Automatic Biography
In the summer of 1997, I took a 2-week summer course at the University of Vermont (UVM) called, simply, “Writer’s Workshop.” It was taught by Professor and poet/novelist David Huddle (UVM, English), and Professor and poet John Engels (St. Michael’s College, English). The total enrollment was maybe 12 people, and they divided us into 2 breakout sections, one led by Prof. Huddle, the other by Prof. Engels. I was in Huddle’s section. I was a non-matriculated student at the time, though it was a 3-credit, graded course, so it’s on my UVM transcript.
The format of the course was simple: during the first week, we were required to produce 50 pages of raw autobiographical writing in the third person, which is surprisingly hard to do. I didn’t think I would be able to write 50 pages, but I ended up writing 74 pages. The header photo for this post shows the first page (with the first paragraph covered up), and the title I ended up giving the whole mess when I turned it in on Friday of that week.
During the second week, we were assigned to pull out excerpts from the initial 50 pages and turn those into finished pieces of writing: poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, experimental, etc. We would then workshop those pieces in our breakout sections.
I loved everything about this class. In retrospect, it was an “inflection point” for me - a point where the vector of my life (speed and direction) shifted. My group had a nice mix of people, both younger and older than I was: an art professor, at least two undergrads, and a couple of other non-matriculated people like me. Everyone involved - the professors and my section-mates - actually took me seriously as a writer. I mean they took my work seriously, told me what they liked, gave me suggestions, asked me questions, and encouraged me to write more. They also listened to my feedback for them, and took it to heart. Magic. We all respected and encouraged each other.
I have written and told people about this course many times over the years, because it was so transformative for me. Yet, for some reason, I have never thought about how I might incorporate the course’s premise into my own writing practice. I have taken bits and pieces from it - teaching and doing my own freewriting - but it wasn’t until this morning that the idea just popped into my head: I could do this on a regular basis.
I knew that I didn’t want to follow the 2-week model, which was imposed on the course by UVM’s summer program schedule. So here’s what I came up with: spend three weeks writing autobiographical prose in the third-person; then spend a fourth week reviewing and cataloguing the previous month’s writing. Part of that will (should) entail identifying things that seem worth further development to me, excerpting them, and developing them into cohesive and coherent pieces of writing. Then repeat, three weeks writing, fourth week reviewing, etc. etc. etc.
That’s it. That’s the idea and the plan. It sounds simple, almost too simple. But I know from experience that it’s effective. It works. There’s something about writing about yourself in the third-person: it keeps you close to the material, yet creates enough critical distance to make the process less fraught than first-person autobiographical writing can be. It remains rooted in the gut and the heart, but it invites the brain, the mind, into the writer’s room.
I’ll report back…
