Categories
Uncategorized

“Chasing that ‘MFA feeling'”

Prose faculty Cat Snyder on reacquainting oneself with the MFA through the writing residency.

This April, I had the pleasure of attending the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, Alaska for two weeks. I wanted to go for a handful of reasons—for the dedicated time and space, to prove I still know how to be alone(ish), to meet other writers, for the ego boost, and because it’s freaking Alaska.

On the time and space: We writers know that there’s really no substitute for uninterrupted hours and a private, quiet place in which to stare at our screens in creative anguish. The first week of my own MFA in Corvallis, one of the instructors (hi, Keith!) warned us that we would never again write at the same volume or pace as we would in the program. I think he meant that writing would never be at the dead center of our lives again, and that it would only get harder to produce work once those two structured years were up. He wasn’t being discouraging, but he was honest. Though this caveat burrowed like a bug in my brain, I tried to believe that he was wrong, that he had underestimated my own dedication—but he wasn’t, of course.

My time at the MFA (especially pre-COVID) was a gorgeous blip. Now, I have three jobs, a dog, a husband, and all the myriad expenses that come with being a functioning adult in 2025 (not to mention Netflix). While the people in my life support my writing, no one is explicitly asking me or paying me to write, so it’s easy for writing to fall to the bottom of my wretched to-do list. What’s more, I have no external deadlines. Though I still meet with many people from my MFA cohort once a month for workshop, writing is submitted on a volunteer basis. Frankly, when I think about the sheer number of pages I wrote for my thesis alone, I almost want to cry. I can’t remember what it was like to be expected to write; to have writing be the whole point.

At Storyknife, I was able to recalibrate the balance of my day. For two weeks, I rewrote the laws of gravity for my life: a colleague and friend kindly covered my classes at OSU (thank you, Mike!). I’d completed my monthly freelance work before the trip. I woke up early to work my PR job (the rest of my team works east coast hours, which freed up my afternoons for writing)—and by 1pm AK time each day, my time was entirely my own. So, what did I do with it? I took long walks on the dirt roads around campus. I chipped away at nearly-fossilized chunks of writer’s block. I dragged the armchair in front of the gas fireplace in my cabin and wrote until it felt like my shins might melt off. And at dinner, I gathered with other writers who had spent their days in similar skull-sized vortexes, and we passed the salt and talked it all out: memoir versus essays, stories versus novels, why we do this even when it’s painful. All of this felt like what I’d temporarily lost when my MFA ended: the difference between “I write” and “I’m a writer.”

On being alone(ish): I have gone my whole life not knowing if I’m an introvert or an extrovert. I’ve had people try to tell me, but neither categorization feels quite right. I like people, but I have social anxiety. I get tongue-tied ordering a coffee, but I crave the high of making other people laugh. I like to hear myself talk, hate to hear myself think. I can only write in solitude, but I don’t love being alone—I listen to podcasts on ten-minute car rides, call my four siblings one at a time on long walks. Being lonely from time to time is good for me; I sometimes feel that I write best when my heart hurts a little.

On meeting other writers: I was humbled when meeting the other women in my diverse and far-flung cohort, all of whom were more experienced in their careers and more advanced in their respective projects than me. Once I got over myself, the conversations were as productive as the hours writing. I learned about everyone’s individual processes and routines, literary heroes, and paths to publication. One night, a fellow writer sat down at the dinner table and said: “I’ve got a question: forgiveness.” It didn’t matter that it wasn’t, in fact, a question—it prompted one of the most invigorating and empathetic conversations I’ve had in a long time, and even impacted the ending of an essay I’d been struggling to finish for over a year.

Though we discussed our work to some degree every day, it wasn’t until our last night together that our cohort sat down for a casual a reading of our own making. After sharing so many meals together in such a sacred space, it was almost surreal to hear snapshots of their stories in their own voices. Even if I hadn’t written one word worth saving, that evening alone would have made the trip worth it.

On the ego boost: Getting accepted to Storyknife was a confidence boost, sure, but to maintain that mental momentum is always a struggle. I feel an overwhelming appreciation for the Storyknife staff who go above and beyond to give female writers a place where they feel truly cared for—through the delicious and creative meals provided, the privacy granted, and the communal space so carefully curated with creatives in mind. I think a lot of women (especially caregivers) are hesitant to be cared for. It took a while for me to believe that I deserved to be there, or that I deserved that level of nurturing. At the end of the day, what gift could be greater?

Although my Imposter Syndrome was still alive and well upon meeting my cohort, by the time I left, I was just proud to have kept such esteemed company. Storyknife is a unique residency in that it lacks both pressure and pretension. Writers are not required to share their work from their time in Homer; there’s a trust that it happened and a hope that it was worth it. The only pressure we feel is the pressure we put on ourselves, and thankfully the atmosphere while I was there was one of patience and passion.

