My Integrative Essay (abridged) that I wrote that got a passing grade:
Integrative Essay
The price of admission into any Graduate Program is a feeling of being under-qualified and overwhelmed. I maybe felt it more acutely because, prior to my acceptance into Marlowe’s MFA for Creative Writing, I’d spent much of the previous years hung-over and intermittently employed. Sarah Wolford-Packard, a Marlowe fellow student, prefaced her Defense Reading with the disclaimer that she had struggled through the MFA, and at times didn’t think she could keep up with the work. Yet she completed the program thanks to support from her family, classmates and mentors. The comment eased my worries.
She set up the context and scene for her reading. In the aftermath of a demon summoning, a mortal rode in a carriage with supernatural humanoids. They traveled to visit an old mystic woman who may or may not have roused the demons. The mystic lived in a creepy mansion situated deep in a spooky forest. My solidarity gave way to judgmental snobbery. What was I so worried about? Past graduates had written books that could be categorized as Horror/Fantasy Fiction.
Guest speaker Max Collins proposed the concept of invisible magnetic rivers in his craft talk “A River Runs Through It: What Makes a Literary Work Complete.” I write the speech’s title in its entirety because of the key watchword “Literary.” He likened the idea of invisible magnetic rivers to binding agents or unifying elements in writing. It’s a slippery abstraction, best summed up as “thematic,” yet can and should be concrete and easy to spot when it’s done well in writing.
Mr. Collins, soft-spoken and unassuming, was an embodiment of this maddeningly complex simplicity. Inherent, yet unacknowledged in the theory of invisible magnetic rivers, is a vapor that permeates the writing, a truth flowing through the work that even the author may not be aware of. On the hinted-at subject of the key watchword, “Literary,” Mr. Collins gave a quick plug for brevitymag.com, a venue for “flash nonfiction” that releases short personal essays and book reviews exclusively via the internet.
In the craft talk from The Director, he differentiated deterministic or probabilistic approaches to writing. The two techniques were connected to Stuart Firestein’s book, Ignorance: How It Drives Science. Not knowing something and trying to figure it out serves as a perpetual line of inquiry. Seeking provides answers that open up more questions. As it relates to writing outlines and drafts is an essential part of the process, but the ultimate goal should be to ask questions that open up more questions and let the writing follow where the inquiries lead.
The Director posed a rhetorical question to support the probabilistic approach. If you know what you want to say before you say it, then what’s the point? Questions leading to more questions were not regulated to just apply to the writer. Thinking probabilistically also connected to the reader. How will the reader’s experience with the story change the reader? How will the reader carry those changes into their lives? How will that affect the lives of others?
For his talk on writing across genres, my Mentor laid out perceived distinctions between poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction. While some separations are perhaps justified, he suggested that the biggest barriers shouldn’t come from imposed categorization, but instead from the writer’s use of technique. The idea is to take a moment of inspiring experience and use it to write towards a greater truth. This concept was exemplified in “The Colonel,” by Carolyn Forché, a piece of writing labeled as a poem that is structured like lyrical fiction, but is based off an actual event.
My judgmental snobbery directed at Sarah Wolford-Packard’s Defense Reading was unjustified and ignorant. As an example of my initial closed-mindedness, I’ll take a different interpretation to her same scene. Replace the mortal with a complacently privileged member of the leisured class. Instead of supernatural humanoids, put in a minority group, systemically marginalized, and yet known for the value they place on education.
Replace the old mystic with a reclusive clergy member once renowned for legislation reforming civil disobedience. She doesn’t live in a creepy mansion situated deep in a spooky forest. She lives in an abandoned storage shed in an economically depressed neighborhood neglected by law enforcement.
Instead of riding in a carriage, they travel in the bare interior of a Chevy cargo van. Or maybe on the backseat, its upholstery dotted with cigarette burns, of a Toyota Camry. Instead of the action playing out in the wake of a demon-summoning, it happens after a homemade bomb has gone off in a public place.
My work-in-progress centers around the experiences of a young woman named Lucia Lovelace O’Malley. As it stands now, in preexisting back-story, and as I’d like to further develop in future writing, Lucia is perceptive, but apathetic. She has a hard time making friends, but she’s very good at alienating the few friends she does have. She graduated with a degree from an expensive university, but instead of seeking out a career, she works temp jobs and lives in the basement of her parents’ house. Her taste in music skews towards the grittier lo-fi, analog recordings of punk and hardcore bands. She has a history of alcohol abuse and drug binges, but is either unaware of, or unapologetic about, the mayhem and self-harm her recklessness causes. She could be a troubled heroine. Or she could be a stuck-up brat.
For a majority of the story, as I now envision it, Lucia’s age is somewhere in the range of older than 28, but younger than 33. She has no children. She is not married or engaged. She doesn’t even have a boyfriend. The setting is Akron, Ohio, between the years of 2008 and 2010. This era has emerged in the public consciousness as The Global Financial Crisis or The Great Recession. Lucia could be a spinsterish old maid in the making. Or she could be a millennial.
Lucia drinks too much. Her life is bad. She wants to quit drinking altogether and thinks that sobering up will enable her to regain some control of her emotions and maybe even be happy. So, she tries to sober up by attending support group meetings of a faith-based program Alcoholics Anonymous designed to help people quit drinking.
This type of story could be described as Kick-lit, as in kick literature, as in literature about kicking the habit (most commonly alcohol dependency and drug addiction). Literature of a confessional page-turning quality, most commonly represented by recovery memoirs penned by junky rock stars and pill-popping supermodels who survive the senselessness of debilitating addiction, then wipe their noses, change their ways and go on to lead healthy productive lives. Recounting their experiences in a book is a way to help readers who may have suffered similar socially stigmatizing setbacks stemming from addiction and unstable mental health.
I was living in the Akron area through the years 2008 to 2010. I had experiences, direct and indirect, pertaining to addiction and drug-related deaths. I have also been involved with 12-step programs. As part of my involvement, I’ve read about Alcoholics Anonymous’ early development in my hometown and visited sites of significance in the movement’s history.
Since she has a drinking problem, and is in Akron, the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous, Lucia begins attending AA meetings and working the 12 steps. Central tenets of the 12-step program are prayer, altruism, and moral spiritual principles as means to stay sober. With this motivation, Lucia’s narrative could be a coming-of-age story. Or it could be a story about a young woman’s quest for God.
Related to Lucia’s experiences with early recovery, I plan to experiment with scenes where AA’s sordid early development in Akron, during the Great Depression, permeates Lucia’s life in Akron during the Great Recession. It may come across as Fantasy Fiction. Or it may be Magical Realism. The story could be Kick-lit. Or it could be a fictional exploration of Alcoholics Anonymous then and now. Or it could be an examination of the connections between addiction, mental health care, and tough economic times.
What I’d like to do in my writing is expand the binaries of what the story is and what the story isn’t, experiment with technique and classification to find the overlap, and have external considerations of inspiration and reader interpretation collapse the elements together until they’re one and the same.