Not-Floundering Friday, #2: The Desire to Do the Work-- A Conversation with Antonio Stefan

Cold Truths, Survival Tactics, and Warm Blankets for Surviving (and Loving) the Writing Life

It’s funny: there are few things more boring— even (or especially) for writers— than talking about or listening to other writers drone on about the challenges and injustices of the writing life.

And also, in the right company, nothing more comforting.

Sometimes, I think the best magic trick I’ve ever pulled is founding or helping inaugurate a series of teaching-writing ventures— the still-flourishing creative writing program for teens in L.A., the MFA I helped launch at Cal State San Bernardino, my Drones Club West manuscript coaching/independent classes biz— which have ensured that I am constantly surrounded by people worth knowing pouring themselves into projects worth doing, and then surfacing to talk to me about their experiences.

What better use, then, of some of these Not-Floundering Fridays than to check in with former students and colleagues and peers to chat about and compare how the writing life looks and feels from where we are, and what we know now that we didn’t then, and what hurts, and what gets us through?

I first taught Antonio Stefan when he was in tenth grade. Before he even got to my program, he had somehow decided that it was for him, or at least would be by the time he was done dragging his entire cadre of crazed, creative, laughing friends into my classes with him. His talent is formidable, his pacing instinctively a novelist’s, his eye for complicated relationships nuanced and wise way beyond his years, his flair for surprising socks and personal grooming choices still mercifully unchecked. May it remain forever so.

I caught up with him at the end of what has been a much less certain path through college, as he mulls applying to Master of Fine Arts creative writing programs for next fall:

We had the following exchange over the course of the last couple weeks:

GH: Have to admit, I was surprised to hear that you were considering going straight on to do an MFA when you graduate next summer, if only because you've seemingly had healthy ambivalence, at various points during the past few years, about your college experiences, at least in relation to writing. Why do you think you've landed where you have, and what are you hoping to find in an MFA program?

AS: My desire to go straight into a program is, in part, a result of my ambivalence about my college experience. What I mean is, I’ve tried on so many hats since graduating high school (neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, social theory) while at the same time mostly avoiding writing, and yet I’ve still come back around to wanting to write. Now more than ever, writing feels like something I want to do. So I guess I mostly want to go straight into a program next fall because I feel compelled to make myself a better writer. And that’s what I hope to find at an MFA: a place where I can go and learn how to be a writer, by which I mean, a place I can go to get myself into the daily, weekly, monthly, rhythms of sitting and working on something, which is probably the aspect of my writing life that I struggle with most. Of course, I’m also hoping to find friends, mentors, readers, community, lakes and mountains and hikes, restaurants and coffee shops… 

Speaking of new phases, how has your (still pretty) recent move affected your writing? Any change in practice? In what you feel compelled to write? 

GH: Change in practice? Not really. At this point, I've probably tried on most of the other hats that could possibly fit me, and I have my music I write to, and my daily/weekly/monthly rhythm (although, more, I think I've weaned myself— from necessity, the way life tends to make us if we want to keep doing this— of reliance on rhythm; in the end, the desire to do the work overwhelms the obstacles). 

As for what I'm writing, yeah, that has changed some. But I suspect that has more to do with the planet circa right this stupid second than the move. On the other hand...new light, new air, new faces, the daily learning and making of a whole new world, or just figuring out where the food market is...let's just say I'm not feeling strapped for new inspirations. 

I want to circle back to your comment about ambivalence concerning your college experiences. You know, I think, that I experienced some of that as an undergrad as well. But then in back to back sentences you say you hope your MFA will make you "a better writer" and also help you "learn how to be a writer". From my perspective, one of those is much more likely than the other, but I'm wondering if you can pinpoint more specifically what you mean by either. As for the mentors, friends, coffee shops, lakes, community...you've always been so good at strapping into those multi-colored socks of yours and heading out to cultivate, grow, find, or create those things or their analogs. Are you feeling like that's getting harder as not-school looms?

AS: I think I kind of conflated my ideas of becoming a better writer and learning to be a writer. Really, what I mean by both is that I’m looking for a place where I can learn how to do the work. When I actually get myself into the chair, when I actually get myself started, I feel good about myself––about my capabilities and my instincts and my process. I enjoy the work. What I struggle with most is building the work into my life in a consistent manner. I want writing to be like eating, sleeping, reading; something I just do every day because it is essential to my being, even when it’s difficult. So my best case-scenario for this program, I think, is that I start to find ways to make that happen. 

