, “Yeah, a book of essays is a great idea.”

Micah Ruelle is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her tumblr here.

Photographs by the author.

"The Next Day" - David Bowie (mp3)

In Which Nothing Protects Us From Moving On

This Is

by SARAH WAMBOLD

I asked three different friends to join me on a trip to Marfa, TX and none of them found the matter as urgent as I did. They said they would look into it but then decided to wait until something was going on out there. I could see that they would go to Marfa only when nothing was keeping them from it. I wrote about my first experience in Marfa in a hurry. I was full of ideas the moment I got there. Later on, I heard those same ideas come out of the mouths of my friends who eventually did go to Marfa. The words had disappeared from where I originally wrote them, but left a space for me to return. I went to Marfa alone for nothing.

I drove to Marfa in seven hours, going 85 the whole way. I felt rushed by the empty road, surprised by how quickly I could become a cliché. It is true that thousands of tourists have traveled the same route I took, but they had all disappeared before I got there. Eventually, we would come upon each other, staring into the distance beyond us rather than make eye contact. Out there, we could pretend we were following our own lead.

photo by the author

I want to crawl inside Paul Valery’s quote, “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through,” and see if I can still write about it. He wrote that line a quarter of a century after he spent twenty years learning how to write invisibly. Periods of silence and space are associated with crisis but sometimes language has simply taken another form.

I arrived in Marfa presciently inspired; it’s a town with an aura only seen by cattle ranchers and artists. It has the same provincial train tracks, sunlight and rusted gates that hold back the West Texas desert as any town in its vicinity, but Marfa is tastefully flaking away. Rust has become the design element for the hotels and gallery owners who have set up there since the town became a destination in the 1970s. A quick look around is like a close reading of hipster ipsum:

Farm-to-table leggings, fanny pack mustache
Tattooed dreamcatcher readymade gluten-
free skateboard art party Austin jean shorts
keytarscenester, bicycle rights vegan.

I take a drive west out of Marfa and see a sign that warns of no services for the next 74 miles. It recalls where I grew up; in the Midwest surrounded by inescapable farmland framed by signage with the same dismal promise of the future. Without those words, I would not have known how to get outside of them. As I drive, Prada Marfa appears like a shapely leg poised on the side of Highway 90, one that reveals itself to be just a prosthetic.

photo by the author

Outside that installation, I take a picture of my reflection on the glass window with my phone. It feels like I am helping in the destruction of the piece, contributing to its purpose of weathering into the desert with pastiche. Marfa is home to some of the most inspired Minimalist art and seduces tourists into becoming artists in its space. The results are like images from a flipbook, all part of the same story where the slightest shift in perspective keeps it moving towards the end.

photo by Elaine Litzau

On my final night alone in Marfa, I went to the Chinati Foundation at sunset. Open that evening was Donald Judd’s works in concrete and mill steel. The air was brisk as we waited by another rusted gate to be let into the area which had been a military compound used through World War II. In the distance, what looked like a construction site in flux awaited our arrival. The fifteen concrete block installations that make up Judd’s outdoor piece appeared as burial vaults. The same concrete structures which could hold our precious remains were now uprooted and tipped over, empty of the sludge that will become of us.

As I walked past, the desert sunset cast my shadows through them. I thought about my grandfather’s vault, emblazoned with his military symbol from the war. I thought about his body, fast disappearing inside that box.

photo by the author

Many of Judd’s structures have only one end open, forcing you to focus on their corners and shadows. If you turn halfway around, you are met with open space. After a full revolution, the box is open and empty and space. In Marfa, Judd can say “The public has no idea of art other than something portable that can be bought.” Outside it, burial vaults are sold as protection from the elements, eventually becoming all that is left of the person it once held. In Marfa, there is no funeral home. The desert town’s residents are close to their deterioration. Nothing is protecting them from time moving on.

The day I left Marfa, I got up before sunrise to look for the Marfa Lights. I sat alone on the viewing platform and watched three glowing orbs float above the horizon. They moved across the desert toward me and I could see how people viewed them as only the headlights of cars passing along some distant road. Beyond that, I couldn’t see anything at all.

Sarah Wambold is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about synchronized swimming.

"Ocean Eyes" - The Medics (mp3)

"Griffin" - The Medics (mp3)

The new album from The Medics is called Foundations, and it was released on May 18th.

In Which The World Is Burning Somewhere Else

Doing This Again

by BARBARA GALLETLY

As a little one I loved school. It was normal. It always helps to be good at it and to have a nice teacher. My parents went away every day, and when they traveled and I felt particularly lonely my first grade teacher asked me if I would like to call her at night just for a familiar voice. I did. And then I was given a hardcover copy of an interesting book called Annie Bananie, My Best Friend. Evidently, we were moving on. To Texas. I didn’t even know I was "from" any place at all until then, but afterwards this "from" concept would be a problem.

