Susanna J. Sturgis: Writer • Editor • Martha's Vineyard

The 1984 workshop was a wave that I caught at the exact right time. I expected it to deepen my commitment to my writing, and it did. I hadn't expected it to propel me toward a whole new life, but it did that too. When I boarded the northbound bus in Washington, I'd lived in D.C. for seven consecutive years. This was longer than I'd lived anywhere other than my hometown, and if I added in the three years I'd lived there as a college student -- well, I had a history in the city, and I knew my way around. For one who rarely plunged into unfamiliar waters, this was important. And I loved my bookstore job, was good at it, and deeply believed in its importance.

Nevertheless, on my semiannual pilgrimage to Martha's Vineyard late that August I tucked a bit of wampum into my empty blue amulet bag, and a few short weeks after I returned to D.C. I knew I was moving back to Massachusetts. Not "decided to move" or even "knew I was going to move": knew I was moving. Writing was my compass, my North Star, but the propulsive power came from an unexpected source. On the last night of the workshop, our fledgling community was attacked from within, and I found myself in an uncomfortable no-woman's-land, not knowing whose side I was supposed to be on.

Out of the writing we had shared, the stories we had told each other, all the meals and walks and trips into town we had taken, a close community had formed, one rooted in writing and populated by writers. Tomorrow we would be leaving these new friends behind and heading back to our old lives. Could we maintain the connections that had so sustained and challenged us over the past nine days? Would we be able to keep writing? The last night's re-entry meeting was meant to ease the transition back to our "real worlds."

After reading a passage from To Know Each Other and Be Known, Katharyn asked each of us to say a little about what we were going back to, and we did, our voices rising and falling around the circle, like the waves on Cayuga Lake. One woman said that the commitment she had made to her writing likely meant that she would not be able to stay in her current well-paying job. Another would soon be traveling to England with an ex-lover. A third was waiting to hear if she would receive the financial aid she needed to go back to school next month.

Then Katharyn asked, "What is the most vivid memory you will take home with you?" Where to start, where to start? The workshop on body image, meeting Marge Piercy, a chance remark that made a big impression, the class where my work was critiqued . . . Again, our voices rippled around the circle. So many of my memories were shared by others; their memories sparked more of mine. Just as a welling in my throat made me realize that I was close to tears, someone was saying aloud that she didn't think she could speak without crying. I was beginning to believe that the connections between us would last, even when we weren't sitting in the same circles.

Two-thirds of the way around, the circle broke. The speaker said she had written some things down in case she had a chance to say them. I sat up, wary: no one else had read from a script. The woman spoke of not finding community here, of her disappointment at what she called the emphasis on "professionalism" and at the small number of lesbians; she said she felt isolated as a lesbian. A second, and then a third lesbian said that they hadn't felt comfortable either.

Of the sixteen workshop participants, four were lesbians. I was the fourth. Had I missed something important? I was confused, but I had to say something, and I did: I said that I couldn't deny the importance of the issues raised, but that since the workshop's opening night, when one woman spoke of being sexually abused by her brother as a young girl, I had come to believe that this was a safe place to take risks. And I had, talking about stuff I usually kept to myself, like compulsive eating, my relationship with my alcoholic mother, and my mixed-class background.

After we finished going around the circle, the meeting broke up, but energies were frazzled. We dispersed in our various directions, but nine of us drifted back -- not, however, the three lesbians, or the director, or several other women who had had enough. Some brought the remains of their food caches to share with the rest of us. We formed a new circle and we talked through what had happened, drinking soda and munching fruit, and eventually we came round to what the workshop had meant to each of us. It was one of the most thrilling discussions I've ever been part of, thrilling and hopeful, because none of us knew exactly what we felt or thought but we spoke it anyway, and every risk taken encouraged us all to push a little further. And collectively we felt our way toward a place where previously unimaginable things seemed within our grasp. All of us knew that this wouldn't have been possible without the preceding nine days, so we went to the director's room to tell her so.

