Susanna J. Sturgis: Writer • Editor • Born-Again Horsegirl

Funny how all the materials can be lying out in plain sight but you still don't see how they fit together. Writing not only makes connections among disparate objects, it reveals connections that were there all along. Yes, this is part of To Be Rather Than to Seem. I've split it into two parts, today and tomorrow, but it's all one piece, albeit one with a clear break in the middle.

I still have a copy of my initial inquiry to the director of the Women's Writing Workshops. It's dated 5 February 1984 and it's short: "Would you please send information on the women writers' workshops to be held this summer in Ithaca? I'm finally ready!"

Katharyn, the director, responded with a postcard that had one of her Raccoon Book poems printed on the other side. She promised to send the workshop brochure as soon as it came back from the printer. My copy arrived a few days later, a three-panel self-mailer with beautifully handwritten text. Featured on the cover panel, just under "Tenth Annual Women's Writing Workshops," was the workshop logo: three intertwined Ws, encircled by the words "To know each other" (on the top) "And be known" (on the bottom). To Know Each Other and Be Known was the title of a book about the workshops by their founder, Beverly Tanenhaus.

I loved Hallowmas Women Writers, my D.C. writers' group, but I was ready to test myself and my work with people I didn't know and who didn't know me. This was a big leap. I was still very much my father's and my mother's daughter: I knew that when you ventured out onto unfamiliar terrain it was easy to make a fool of yourself, and that plenty of people ate fools for breakfast and spat out the gristle. But ten days on the shore of Cayuga Lake, in upstate New York, writing, sharing writing, talking about writing with other women writers? The prospect overcame my terrors. To keep from chickening out, I sent my application and $75 deposit in early enough to qualify for the $50 early-bird discount.

In those years the workshop was held at Wells College in the village of Aurora, a bare blink of the eye on state route 90, which runs along Cayuga's south shore. We lived in the Dodge House dorm, ate in the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled dining hall (sharing time but not tables with the other groups in residence), and met each morning on the second floor of the college boathouse, a big airy room whose comfortable chairs and couches we arranged in a circle. Thanks to all the windows, three of the walls seemed to be made of lake and sky as well as wood.

Each "class"consisted of two hour-long critique sessions, and each participant's work was the subject of one before the workshop was over. The day before our session, we'd leave copies of our work out on a table in the dorm for everyone else to pick up and read. The critique process was more structured and more focused than that of my hometown writers' group, and the circle was almost three times bigger: we numbered sixteen that year, and Katharyn was the seventeenth. She served as moderator, ensuring that the ground rules were followed. These ground rules were few, simple, and powerful. When your work was being discussed, you were a silent observer only. The others referred to you as "the poet" or "the writer." They discussed your work with each other, not with you. In the last few minutes, you got to respond, but until then the work had to stand on its own.

Nervous though I was, I volunteered to be one of the two whose work was critiqued that first Monday morning. Having sixteen sister writers bring their attention, experience, and critical faculties to bear on my work was a revelation. One woman might love a line that left another cold, or confused -- this provided plenty of grist for future revisions, but even more valuable was seeing all these people responding passionately to my written words, disagreeing with each other, expanding on each other's insights, having their own epiphanies in the heat of discussion. When the time came for me to become visible again, I was a little stunned. As the workshop went on, I learned that this was a not uncommon reaction.

No matter how carefully I wrote a line to achieve a certain effect, I couldn't control how a given reader would respond to it -- and this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. When I became a critiquer instead of the critiqued, this insight released me from worrying too much about having the "right" reaction to or definitive understanding of a work. My challenge was to respond as fully and as honestly as I could. This takes ongoing practice on several levels, from willingness to engage with a particular work to awareness of where one's own reactions are coming from. Morning after morning, as water lapped at the pier and the shore and sun danced on wavelets way out on the lake, we practiced and stretched and often surprised ourselves.

Since this was my first writers' workshop of any kind, I had little to compare this process to, but several of the other women had plenty. They told of workshops and classes where all work was held up to a certain narrow standard of excellence -- the standard might vary, depending on the aesthetic or political tastes of the leader, but it didn't tolerate anything that didn't at least aspire to conform. They told of critiquing as blood sport, where applause and professorial approval were awarded for a critiquer's stylishness and erudition, even if it was unfair, unuseful, or downright cruel. In nearly all of these tales, the instructor and a large majority of the class were male.

Our workshop's only requirement was attendance at the orientation meeting, morning classes, and the re-entry meeting the night before we left for home. Meals were included in the tuition for resident participants, so most of us ate most of our meals in the dining hall at more or less the same time. There we talked incessantly, in twos, threes, and larger groups. Food was a favorite topic from the get-go. It segued easily into families, class and cultural backgrounds, and living with an alcoholic, with which several of us had firsthand experience. Within twenty-four hours we got around to sex. Most of us arrived with the idea that we would spend a lot of time writing, or that we should spend a lot of time writing: here we were, after all, a world away from all the interruptions and obligations that kept us from writing at home. At our first-night gathering, one woman said that she never wrote much at workshops but she always wrote a lot when she got home. This let me off the hook of my own expectations and gave me permission to use the time however I wanted -- and with all these fascinating writers around, who wanted to spend all her time holed up in her room?

The workshop offered a variety of optional activities, and I took advantage of most of them: readings by the director and her two assistants; a reading and talk by guest writer Marge Piercy; a publishing talk by Nancy Bereano, then the editor of the Feminist Series for Crossing Press[1]; an afternoon trip to Smedley's Bookstore in Ithaca, where proprietor Irene Zahava spoke to the group about feminist bookselling and then, while everyone else browsed and bought, Irene and I got to talk shop.

Impromptu events were organized by participants and announced by handwritten flyers posted on the dorm bulletin boards. One workshopper who was working on a musical gathered several of us around a piano to sing a couple of her songs in progress. Another, a martial arts adept, offered a self-defense class on the lawn. Yet another offered a mini writing workshop on body image. First she asked us to pick the part of our body that we disliked the most. One? Just one? From the comments and nervous laughter I knew I wasn't the only one who had several to choose from. My top two were my boobs and my hair; for this exercise I settled on the latter. Then we were directed to let that disliked part speak, to tell us what it wanted us to know. We wrote furiously for 15 or 20 minutes. Reading the results aloud was optional, but everyone took the plunge, often to murmurs and even hoots of recognition. Then, for another 15 or 20 minutes, each of us got to respond to what our hair, breasts, hips, feet, or face had told us. I wound up with two new poems, "Revolt of the Frizz" and "In Cahoots with the Frizz."

On full moon night I was in my room thinking of falling asleep when poet Joan from Oklahoma came round to say she thought it was a good night to howl at the moon. She was decked out in a white bedsheet with bathing suit underneath. Within minutes most of us, likewise clad, were racing in the direction of the lake. Our path led across the lawn in front of the gymnastics camp's dorm. At least half a dozen astonished prepubescent girls leaned out their windows to wonder at our passing.

The rest of the time I went for walks, hung out by the lake and swam, found myself a grassy place to read or write. As writers we respected each other's solitude but were also pretty good at sensing when someone else was willing to be interrupted.

[1] Crossing Press was then located in nearby Trumansburg. Within a year or two it moved to the San Francisco area. Nancy stayed in Ithaca and went on to found Firebrand Books, a major player in feminist publishing in the 1980s and '90s.

Women's Writing Workshop I