It was August, there was tumbleweed, and as my father drove us "home" from the airport my sister and I wept. It was really hot, and by that I mean awful. The first day of school I found out I had missed last year’s introduction to cursive. Horrifying. Behind. I also learned a new word, so common that the other second graders used it in cursive in their little journals we kept to practice writing. "Yawl" or "ya’ll" or "yall" or even correctly, "y’all." But this was simply too much. I remember sobbing that night, a seven-year-old cutie from the preppiest town on Long Island, describing these barbarians (yes, my name is Barbara) to my parents. I can't imagine how they dealt with me, or what they felt when they found out they had a snob on their hands.

In spite of this seemingly innate bitchiness, the children of Dallas were kind to me and became my friends. I caught up in cursive and slipped into y’allsing every now and then. Soon I was from Dallas, I became a normal, average teenager. I wasn’t too good or too bad, and I wanted to be Winona Ryder in Reality Bites (that’s actually Houston) so just before ninth grade began I cut off my hair. I had cool friends even if I wasn’t awesome, and no one even made fun of my boy hair because the point of a girls' high school was not to start hot and stay hot, but to start a kid and end up a woman. So. Then we were moving again.

In Houston being from Dallas was like being from the moon. And a leper colony. I had no friends for the first six weeks of school and from August to October I went to the phone booth at lunchtime, to cry instead of having to sit alone in the cafeteria. Great attitude. Where the hell was Tavi Gevinson then? Probably not born yet.

Part of the problem was that little snob inside, who thankfully found acceptance at college and occasionally snuck out of hiding while I lived in New York, where she had been born, where my family lived and where mild snobbery is neither exceptional nor such a bad thing: "Home."

Then I decided to move. It was in tiny part about loving or wanting someone who had left for California before me, but it’s mostly a cruel streak of habit and a desire to challenge whatever I think of as my identity. Whether it’s true or not, I believe that once you start moving around, it does not get any easier to adjust to new places, it’s just awfully hard to terminate the pattern. My mother, who has moved at least 25 times, says you can make a home for yourself anywhere. And I have taken this statement as a dare. Who are you when the things you do and the people you know and the places and certainties change abruptly, for you, and you can’t get back home because you’ve just forsaken it? Anyone you want to be?

It helped that I could convince my best friend to drive with me, and it was awesome. Well, I was kind of a mess, but I was also so excited to go and explore and see what I was worth to other people. My friends in Los Angeles were amazing despite obnoxious complaints about traffic, pollution, strangeness, erratic public transportation, occasional rain, etc., so I thought "I can do this again!"

I came back to Texas, this time to Austin, ready to embrace August this time, to go back to school again. I knew summer here was not really a great way to kick things off. I didn’t suppose it would be this bad. The drought here has been exacerbated by temperatures in excess of anything seen before. God is clearly punishing Rick Perry or me, or all of us Texans and our plants and animals and water. Driving through the western half of the state from California I passed scorched corridors that wildfires had recently decimated, groves of thirsty live oaks alternatively charred and spared, all of us equals under the wide greedy heavens.

My first evening in Texas there was a burst of lightning and rain splattered Marfa, kicking up dirt before evaporating. That’s the last time I saw this enormous blue sky do something so kind as obscure itself in the daytime. Austin’s summer has finally ended, the hottest on record, and just this week daily highs dipped below 100˚ for the first time in two and a half months. Given the circumstances, the outbreak of wildfires around Austin was unsurprising but dramatic and scary. The sunset reminded me of Los Angeles, colorful through all that smoke. Meanwhile my old apartment in Greenpoint was in a Flood Zone B, two blocks from the East River, and had just days before escaped Irene/Borene. Everywhere a natural disaster zone.

Graduate school is like a mix between high school and college, so far, as we’re all shy aliens of different ages, doing different things, and it is hard to be the right amount of friendly to absolute strangers. On the first day I dressed myself as Scandinavian, with clogs and a Marimekko tunic and everything, and it really did not matter because adults are less likely to really notice what other people are wearing, and no one else seemed to have dressed "special" for the occasion.

I brought all of this with me, ideas about who to think about and how to act and where to say I'm from, and I got my sister to come and make sure it’s really true, that I arrived and that I still exist. All of the people who love me, who I love, I think about them all the time that I am not worrying about sunscreen or my reading for Tuesday or new wrinkles. I do not love a single soul in Austin yet and I think that is the strange thing, why it feels very weird to be here, to live here. Not so weird as it feels to be cool in my air-conditioned house when the world around me is burning or to find delightful fruits and lettuces inside grocery stores when I can’t keep a sage plant alive in my backyard.

Wherever you are, be somewhere else. But no matter how hard you resist, you will also be exactly where you are. So thank Tim Berner-Lee for the www, and please send us your rain.

Barbara Galletly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. She twitters here and tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

"Crack in the Paint" - The Concretes (mp3)

"Good Evening" - The Concretes (mp3)

"Oh My Love" - The Concretes (mp3)