I needed to understand what had happened, and explore my own evolving response to it all, so over the following weeks and months, I wrote an essay about the workshop. The final draft was never published,[1] but I still have a copy -- extensively annotated by comments by a sister participant I shared it with.

In the weeks after the workshop ended, I learned that one of the three women who orchestrated the confrontation had been lobbying hard throughout the workshop to be appointed one of two assistant directors for the following year's workshop. The director had turned her down. That helped explain why nothing about discomfort, homophobia, or professionalism had been said at the Sunday night "how's it going?" meeting. Or at any of the other times when it could have been brought up, either in conversation or in a private meeting with the director.

The one who had been disappointed by the emphasis on "professionalism" was by far the least proficient writer in the group. She was also one of the workshop's two commuters. So many connections were made and deepened around the dorm and after hours that this must have contributed to her feelings of isolation.

In that untitled, unpublished essay, my anger, checked somewhat by my attempt to be fair, comes through clearly. True, confrontational tactics are often necessary. Civil rights activists, labor organizers, woman suffragists, and countless others have learned over the years that polite requests and cogent arguments rarely move a well-entrenched opposition. The three women at the workshop, however, hadn't bothered with less drastic measures. Most of the rest of us had been testing the waters, cautiously disclosing truths that made us nervous or had made us unpopular -- and learning that it might be safe to take greater risks. In the process we created a little community based on the workshop's motto: "To know each other and be known." And these three women had lifted their labyris and brought it down hard on the web the rest of us had created.

But that night among the wreckage we re-spun our web, demonstrating what Adrienne Rich called "the passion to make and make again / where such unmaking reigns." The miracle didn't neutralize the anger. I had witnessed scenes like this before, but never had I been so emotionally engaged, or acknowledged that plenty of the unmaking in my home community was perpetuated not by men, the patriarchy, or the Reagan administration: it was being done by women to women, feminists to feminists, lesbians to lesbians. Some viewed proficiency with suspicion and were quick to accuse anyone who desired it of professionalism or elitism. Their feelings of inadequacy were always someone else's fault. In myriad ways the lesbian community had encouraged my writing. Now it seemed to my muses that the community's support was conditional. I followed my writing northward.

Early the following spring, Katharyn asked me if I would serve as the second assistant director. I jumped at the chance, and did it for the next three years, till my combination of Vineyard jobs made it impossible to leave the island for ten days in midsummer.

[1] I never submitted it for publication. I solicited comments from several workshop participants, including Katharyn. Katharyn either shared it with workshop founder Beverly T. or told her about it. Katharyn told me that if I published the essay, Beverly would sue me. Beverly was now a lawyer. I've never met Beverly. I have no idea whether she actually threatened to sue me. Whatever she said or didn't say, it was an unpleasant coda, and not atypical of the power-tripping that went on in the women's community.

Women's Writing Workshop I

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.

Amazing

Morgana, the first of that name, was a Leading Edge Model D. I had her for nine years. Since then all the Morganas have been Gateways. Way back in 1994, when Morgana II moved in, I was very impressed with Gateway tech support. Getting through on the phone was easy, and once I established that I knew enough to check my cables and plugs and reboot the computer before I called, they treated me like an intelligent human being. My Gateways have been very reliable and my various science fiction and editorial colleagues very helpful, so I had little need for tech support over the years.

Morgana V, however, has been temperamental. Between October 2008 and April 2009 I had three major crashes: the kind where you have to reinstall Windows if you ever want to see your files again. Two weeks ago I had another one, and my Internet connectivity still hasn't recovered. In between there were numerous software crashes and "Microsoft Windows has recovered from a serious error" messages. My attempts to figure out WTF was going on have not left me impressed with either Gateway and Microsoft. They'd suggest it had to do with the addition of new hardware -- when I hadn't added new hardware in months. Run Memory Diagnostics, they'd advise, but Memory Diagnostics would turn up no problems. Maybe your hard drive is crashing?

