Taos Toolbox workshop

This summer, I attended the Taos Toolbox workshop, a 2-week SF/F writing workshop in Angel Fire, New Mexico, run by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress.

It was a good but tough two weeks, very busy in a beautiful location. There were 18 of us and we each got to submit two pieces--a 10k piece the first week, and a 5k piece the second. So, naturally, we spent most of our days in workshop, responding to our peers' work, and then evenings mostly reading work for the next day.

Walter and Nancy were compassionate, funny, interesting, and exacting. They didn't pussyfoot around or pat us on the back often, but they made sure we knew when we'd succeeded. I appreciated their senses of humor and their focus on problem-solving when our writing didn't meet the mark.

We also had guest speakers throughout our time there, who came to speak about different areas of expertise and the writing life. While we were all looking forward to George R. R. Martin and I really enjoyed meeting him, the most helpful guest speaker for me was E.M. Tippetts, an indie-publishing guru with lots of practical strategies for launching a book or series as a self-published author. Her talk was so practical, so jam-packed with information, and I came away inspired to try self-publishing someday.

Taos is also billed as a graduate workshop but I’m not sure I’d agree. I'd compare it more to technical or professional school. The workshop is more geared towards commercial writers and making your work sellable, than it is about honing a creative aesthetic. To that end, we learned a lot of very practical writerly advice, some of it truisms or plot formulas that writers have likely heard before. But what really helped was being forced to put it into practice via critiques and writing exercises. Honestly, I wish there'd been a little more writing exercises or structured time for writing, but I do feel like I've developed a more judicious eye for my own work and the work of others. The two weeks felt like learning to write from muscle memory. It was almost as if our instructors said, "Oh, you think you know this writing truism? Then do it, over and over." At the end of two weeks, I came away with specific writing maxims much more ingrained in my process than before.

The aspect that sets Taos apart from the two other big summer workshops (Clarion and Odyssey) is that it's much more novel focused. Most people in our group were workshopping the beginnings of novels, and I took the first segment of Jurassic Unicorn. While we got line edits on what we submitted, we also had a lot of chances to talk larger plot, and I even got to sit down with Walter and get his feedback on my plot revisions at the end of the two weeks. I came away feeling much stronger about the shape of the Jurassic Unicorn plot.

Things I learned:

I learned about letting your readers know what to expect from your work right away.

I learned about plotting.

I learned about making an ending as strong as a beginning.

I learned about active, atmospheric description.

I learned about the ups and downs of the publishing world, and strategies to adapt to a changing market.

I learned to be tougher in my criticisms of others, and more exacting in what I demand from myself. After Taos, I can look back at stories I thought were finished and already I can see where they drag, are bloated, are convoluted.

And I learned that the tough thing about criticism is separating taste from technique. Technique, you can change. You can improve. But if your vision doesn’t match someone else’s taste, there’s not much you can do except shrug and say “well, you’re not my audience." 

This was what happened to me, with Jurassic Unicorn--it was not to several people's taste, which kinda crushed me while I was there. But I've bounced back from that now and am focused on changing the things about my technique that I can, while staying true to my original vision for the book. 

Hands down the best part of Taos was making friends in the SF/F world. I'm so excited that I connected with folks there, people that I will be able to share work with and learn from for a long time. 

Me, Bertha Mason, and Trichotillomania

A few weeks ago, my essay “The Breathtaking Sting of the Pull,” about my experience with trichotillomania, came out in Superstition Review. This is by far the piece I’ve gotten the most comments on from readers, which surprised me, though it probably shouldn’t have; more people read non-fiction than fiction.

What shocked me—and ultimately affirmed my choice to write about trich—was how many people wrote to me, both publicly and privately, to tell me that they could empathize. That they too pull their hair or pick their skin or do something else that they’ve always felt vaguely ashamed about. It feels really good to have people tell you they spent their free time reading something you wrote. It felt even better, after twenty-plus years of hiding, to have some solidarity, to have found some people who understand. 

I just wish I’d written about it sooner.

I love hair: all it can do, all it can say. Hair as symbol and signifier. This past semester, my Women in Lit class talked quite a bit about hair as we read Their Eyes Were Watching God and Americanah, both books about, among other things, the importance of hair in the lives of black women. We also talked about Bertha Mason’s hair in Jane Eyre. Jane describes her lover's imprisoned wife as having “a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane,” hiding her face. Wild hair could be read not only as an indicator of Bertha’s madness but also of her potential racial otherness in the book. Some scholars have read her as a multiracial woman. (For what it's worth, the book calls Bertha a “Creole,” which is a complicated and ambiguous term. As far as my research shows, at the time the term simply meant that she was the daughter of a white European settler in Jamaica. However, there is enough in Jane Eyre to indicate that Bertha might be intended to be multiracial—for instance, Jane talks about her “discoloured” and “black” face.)

Women’s unbound hair has also, at various times and in many cultures, indicated similarly unbound sexuality, and Bertha is no exception. Rochester doesn’t spell it out for us, but he says that when he first met Bertha: 

she lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments. All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me. I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her.

The words "displayed," "charms," "stimulated," "senses"--all of this reads to me as the account of a man driven to lust by a woman’s sensuality. Later on, though, Rochester criticizes Bertha for her lack of modesty, calls her “perverse” and “unchaste,” a woman of “giant propensities.” Reading between the lines, I assume she had, in some way, violated Rochester’s expectations of committed female sexuality—perhaps through adultery, or by being too eager for and interested in sex in general.

This second option is how I’ve chosen to rewrite Bertha’s backstory, in my story “The Beautiful Bird Sits No Longer Singing in the Nest.” It’s a retelling of Rapunzel, as well, with Bertha imagining herself as the captive at the top of the tower, and Grace Poole/Jane as the witch imprisoning her. And you can’t write about Rapunzel without writing about hair, so my Bertha uses her hair as a means of escape and even revenge. But unlike Rapunzel, whose hair is most useful when it is still growing from her head, Bertha must pluck hers to braid it into rope, to use it as kindling, simultaneously erasing the very symbol of the madness and hyper-sexuality she’s been labeled with. The absence of hair, here, means as much as its presence; it gives her power.  She imagines making a boat out of her hair and sailing away, saying "I would stride the waters like a bald Amazon."

I don’t think I intended all of this subtext, at least not when I started writing the story. I hadn't given much thought to what Bertha's hair might symbolize and I was still in the closet about my trich. But when I thought about my own anxiety, imagined myself in that tower room, the imagery flowed from there. I was writing about trich before I knew it. My version of the story begins with Bertha plucking her hair, in a scene that mirrors my own experiences plucking mine: 

I roll each hair between my fingers like a rosary. My fingers crawl across my scalp until I find one: coarse where the others are thin, kinked where the others are smooth. I enjoy the feel of it pulling against me, tenting my skin. Then I yank it out, suck on the end, and drop it on the floor.