Page 3 of A Storybook Wedding
“Please, Tim, let’s follow the standard workshop rules. We need to be sensitive to the writer, although in this case, I tend to agree that the need for acceptance as a theme is falling a bit short in terms of depth.” These words come from the mouth of my teacher, a PEN Award winner who is disturbingly (1) young and (2) handsome. I guess his novel must have ranked pretty high on the depth scale to earn him such a prestigious literary accolade, but if I’m being entirely truthful, I rode the struggle bus big time in my attempt to read it. Which sort of makes me wonder, does this guy work here just so people buy his book, since it’s required reading for the program?
“May I—” I begin to ask, hoping to defend my work.
“Hang on, Cecily. For now, let’s hear what else folks have to say.”
I clamp my mouth shut and resume staring down at my notebook.
“Harold, how about you?”
Across from me, a middle-aged man with a round face, brown bangs, and circular glasses who is wearing (I cannot make this up) a cape strokes an invisible goatee, staring out the window as if searching for the perfect words to use to describe my life’s work. Perhaps this Hogwarts doppelganger is precisely what our workshop needs: an intelligent soul who can remind the group that I worked hard on this piece, and even if it’s not perfect, I am here to learn, and I have tremendous potential.
“Overall?” he begins, and I wait optimistically for him to find the appropriate commendation. “I thought it was good. But—”
“Remember,” Professor PEN Award says, “we’re not looking for subjective opinions on the readability of the work. We’re looking for constructive criticism here. What can Cecily do to improve this piece?”
Ugh. Why’d you have to interrupt him? Didn’t you hear him use the word good? He thought it was good! Just leave it alone!
My heart’s pumping hard, as if I just finished an hour on the treadmill, minus the endorphins and the feeling of satisfaction one can get from a good sweat. It’s more akin to the thumping of a young deer’s pulse after hearing gunshots in the tranquil forest. Run. Hide, Bambi. You’re under siege by a literary elitist hunter who undoubtedly reads Faulkner, Proust, and Dostoyevsky for fun. No Emily Henry novels to be found here. Just the author of some critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling debut author parading around like a professor whose sole mission is, apparently, to get people to trash talk your work. My feet are anchored to the ground, and I absently pick at my thumbnail cuticle. I will not allow the words to sting me. Sticks and stones and all that. I will just breathe, and the fresh ocean air will infuse clarity through my veins, cleansing my mind and (more importantly) my heart from the toxic highbrow remarks in this workshop. Inhale. Exhale. Let the words float out to sea.
I am an island.
“Well,” Harry Potter replies, “in my opinion, the narrator, Daisy, lacked a character arc. She felt more like a grumbly teenager than a stoic ingenue.”
“Can you give us an example?”
“Hm,” Harold replies, furrowing his brow. He uses his pointer finger to scroll on his tablet screen. “Here. On page sixteen. Third paragraph down.” He clears his throat.
“‘Tony was sitting with Veronica in the cafeteria, only seventy-two hours after sliding his tongue down my throat. How could this be, after I told him how she tried to ruin my life in middle school? A slick of bile threatened regurgitation as I considered my options. I could slash his bicycle tires, of course, although that might look fairly obvious. I could throw my lunch tray in his face, but I’d never been one for theatrics. What else was there? Pull the fire alarm? Feed arsenic to his dog? I stood there for a moment, staring at them from behind the trash can, when it hit me. The sweetest revenge is indifference. I held my chin high and strode easily past them.’”
He looks up. “I don’t know. I get that she’s trying to work through this big moment or whatever, but I just feel like it lacks interiority.”
Remain calm, I tell myself. I try to hear the comments as if they’re not about my work. Lacks interiority, I write down.
“Thank you,” Tim says, gesturing at Harold and nodding vehemently. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Like, okay, so Tony is sitting with Veronica. And yes, we know that Veronica spread rumors about Daisy and that they hate each other, but how is Daisy not more impacted by this moment of betrayal in the lunchroom? I think that’s my issue with the story.”
“So it’s not the plotline,” Professor PEN Award says.
“No,” Tim replies. “It’s the character development.”
“This is YA, obviously,” another voice says. This time, it’s the pretty woman to my left with twin purple braids cascading down her back and bright red lipstick accentuating her high cheekbones. Her name is Andrea, but she pronounces it Ahn-dray-uh, all fancy-like. My hope is that she’s about to come to my rescue, that her comments will be as lovely as the tattoo of angel wings adorning her bare shoulder. In fact, I direct what remaining strength I have to the task of forgetting that her workshop submission, titled “Lotus Blossom Soup,” was so abstract it was nearly unintelligible. But when she opens her mouth, I am met with my own personal horror once again. “I think you’re creating false expectations for genre fiction,” she says, and the words turn her braids into horns. My mind twists her angled face into Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent; the angel wings morph into those of a black dragon as my breath catches in my throat. Seriously? This from a woman whose piece opened with the following line: To find the soul of one’s ethereal depth, one must look no further than the spoon of life. Which made me wonder if I was reading a bad fortune cookie, or if the line had been written while the author was extremely high.
“How do you mean?” PEN Award asks.
She purses her chapped lips. “It’s commercial,” Maleficent explains. “Surface. Character arc not required.” She waves her hand, as if shooing an illiterate mosquito out of the space immediately in front of her right boob.
The realization hits me like a stack of hardcovers.
I am the illiterate mosquito.
No, no. Stop it, Cecily! You are above this! You are transcendent in this maelstrom of negativity. I write the words character arc on the college-ruled page before me.
“I disagree,” Trite Tim rebuts.
This goes on for several minutes, and I will myself not to listen to any of it. I work on intentional breathing. In, two three, four. Out, two, three, four.
To be fair, none of this was on the website. Or in the welcome folder. Or even discussed at orientation yesterday! In fact, when I got my acceptance letter from Matthias University, the director of the program—a novelist and poet laureate named Dillon Norway—actually complimented my ability to write about young people with depth and verve. He also said that my work had resounding acoustic density and emotional complexity.
Those phrases were the reason I chose this school. Well, that and the low-residency model. When I began applying, my director at the library told me she wouldn’t be able to change my work schedule to accommodate regularly scheduled grad classes all year long. However, she told me to look into low-res programs, since she could convince the board to approve me taking a short stint away twice a year. That’s the model. You come away for an eight-day intensive in the summer and an eight-day intensive in the winter, and you’re paired with a mentor for the in-between time, which is technically considered independent study. You write and submit twenty-five pages a month to your mentor, who meets with you virtually to discuss the work you’ve produced. You’re also responsible for reading ten books per semester and writing craft essays on them. Lather, rinse, repeat four times for two years, and then come back for the fifth residency, where you’ll graduate with an MFA.