Workshop Blues
So, lately I’ve been wanting to start up a workshop group of some sort. I am desperate to get some feedback on my new project, and equally desperate to exercise my own critical muscles. Of course the other thing I’d like to do is be able to sit down and talk with other serious prose writers on regular basis.
None of those things are happening for me right now.
I did consider having some kind of on-line workshop, but for me I just don’t think it would work. Unless everyone is set up to video conference, we’d then be reduced to emails, write-ups, and no spontaneous conversation.
No, what I want is a face-to-face, in person workshop. Such a thing would force me to read the submitted manuscripts, plus it would get me out of the house - or at least get other people into my house.
The only problem is I can’t seem to scare up some mutually interested writers in these parts. Of the prose writers I know, one has a travel heavy day job, one is already in a workshop and the workshop is an ad-hoc online endeavor, two others seem to think I’m too square or otherwise unhip, another is just plain uninterested and I can’t tell if it is out of insecurity or some kind of intellectual snobbishness, still another is a professor of creative writing who also seems completely uninterested in me the few times we’ve met, and the last two I know write kid lit for the preteen set.
I’ve been told that I just need to get out more, which makes sense only on the surface level. Outside of the academic setting most working writers have day jobs and aren’t out doing a lot of socializing in their spare time.... they’re off somewhere writing. And if they’re anything like me then they’ll pass pretty innocuously through most social events.
This all leaves me in a pretty dismal and isolated position.
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About Jason
Jason Quinn Malott has a BA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University, and an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University (The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics). He has worked as a dishwasher, a short order cook, a barista, a newspaper...
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Ah, they _say_ they're off
Ah, they _say_ they're off somewhere writing, but I'd wager a lot of them are enjoying a bottle of nice red, or any red, really, promising to get onto that manuscript 'first thing in the morning'.
Only kidding! You do have a bit of a predicament there, though. This kind of creative work is often a lonely road and it's good to have peers around.
Not Far From The Truth
Actually, the bit about drinking wine and promising to get to that manuscript later is, I am beginning to suspect, more true for this town I'm stuck in than I want to admit.