Our motto at Wednesdays@One is "A better writer today than yesterday, and better tomorrow than today." Progress is what we're after, no matter the starting point.
But I've never addressed the question, How do you know you're making progress? Here's a story that suggests an answer:
At a recent W@1 salon, as we worked our way through the week's submissions, we came to a poem by a writer who has struggled to break out of her comfort zone. I don't need to name the writer or describe that zone. We all know our comfort zones exist and, as writers, our goal at W@1 is to try things with language that we may not like, that require some bravery on our part, or at least some curiosity, so we can add facility to our "writing kits."
But TRYING requires awareness. And awareness demands that we open ourselves to self-reflection every so often, about our skills, our preferences, and our fears as writers. Workshops are supposed to help us do that. They're supposed to offer the safe space where not only can we experiment with styles and subject matters we are not familiar with, but we can open ourselves to criticism and encouragement, where we can absorb input and readers' reactions.
Workshops don't always give us that help. Sometimes they are nothing more than enabling mechanisms, praise fests, critique-free zones. Or they are fraught spaces where people tell us exactly how to fix our poem--i.e., write one that better suits their prejudices about good poems. A good workshop will seek only to help a writer understand the decisions she has made in writing a particular poem, and those she has avoided making for whatever reason, to promote awareness. In turn, that awareness, over time, should help her to make better, more informed decisions as she writes.
But she has to be open to this process.
A good workshop will help a writer recognize himself along the long arc of development that every poet travels his entire writing life. He has first to be willing to travel that arc, and then to walk it with eyes and ears open.
If we are really committed to bettering ourselves as writers of poetry, that's what we want of ourselves and our fellow writers at W@1.
Well, I am especially happy to say that the writer whose poem we read recently has started to take that deeper look into her writerly soul. Before reading her poem to us, she acknowledged that it was a backslide. She had been TRYING to write differently (And if I may, now I'll try to describe her "zone." Over time, her writing has calcified somewhat into narrative storytelling of her days in New Jersey--a sometimes sentimental journey.), more lyrically and against a richer backdrop of subjects. She had been working to drop the go-to narrative voice of this happened, and then that happened and then I realized something and isn't that a fond memory?
She has wanted to write more intellectually and also in a more nuanced fashion where her emotions are concerned. She has wanted to explore her world, or maybe I should say The World, not just her memories. She has wanted to approach her poems more as verbal icons, linguistic works of art, less as little memoirish vignettes broken into lines.
But as I said, this poem reverted to the old way, and our colleague knew it. And acknowledged it. You might argue that one way of measuring your progress is to regress once in a while. So this poem was perfectly fine with all of us, so long as its author understands its place in her development.
That's step one in becoming a better writer, self-awareness. Kudos to her.
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