On freaking Alaska: I believe in creative respiration—taking in as much beauty as you can, in the hopes that you will give something beautiful back. This was my second time in Alaska (after attending the Alderworks residency in 2021, in Skagway), and it never disappoints. If my eyes are to be believed, I saw a dozen bald eagles perched on a landfill [INSERT POLITICAL COMMENTARY HERE]. I saw the sun—at eleven at night (every night). I saw a mother moose, swelling with the weight of her next calf (her yearling not yet wise to the fact that he will soon be banished to adulthood with the rest of us). I saw the ancient cerulean blue of a glacier, spurs rising like white sails on the horizon; dead plants stalks I didn’t recognize (like the skeletons Dr. Seuss flora); the sun sinking below Mt. Iliamna, leaving her a ghostly blue against a clementine sky; rows and rows of mountains sharp as shark teeth, melting abruptly into a silver sea. (Honorable mentions: I was convinced I heard wolves in the night, but turns out it was just the neighbor’s dramatic dog; I set my alarm for 2am every night and never saw the Northern Lights, but it was fun to run into other hopeful fools on the lawn.)

All this to say, I will be chasing that “MFA feeling” anywhere I can, and I can’t recommend residencies enough.

Connect with Cat online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-malcynsky

Photo credit: Cat Snyder

, , ,
Categories
On Writing

“When your daughter refuses to be in your essay”

Prose faculty member Beth Alvarado on the boundaries of memoir.

This essay first appeared in LitHub on 10 May 2019 and has been reposted here with permission from the author.

A week ago, my daughter had opened to a random spot in my new essay collection and read a passage where she and I were having a conversation. Although she’d been angry, she’d said nothing for days, finally taking me out to lunch to tell me that I was no longer allowed to quote her without her permission.

In this particular instance, she was right. I shouldn’t have quoted her. She had told me something in confidence and I’d betrayed her. She was worried that what she’d said would hurt someone else. There was no way, since the book is out, to undo what I’d done.

She said, “I’ll bet it didn’t even occur to you.” She was right. I was just trying to get the scene down as accurately as possible. “The essay didn’t even need that quote.” She was right about that, too.

But, often, she has these pithy sayings about motherhood—while on the phone with me,for instance, she might say, I’ve got to get back to crushing my children’s souls, or when she’s exasperated by her twin boys, she’ll say, will everything with a penis please behave?

“It’s just that you’re so quotable,” I’d told her, “And I’m writing about writing about motherhood.”

“Tame your impulses!” is another thing she says to her toddlers. She could be speaking to me.

She wants me to tame my impulse to write about her life. But my life is so bound up with hers right now as I help, daily, to care for her boys. My impulse is to write about those toddlers, about her mothering, and about the memories that rise up.

Why is it so hard to write about children? For the same reason, I think, that it’s so hard to write about being a mother. One: it just hasn’t been done that often, not realistically, not honestly, and not by mothers—until recently. Rivka Galchen, who calls her infant daughter “the puma” in her book Little Labors, notes, “Literature has more dogs than babies.”

So many personal essays are about parents or partners, but there’s a lot to say about trying to write about children and grandchildren. About the balance between difficult subjects and personal relationships and protecting privacy. About the dance of anxiety in truth-telling and not making caricatures of our own grown children and their children.

Also, consider this: both babies and mothers are idealized in popular culture. Mothers are self-sacrificing, nurturing, wise, honored for putting others’ needs before their own. If they have conflicts, they swallow them. Or, there’s the other extreme: tomes have been written in which mothers are over-bearing, devouring, all-powerful beings who deform their children and are responsible for their every short-coming. My mother’s generation was that of the “refrigerator mother” and my daughter’s, the “helicopter.” These two extremes are myths that we, as mothers, have to somehow counter before even getting to the story.

And babies? They are round and sweet, cherubs all. Innocent, yet precocious. Of course, these are only our own babies. Other people’s babies are hungry, pooping blobs of flesh. If we’re honest, they barely interest us at all. Our government, especially lately, seems to want fetuses to be born, but is not interested in legislating a living wage for their parents, parental leave, child care, medical care, good public schools, or protection from gun violence. Our indifference to the children of others reveals itself most dramatically in our willingness to separate immigrant children, even infants, from their parents. The pictures of two-year-olds in court? Empty strollers outside of detention centers? Children housed in dog kennels? They seem emblematic to me.

All of this to say: writing about motherhood and about children is a radical act.

It is also one that has caused me extreme conflict.

I was conflicted when I was young, of course, because children take so much time, time I often wanted to spend on my work, which made me feel selfish. Then, in graduate workshops, it was apparent that no one was interested in stories about women and children. Even the few feminists in my class asked questions like, “Why can’t you write about independent women, women who don’t have children?”

Because, I wanted to say, I am not nearly as interested in dysfunctional heterosexual relationships—which is what they were writing about—as I am in mothers and children. Later, when I finally was brave enough to write about my own life, I was asked, “How can a woman who used to be a heroin addict be a good mother? This just isn’t believable.”

