The Artist’s Way: Week 1 (or Notes from a letter of recommendation written on my behalf)

It’s a Monday night and I’ve just completed my THC-yoga and I sit down at my laptop to work through assignments for The Artist’s Way: Week 1. 

One task in this first week is to list “three old champions of your creative self-worth” and, optionally, to “write the compliment out” and “post it near where you do your morning pages.” Because the written word always feels more real, the compliment more valid, than words living only in my memory, I decide to compile screenshots of nice things said about my work. I include the words my dear thesis director read during his introduction at my thesis reading. A kind email received from a revered writer and faculty member of an MFA program where I was accepted but couldn’t afford to attend. And a letter of recommendation included in my grad school applications, emailed directly to me by a writing mentor who, for the record, said, “feel free to use it anywhere it might behoove you.”

During this process, I try not to think about the fact that I am, essentially, collecting testimonials for myself — a task I’m often responsible for professionally (though in that case the subject of the testimonial is a piece of software). But I digress.

In the words of the narrative circle-back used in many a MFA-workshop-essay (including mine, let’s be clear): “Let me try again.” 

It’s a Monday night and I’m reading some of the most generous words ever written about me. It’s hard to avoid the fact that reading whole paragraphs about my writing feels self-indulgent and embarrassing. And if that’s not enough, I feel a sudden jolt of shame, like I’ve been scolded. Reprimanded. Called out by the fifth paragraph of a six-paragraph letter of recommendation.

“It’s been my experience that the writers who contain the fortitude to keep writing amidst the inevitable doubt, rejection, and yes, fear are the writers who are practiced in insisting upon their need to write. To write personal essays and memoir is to commit a searching exegesis of your original wounds, to probe your most tender spots ten times a day. Such intimate work requires a fundamental belief that doing the work is ultimately less painful than not doing it. Her pages persuade me that she would write in the hull of a sinking ship.” 

Me. The girlie who’s spent nearly-three years post MFA doing beer shots in Brooklyn dive bars and using her In-Design chops to design sales collateral for a software company. The one who has taken more Citi Bike rides in that time than she’s spent days writing. (And I’m a homebody that was terrified of Citi Bikes for a long time, so that’s saying a lot.) The one who’s logged into Submittable exactly one time since graduation to submit exactly one essay. (Which was, for the record, declined.)

I would write in the hull of a sinking ship? Fuck. I live in a picturesque neighborhood in Brooklyn, within walking distance of half-a-dozen bookshops and a dozen or more coffee shops, and I am still struggling to write. I go on morning walks to my neighborhood park and glimpse dozens (hundreds?) of lives before I sit down at my desk for the first time. Yet my smart typewriter (which I splurged on last year after a promotion because I was convinced it would help me write more) sits in my apartment’s loft, barely used.

Then again, why should I be taking this LOR so seriously? It’s clearly too nice. An exaggeration aimed to help get me accepted into programs. Just a writing teacher doing me a favor. 

I realize this is not the response I’m supposed to be having to this Week 1 assignment, a week focussed on protecting your inner artist from negative core beliefs. I’m supposed to be thinking: ✨ my creativity has been validated and supported by so many ✨. Instead, I’m feeling like a failure 🤡.

I catch myself mid-spiral and beg my logical brain to clamber into the driver’s seat. It’s true: I have not been writing. And when I have been writing, I’ve received encouragement from many sources. My memoir remains unpolished, un-queried, un-published. And many writers have expressed their beliefs in my abilities. Generous words may not tell an entire truth. And there’s no reason to assume they’re devoid of truth entirely. Even in her assignment, Cameron specifies: “Every encouraging word counts. Even if you disbelieve a compliment, record it. It may well be true.”

And so I still screenshot pieces of the letter and copy them into the document with my other champions, which I’ll print and tuck into my copy of The Artist’s Way: Week 1. All in time to start Week 2.