Make up your effing mind, people. I'm not going to shell out $150 for a new hard drive unless I know that's the problem.

In the 16 years I've owned Gateways, Gateway has gone from having impressive tech support to having a reputation for the worst tech support in the business. This is one reason my new laptop is a Dell. The other reason my new laptop is a Dell is that I found the Toshiba website too Byzantine to be borne -- I was gonna get a Toshiba, but it was easier to get a Dell.

Everything arrived when it was supposed to arrive, except for the upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional, which was included in the deal. Saturday afternoon I went to the Dell website to investigate. Customer Care said they'd get back to me within 24 hours. They got back to me this morning, which I consider "within 24 hours" because yesterday with Sunday. On their advice I contacted Dell Tech Support's chat service. My chat session with Saumya_215434 went on for about 50 minutes. S/he was cordial to a fault. Dell didn't have a record of my upgrade. I, however, had the printout I'd made of the order right after I placed it. I quoted purchase IDs and item numbers. Finally I won over Saumya_215434 and his/her supervisor. My upgrade, I was told, would arrive by UPS this afternoon, and here was the tracking number.

They must mean tomorrow afternoon, I told myself, as I logged off, quite satisfied. Maybe Saumya_215434 is in India or Indonesia and it isn't the same day there as it is here.

But around six p.m. the UPS truck arrived -- Travvy let me know, of course -- and wonder of wonders, it brought my Windows 7 Pro upgrade. The return address is in Nashville. I know for sure that until about 11:30 a.m. EDT there was no upgrade en route to me. But here it is. How the hell do they do that? My UPS guy couldn't figure it out either.

Out from Under

Here are some things in my life that have returned to their pre-horse settings -- having just bought a new computer, I'm tempted to call them "defaults," but these aren't things I was equipped with when I left the factory. They're more like shrubbery and wildflowers overshadowed by a giant tree: they stop growing, they look like they're dead. Once the tree is gone, they come back to life.

Not everything has changed, however. When I got back into horses, I didn't much care for beer. At potlucks and parties, I'd drink wine, usually white, though that wasn't something I'd cross the street (or pay) for. Maybe it's because working outdoors in all weather raises a thirst that can only be quenched by beer. Maybe it's because horse people drink better beer. Whatever the reason, being in horses turned me into a beer drinker. I'll drive all the way to Oak Bluffs if I run out of beer. I'm not hanging out at barns any more, but I'm still drinking, and paying for, beer.

Not right this minute, however. Right now I'm eating oatmeal. It's too early for beer.

Summer Laundry

First sign of summer was that yesterday there were no free washers when I arrived at the laundromat, at 8:20. So I went back this morning.

Summer laundry weighs less than winter laundry, but it takes up more space on the line. In winter I might wear the same shirt for several days, the same socks for a week. In the sultry weather we've been having, the idea of putting anything back on once I've taken it off is too disgusting to contemplate. So nearly all of my sleeveless Ts and tank tops -- a dozen or so -- were out there, and most of my shorts, including the khaki pair I just got from L.L. Bean. I wanted something less scruffy than cutoffs and less baggy than the knee-length shorts from Deva, and these are just right. I only hung out one pair of long pants, and those were considerably lighter than jeans. Only four regular T-shirts -- it's been sleeveless weather for sure.

Looking like malamutes in a pack of Chihuahuas were two fleece vests that I hadn't got around to putting away for the summer. Now they're clean, dry, and hanging in the closet.

The air was almost as saturated as the inside of a washer on rinse cycle, and the lack of breeze left even the lightest fabrics hanging limp, so it took nearly all day for the clothes to dry. Still, dry they did, and now my bureau drawers are stuffed with clean undies, socks, tanks, and shorts. Let the summer continue!

Women's Writing Workshop II

Women's Writing Workshop I

Amazing

Out from Under

Summer Laundry