In terms of finding spaces and people in a post-undergrad life, I don’t think it’s exactly accurate to say I’ve found it getting more and more difficult. If anything, I’m feeling incredibly excited and enlivened by possibility. My undergrad experience has been such a mixed bag in terms of finding these things (mentors, community, friends, positive spaces, etc.), but the nourishing and rewarding relationships I’ve formed— whether those relationships are with people, places, businesses, whatever— have been the best of my life, without a doubt. And it seems to me that in my post-undergrad life, that trend will continue: the rewarding relationships may be harder to find and forge, but the ones that do materialize will be even more impactful. Does this sound incredibly naive to you? Did you experience something similar at Columbia and then at Montana? 

GH: As usual— as has always been my experience of you in regards to your writing— I think you're thinking with remarkable clarity about where you want (and probably need) to get to if you're going to make a professional go of this. Life provides so many valid, important reasons not to get writing done— such as tending to those rewarding relationships, for example— that eventually, it will just stop happening, I suspect, unless it's so ingrained in your muscle memory and days that the days feel wrong without it.

As for the relationship piece, the only part I suppose might prove naive on your part is your assumption that that trend toward fewer relationships but with greater impact will continue. I wish that for you, for sure. My college and grad school experiences were so wildly different from each other and from typical expectations that I don't think they serve as a useful comparison point. At Columbia during my time, the best writing courses available to undergrads (at least for me) weren't even offered through the College, and they weren't in the catalog. You had to hunt them out, apply your way in, and I was often the only undergrad in my workshops. That plus mid-1980s NYC madness plus unproductive Ivy competitiveness made rewarding relationships difficult to cultivate. 

And yet I met a couple of my best friends and most helpful beta-readers there. 

In Montana, the workshops were often more congenial and my peers more like peers (even if many were much older than me, still), and yet...writing is so solitary. The people really doing it were often the people you'd see least outside of class. I was probably one of those. 

And yet I met my wife and more lifelong friends there. And played on the Missoula Review of Books, the softball team whose memory I will always treasure most.

Wishing the Antonio version of those Montana days for you (including softball team, obviously), only better. 

Let me switch gears before we finish, and ask you one other thing I've been curious about: One of your peers (and good friends) from high school, Ava Bellows, has had that miraculous, impossible, hopefully-good-for-her-in-the-end experience of selling a novel to a major press at 21. I know how happy you are for her, as am I. But I'm also curious in what ways, if any, watching that happen has affected your attitude toward, feelings about, or concerns for your own writing life.

AS: It’s an interesting question, because it’s certainly something I have been thinking a good deal about, although on kind of an adjacent plane. When I was younger and just kind of starting out (so, when I was in your class), I was pretty caught up in the whole “F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise at 24” or “Paul Thomas Anderson made Boogie Nights at 26” kind of thing, in a way that I now think of as quite unhealthy. I had this fantasy of being a kind of prodigy like that, as if that was the only way to go about making a career of creative work. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with publishing young (of course not), or even with wanting to publish young. I think I just had twisted ideas as to why I wanted to publish young. Carmen Maria Machado touches on this really nicely in that post I sent you last month. She writes about the trap of (especially young) writers desiring some literary stardom more than they desire the actual work. Which, I never thought about my own feelings in those terms, but I felt a lot of familiarity when I read that. I think it was then that I realized, explicitly, what I had been working through implicitly for the last year or so: my desire to be published is great, but so is my desire to write; both are important, but the desire to do the work needs to come first. I think it’s easy for me to fall into the fantasizing and then dreaming about what might be, but sometimes that comes at the expense of the work, and that’s something I’m working on getting away from. 

With Ava’s book, though, I could never have been anything but proud and joyful. We basically started out together, and she’s had basically as big an impact on me as a writer as anyone, just by supporting me and reading me and sharing her work with me. And since Ava and I have been so connected since we started, it’s much easier for me to recognize how different our current paths are. In the end, it’s been really cool to see her recognized in this way, to see this book evolve and then eventually end up out in the world, to recommend it to all my friends. That’s not to say I’m above being jealous of a peer. I’m not, and I certainly have been (although, never because someone I know has published; usually it’s just that I’ll read a story or even just a passage or sentence or phrase that I wish I wrote). But in this particular case, I didn’t experience any jealousy or fear or anxiety about the current state of my writing life. 

GH: I knew you were the right person to help me inaugurate this. You’ve given me so much to respond to and expand on in the coming weeks, here. Going to need to check in again and do one of these from your next port-of-call. It’s inspiring watching you wrestle your way into figuring out how to love and use what you’ve got. Thanks for being willing to share this.

Also need your report back from your first Brooklyn Cyclones game. Obviously.