All You Learn Is How You Learn It
I wish I had known Camille T. Dungy about thirty years ago, back on what I hazily remember was an unusually warm autumn afternoon when I strolled up to the English Philosophy Building, at that time the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, before its move across campus to the Dey House, and attempted to mingle among my fellow first-year poets in the fifteen minutes before the start of my first MFA workshop. In those salad days I had yet to grasp the tips Dungy bestows on us in “How to Mingle at a Book Thing,” my favorite among them: “Many questions asked at social gatherings are either too capacious or too restrictive. ‘How are you?’ is hard to answer politely or accurately these days.” Too true. (Should a stranger ask me at this very moment, I wouldn’t trust myself to refrain from launching into a litany of complaints or descending into the lassitude of the perpetually dumbfounded.) No, as a relatively shy twentysomething, I was more likely to jam both hands into my pockets and let my hair—I had hair!—slip over my eyes while I studied my Chuck Taylor All Stars. (I like to think Dungy would have had something to say about them: “In any room, you can find people willing to talk about shoes,” she writes. “These delightful conversations will reset the atmosphere and bring you back to yourself.”) Back then I was a clumsy mingler—not much has changed, truth be told—and I hadn’t considered the value of the degree I was embarking on the way Molly McCully Brown so beautifully describes in “How to Think About the Value of a Creative Writing Degree,” and I certainly hadn’t read anything so spot-on accurate as “How to Make the Most of Your Time in an MFA” by Dan Beachy-Quick, but I wish I had. “You’ll realize all you’d meant to learn was how to listen, the ever-present present tense of what now is, when now is when you’re listening,” he writes. I sure wish I had listened just a little more carefully.
The essays in our special section, “The Writer’s How-to Guide: From Choosing an MFA to Protecting Your Time,” and indeed all the other articles and interviews in these pages, are filled with advice on the “untaught essentials” of the writing life from those who I sincerely hope you consider to be members of your community: the contributors to this and every issue of the magazine. If you’re feeling alone or uncertain—or simply dumbfounded, and who could blame you—I hope you’ll find in this magazine an oasis, a refuge. A standing invitation to clumsy minglers everywhere.
