The Weekend

Current weekend status for Terrible Mother:

Writing: an email to Friend One

Breakfasting on: a piece of toast with cashew butter and honey, and a cup of strong cafe con leche

Wearing: pjs, which today consists of her MFA t-shirt*

Listening to: The Garden State Soundtrack

Getting ready for: yoga in an hour

Planning on: meeting This One Guy for coffee sometime today

Eating dinner with: Friend R

Must, at some point: water and weed her garden

Will finish this weekend: her revised pitch for The Magazine, the cleaning of her house

Will work on this weekend: her new story

Is actually feeling: really good.

*tm

*Ahh, the MFA t-shirt. So, the year before we graduated, the 2nd year fictioners made t-shirts that said "Team Fiction," listing their names as players, and the professors as coaches. They were cute. We, however, took it one step further. On the front of our t-shirt, is the fabled Wedge, a tool Ehud used repeatedly, in his classes. It's basically a way to conceptualize the necessary movement of a story. He drew it on the board all the time. In the middle of it is a favorite Malamud quote ("Art celebrates life and gives us our measure"), and next to that are all five of the graduating fictioners first names.

But the back--the back is especially brilliant. Our professor David Bradley is known for his unique critiquing style. First of all, he has most of us submit our work electronically, and then he adds endnotes to it, printing it out on the day of workshop with all of his commentary. I should say here that he comments excessively. For example, the first excerpt I turned in to him was 10 pages. He wrote 156 endnotes. 156. When he's particularly cranky, he uses Roman numerals instead of Arabic numbers so that you have to also try to remember what the hell ICXV is.

He's also extrememly tough, but instead of just saying something like "this sucks," (which he will do), he'll often use the Hilarious Death Line, something that is accurate as hell, painful, and fucking funny. That first year, we all had to get used to the way he critiqued our work, how he was toughing us. So, the back of the t-shirt is an homage, more or less, to David Bradley. At the top is "WWDBD?" (What Would David Bradley Do?), with each letter numbered, endnote style. At the bottom, for the endnotes, we've each included our favorite DB insult about our work. Mine is "Look, I know you graduated college, because after your last draft, I checked. But when I read sentences like this I think 'how the hell did you pass the fifth grade?'"

Ahh, the good ol' days.

Comments

[Alana]

Mine is "I thought you came here to write?"

I cried four days after receiving my first David Bradley critique. Now, I miss him dreadfully. For a very long time I assumed it was because I like bullies, bastards, and assholes. But I think I miss him for an entirely different reason. He genuinely wanted me to become a better writer. And he also never-ever-ever told me I shouldn't write a story about a young women in love with Adolf Hitler, my massive novel undertaking in graduate school that has absolutely without a doubt become a life life-long, life enlightening, life changing experience. I'm a completely different woman now than four years ago.

David absolutely understood that, even before I did. Isn't that . . . I don't know. At loss for words.

[Terrible Mother]

That first David critique was rough, but it was the first workshop I had with him that was worse. In the middle of workshop of the Nathaniel and Becky story, he started throwing around the word "retard." He knew how much it burned me up. "Why the hell does TM have a retard in her story?" And "Do we even need a retard in here?" I hated him, told everyone I did.

But he was right about it. There was no reason, in that draft, for the kid to be in there. I was flinching, and David was toughening me, making me capable of looking at myself and my work more clearly.

So, when we workshopped my thesis in the spring (that's a new thing since you left--but David does this really amazing job at. You turn in your entire thesis to workshop and it's criqiqued like a story collection or novel. DB even writes, instead of a normal critique, a book review) and he said "How many retards do we need in one story collection?" it didn't even hurt.

It also helped that I had taken bets on how many times he'd use the word, or a derivative, even going so far as to set an over/under.

Another time, he took me out for coffee, this would be right after I seperated from John, and let me cry, then gave me an amazing pep talk. "You can't control him," he said. "But you can control you."

I know, A., I know. I don't know how David did what he did for us. Just don't know.

[Alana]

TM,

I love your stories here about David. I can hear him, I really can, saying the word, "Retard" in workshop twelve times. I'm writhing with jealousy knowing the Program now does thesis critiques. What a gift!

XXOO
A