My Parachute

Nearing the End of the Stonecoast MFA Journey

Have I ever told you about my phobia? My partner says it’s irrational. I say, “No, Jason. Your fear of nutcrackers is irrational. My fear is something that could happen at any moment and has very dire consequences.” He laughs, holds me, and whispers teasingly in my ear, “Sinkholes.”

Even the word, just sitting here on the page minding its own business, puts me on edge. My breath shortens, my heart races. And it doesn’t stop with sinkholes; it’s any gaping crevice. Whirlpools, potholes, earthquakes, tsunamis, the entire ocean in and of itself. It’s any phenomenon or natural feature where the earth has opened beneath you or has lost its foundation. It’s anything that even remotely resembles a large cavernous hole that could suck you in and make you disappear.

I felt like I was on the edge of one before I came to Stonecoast. Before I even applied to Stonecoast. I was standing there, toes curled over the edge of a chasm, body swaying back and forth, teetering toward demise. It was a pivotal moment in my life. It presented me with a choice: succumb to the shadows, escape in haste, or confront the turmoil head-on with resilience. I chose the latter, and I threw in a parachute. Stonecoast is my parachute.

The first lesson Stonecoast taught me was two-fold: genre and genres. I remember sitting there, staring at the application, trying to decipher the difference between literary fiction and popular fiction. My favorite authors were Kundera, Salinger, and Gaiman. Two arguably literary, one very much popular. And then I looked at the books I’d been reading recently: Peripheral, Silo, Station Eleven. Post-apocalyptic novels turned into TV shows. Also popular fiction. I took to Instagram stories, Facebook polls, texting everyone I knew just to figure out what my writing was. In the end, I chose Fiction, only to be presented with part two of the two-fold lesson: you don’t have to choose at all.

My first residency, I discovered auto-fiction. I had submitted a nearly entirely non-fiction piece to a fiction workshop, was given fantastic feedback, and then revealed that it was, in fact, a story from my life, but that I didn’t feel confident in calling it non-fiction. My second residency, I had a non-fiction workshop with Debra Marquart. I was encouraged to pursue an earlier project I’d considered: a collection of short stories based around my solo travels overseas. I had submitted a non-fiction piece about a night in London, but once again I wasn’t so sure I trusted myself to get the facts straight or that I could fully admit to anyone that this was a night in my own life. The idea of auto-fiction had solidified.

Meanwhile, I had started a novel. It came to me when I was working on pieces to submit to the workshop in the first residency: an Irish fisherman loses his son to a tragic fishing incident. So: so far I’d had two non-fiction pieces turned into auto fiction and a novel that followed the character-driven plot-ideal of literary fiction. Could I throw more into the mix? Of course I could. This last semester I was lucky enough to be placed in Chen Chen’s Prose and Flash Fiction workshop. To say my entire being lit up with adoration is an understatement. At one point in the workshop, I leaned over to Chen and I said, “I didn’t know this was a thing. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I actually have enough pieces that I could edit and put together as a collection already.” To which he chuckled his cute little Chen chuckle, shrugged, and said, “Yeah, you could.” So now my plate is heaping with genres: non-fiction, auto-fiction, literary fiction, prose, palm-of-the-hand fiction. But that’s not all. Through seminars, casual discussion, and recommended literature, I’ve found a deep interest in satire, in the surreal, in lyrical essay, and I’m still completely enamored by science fiction, though I find the world-building so daunting that I don’t think I ever could. But maybe I could, right? Because that’s what I learned: I don’t have to choose just one.

The project I have taken on throughout this entire program is my novel. From day one, I have been throwing more and more words into the chasm as I float to the bottom to see how they’ve all settled beside one another. The story grew with each semester. It morphed into different timelines, different perspectives; Hell, even the characters themselves aged or Benjamin-Buttoned. By my third residency, I was deep diving into “sensorium,” having taken both the seminar and workshop on emotion with Susan Conley and Liz Hand. I knew that the project I was taking on would without a doubt be chock-full of inner turmoil; grief, guilt, frustration, pain. I had to make sure that I was giving my characters the appropriate time to let those emotions settle in, that the reader would be able to feel it with them. Lesson three. Susan and Liz also had us address the big picture alongside the micro. What is the “Why?” of your story (this sent me into a spiral of self-doubt, but I found my way out) but also make sure to keep the camera at your hip; let us see the character's internal and external interactions with the world that surrounds them.