Believable or not, it was what I needed to write—and yet that brought up another conflict. I wasn’t worried about my parents or siblings or students (etc) reading about my past; I wasn’t even worried about my own children, since I’d always been honest with them, but I was worried about my nieces and nephews. I was worried about white perceptions of Mexican Americans, since my husband was Mexican American. I felt responsible, not only to my own children, but to their cousins, and to the family I loved and had adopted me. Was I perpetuating stereotypes?

And now, 30 years later, with the latest book, I worried about my grandchildren. The oldest child, the twelve-year-old, I figured my son could explain my past drug abuse to him, but the nine-year-old? I asked my son. He said, “Oh, he knows that his tata”—my husband—“died from liver cancer because he did drugs. He’s sad about it.”

So the family tradition of truth-telling lives on. This is good. After all, if we present ourselves as infallible, then what happens when our children fail? To whom can they turn?

Still, to present ourselves as flawed, is one thing, but to write about our children’s flaws? Or our grandchildren’s? That seems a betrayal. I had to scrap a whole essay on anger because to talk about the anger I’ve felt toward my son’s sons was too complicated. Yes, my grandsons were misbehaving. Yes, I tackled one on the stairs so he wouldn’t hurt his brother. Yes, I did threaten to break the older one’s fingers when we were lost, and he wouldn’t give me my cell phone.

And, yes, that night, when I apologized to them and asked if my anger had scared them, the older one said, “No, but it was a little surprising,” and the younger one asked me if I needed to hear “the patience meditation.” As if my anger had been completely unwarranted! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt guilty for months.

I remembered going into the bathroom when my children were little and holding a hand mirror parallel to the floor so I could see my face as they saw it when I said the things I said in anger. Was there something wrong with me? I didn’t remember my mother ever getting that angry. When I’d called her to confess, she’d said, “Oh, you know what your Auntie Sue always said. It’s damn hard to kill a kid.” Of course, she was joking. It was a bad joke. Still, even though I’d worked with children whose parents had harmed them, it somehow made me feel better.

Now, when I hold the little boys, I feel such tenderness for them and such horrible regret for my impatience with my own children and my older grandchildren.

I wonder why those we love most can light a match in our hearts. So easily. So quickly. Sometimes several times a day.

“Motherhood,” my daughter said to me, “is humbling.” And here she let me quote her.

Connect with Beth online at https://www.bethalvarado.com/.

Photo credit: by Beth Alvarado

Categories
On Writing

“How best do we use our voices?”

Prose faculty member Kristen Millares Young on how silence will not serve us.

I’ve been thinking about silence of late. How best to use our voices? I strategize best in community. Maybe you do, too. I’ll moderate a panel called To Speak with Silence: Writing the Unsayable alongside prose writers Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Sonora Jha, Cameron Dezen Hammon, and Lilly Dancyger.

In Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde wrote, “The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.”

That essay is foundational to my memoir Desire Lines, to come out on October 6, 2026 from Red Hen Press, which also published my novel Subduction.

In Desire Lines, I seek possibilities for women’s liberation despite the erosion of our human rights. Taking its title from footpaths that emerge, eroded yet unforeseen, next to the routes that were planned for us, Desire Lines excavates motherhood, the body, and the sacred. 

In the eight years I spent researching my memoir, I pursued the trail of family silence down in diaspora, tracing my matrilineage from Spain to Cuba as I track down a pagan mother goddess cult. Along the way, I reclaimed the power that had been siphoned from my body and my story.  

Lorde wrote, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”

Based on my own pursuit of truth and my refusal of silence, which I have come to understand as the coda of compliance, I have a crafted a series of questions for you to consider:  

What is the hardest thing that has gone unsaid in your life?

When did that truth’s origin story begin?

Who peopled your world at that time?

What did they hide from each other?

What was known?

Who have you been protecting with your silence?

In Desire Lines, I wrote that my family has “forestalled conversations for decades, fearful of realities we have already lived. On the far side of silence, I suspect, is joy.” Inspired by Lorde, I have forged communion with other writers by sharing my story. I hope the same can be true for you.

To join our discussion of the craft of silence, please find me in Room 403B of the Los Angeles Convention Center on Saturday, March 29th, at 9 a.m.  Or we can continue the conversation at the Red Hen Press Booth 345, where I’ll be signing copies of Subduction on Friday, March 28th, 2025, from 2-3 p.m. at the AWP Bookfair.

Connect with Kristen online at www.kristenmyoung.com and on Instagram @kristenmillares.

Photo credit: by Kristen Millares Young

Categories
Uncategorized

Welcome to Work / Life!

Welcome to Work / Life, the faculty blog of the OSU Cascades Low-residency MFA Program in Writing. 

In this online space, you’ll get to know the talented faculty of our program as they share their insights on writing, teaching, and community. We invite you to join the conversation and get to know our Low-residency MFA Program by visiting our website https://osucascades.edu/academics/mfa and reaching out! Happy reading and writing!