Why I'm Pseudonymous

Complaining about writing workshop again....

A few years ago, I decided I would never write again.¹ At the time I was dropping out of a writing MFA program. Even when I entered the program, I had not expected to gain much from it professionally or artistically. Considering the cynicism I started out with, I’m pretty impressed that it could turn out worse than I predicted.

Given that I didn’t expect that getting an MFA would unlock access to academic jobs & book deals, & that I was well aware that most of my favorite books had not come out of workshops & many of my least favorite books had, you may well ask why I had decided to do this in the first place. Here are all three reasons.

1. I wanted validation.

2. I thought it would be fun to be around people who shared my interests.

3. It was free.

Well, I was right about it being free.

I even felt validated—at first. But I didn’t end up having a fun time with people who shared my interests, which in the end kind of poisoned the validation, including the validation I had already felt. I ended up chain smoking cigarettes during the ten-minute break in the middle of workshop in order to cope with the escalating social tensions.

For one thing, it wasn’t exactly true that I was around people who shared my interests. We were interested in reading, and specifically in poetry, but my interest was somehow at cross purposes with theirs. It’s hard to describe. This was sad but it wouldn’t have been a big deal on its own; I was pretty used to being interested in things by myself. But also. The program, like many other artistic and cultural institutions around that time, had taken on an increasingly political bent. At first this was annoying but very funny.

For a while, it kept getting funnier how more & more workshop time was taken up with talking about whether the piece under discussion was politically helpful or harmful—as if there could be anything with less political weight than a lyrical poem that would be lucky to get inside a literary journal & see a hundred pairs of eyes, as if anyone who primarily cared about the oppressed would ever come up with “writing poetry” as the best course of action. For a while, it kept getting funnier that the quickly-proliferating rules about harmfulness were applied so inconsistently, that person x could accuse person y of some transgression & do the same thing themselves a week later & not get in trouble for it, usually not because person x could even be argued to be more oppressed than person y (which would at least be a consistent application of rules) but simply because person x was more popular. It was very funny when a student turned in a poem about the evils of an old white man creative writing professor to that old white man creative writing professor, & it was very funny how matter-of-factly he critiqued it & suggested ways it could be more effective (I wonder if she took any of his advice). And the funniest thing of all was the way that—even though I knew better, even though I knew very well that most people engage with rules in a much more impressionistic & less literal way than I do—something about the granularity of these rules, and the number of them, and the assurance that everyone expressed about these rules, made me very argumentative. I couldn’t help asking about inconsistencies, asking about exactly why something broke a rule. It was very weird luck that I basically never got in social trouble for this. I think I got some cushion because I gave very good workshop feedback;² if you ever want to get away with shit with a writer, give her a thoughtful critique of her latest poem first.

But then it started getting less funny, and I started getting less argumentative. And eventually we had a full workshop session of some students screaming at two others. The professor let this happen. I tried to argue against this at first, but I let myself be shut up. I am very, very ashamed that I sat through the class. Even from the perspective of a full believer in all these rapidly proliferating rules, it was the wrong thing to do, to sit there, not agreeing but cowardly enough to pretend.

Which brings us back to the beginning. After metabolizing this event for a while, I dropped out & decided never to write again. Reading and writing are both pastimes for solitary people, which makes it hard to notice that they are basically unsatisfying without an element of reciprocity. I expected to keep finding reciprocity in reading—I believed that I would find authors I liked—but I no longer had any hope about finding reciprocity through writing; I had long been blackpilled about the tiny circulation of the literary magazines I’d been published in, not to mention my negligible chances in mainstream publishing; I had hoped that I would at least enjoy a few years of mutual literary admiration in an MFA program, which would be very fun for a while even though I doubted it would lead to anything, & I had kind of flamed out on that too.

What the MFA taught me, if nothing else, was to be very careful of my words or I could find myself in trouble. And that turned out to basically not be true either! I have this whole self protective pseudonym and I think I have basically never said anything that made people mad. A lot of this is just luck; I think the people who encounter me have longer fuses than the average person online, for which I’m extremely grateful.

So the stuff that made me decide to be pseudonymous online turned out to have basically nothing to do with the online environment I found myself in. That being said, I’m still very grateful to have been doing this under a pseudonym; it’s just that the reasons it turned out to be a good decision have nothing to do with the reasons I made the decision. I plan on writing more about that soon, watch this space…

1. Since then I have written more than I ever have before. Oops.

2. In fact, when I told one of my professors I was dropping out, one of the things she said to talk me out of it was that my workshop notes were always the most thoughtful & fleshed out in the class. Unfortunately, that was a very good reason for the program to want to keep me, but not a particularly good reason for me to stay.