Having Susan as a mentor was very grounding for me. She has brought me back to my roots. And she has allowed me to understand that there is only good here. That there is nothing to be ashamed of. My novel transformed from a close-third male perspective into a first-person female perspective. There is power here, in this voice. There is a message that I’m able to convey; a voice with strength. I think if it weren’t for working with her, I wouldn’t have been able to patch all the holes in my parachute.

Like all things good, this quickly took a turn. I found myself asking, “Is this too much emotion? Am I going to depress my readers?” And that’s when Ron Currie Jr. came in with his needle and thread. As a mentor, he has shown me confidence in my voice, in my use of humor to lighten a situation; The use of satire and dark humor to bring the reader up for air when I’ve been forcing their head underwater for too long. When I add on a new tragedy, I ask him, “Is this too much?” And he assures me that fiction is life, dramatized, and that so long as my tone remains consistent, I won’t ever bog down my reader with the sad-sack-shit.

My workshop with Debra Marquart put me back into a position of playing with the page, of being lyrical in writing that you would assume doesn’t deserve lyricism, when in actuality it deserves it the most. She helped me remember that white space is important. That structure on the page (or the existence of structure) can say just as much as the words. I always thought this was something that only lived in the world of poetry or ‘prose,’ but then I recall all the novels I’ve ever read and how each of them had something quirky, something unique. Even Salinger and Kundera mix it up sometimes. And it’s all the artist's way of conveying a feeling, of manipulating the way their words are read to ensure the point is getting across.

Other seminars enlightened the use of absence: Marco Wilkinson spoke in-depth on how the absence of something can be used to support the very real existence of something else. How negatives help expose the positives, and vice versa. That just because we don’t know something, doesn’t make the unknown not valuable.

John Florio, Ron Currie Jr., Raina León, and Jenny O’Connell all heard our cries for “What happens next?” And answered with an astounding, “It’s a mystery! But let us help how we can!” Ron urged us to keep writing, even after the book is out there looking for representation. John helped us fine-tune query letters, see the value in knowing our audience, our niche, and our similarities with other authors. Raina assured us that we do have to use technology in our favors as artists; that websites are important, mixed media is important, and these are things we should embrace and not neglect. Jenny eased our mind with color-coded spreadsheets. She used her personal experiences as a Stonecoast alumni to be vulnerable and share with us the difficulty of publishing a manuscript, the time and effort that goes into submitting pieces to publications, and the opportunity to revitalize our work in a number of ways, ways that don’t always stick to the original platform.

I have been exposed to so many fantastic novels, from Dirty Weekend, read for Liz Hand’s seminar on Girl Gone Wild, to Swamplandia, which was actually the recommendation of a peer. The bookshelf in my office is stacked high with books that actually cater to me, my writing, my personality: Fates and Furies, Writers and Lovers, Stern Men, Wonder Boys, My Murder, Know My Name; I could go on for days.

I’ve lost track of how many lessons I’ve learned. Too many to count? I’m not at all surprised.

The novel I am now writing was initially titled Quicksand. I thought of it one morning when I was sitting court-side at a tennis match and the simile came to me: grief is like quicksand. It was a feeling I had grown to understand quite well. Not through the tragic death of loved ones, like I explore in my thesis, but the loss of myself. The loss of love, the loss of direction, and yes the loss of life. I still cry when I hear Semi-Charmed Life by Semisonic. What I find most amusing about this is through my journey at Stonecoast, this title has wavered ever so slightly, until just as the story fell into place, the next working title came out to say hello. Estuary. The joining of river and sea. A collision that still understands grief, can still be a place where grief (quicksand) lives, but understands what has to happen to relieve yourself of the guilt that comes with it - never wholly, but enough to carry on with life, enough to go one direction or the other. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s in progress. 

Well, here I am: I’ve nearly reached the bottom. Uncertainty still looms over what lies beneath, but I’ve been floating for a long time. Along the way, I have rested on the sharp rocks bordering this deep cleft. I have patched the punctures in my parachute, tended to the chafing on my thighs and underarms, and adjusted the straps, finding moments to loosen or tighten them, and sometimes even removing them altogether.​ Strangely, as I draw nearer to the abyss, my fear diminishes, replaced by an eager anticipation to uncover what awaits.

Maybe I’ll go scuba diving next.