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I hear voices in April, every April every year for the last twenty or so years. Any writer who teaches has that glassy-eyed, overwrought, reading-1000 pages a day look on her face, that pale sucked out from the computer pallor, a crick in the neck. Many of us are reading theses for students in Masters of Fine Arts Programs. We carry them everywhere we go: to cafes certainly, on the seat of the car, to the gym and sometimes to other friends’ houses, if we allow ourselves to go out at all. I have slept with theses and awakened with them. I pick them up automatically and flip to the un-smeared un-coffee-stained page and continue. The voices of the writers bang around in my head so much, I suspend my writing for a month. I keep my head clear, pay attention to what they are creating and how.

I ask myself as I approach this season, with a fair amount of dread, actually, what I should do faced with the sheathe of cried-over, bled-through manuscripts—should I read them with enjoyment pleased that the writer has something to show for her years at the program? Should I comb each sentence and word for accuracy, delight, clarity? Do I tell the writer that it does have merit, maybe a future even if it does not? Do I press myself into service of the writing and give every single helpful suggestion I can imagine to push it to another level?

Years of the same questions, years of poring over pages with commitment, hoping someway to be helpful. It’s a dilemma—peaceful encouragement? Activist direction? A combination? It’s exhausting to think about and naturally what feels right for one writer doesn’t necessarily serve another. Weirdly enough, those of us in my world who read theses, talk about the number of students and the numbers of pages, but we don’t share approaches, methodologies, visions—at least not enough. We’re tired, sometimes disenchanted, or encouraged by change, or sad that they are driven to write these important benchmark works in such a rush, with so much else going on, and at such a cost.

Yet like many things about these MFA programs, the processes are flawed. How does one write with 11 voices in a room giving critical comment without being neutralized? Where does the writer fit her writing in between jobs, classes, scholarly papers, TA-ships and heaven forbid a family or love or hobbies or babies or a garden? True true true amazing fantastic successes have come from such programs but still is this the way an artist is built?

When chatting in Piedmont Peet’s with Sandra Woodall, the famed costume designer this morning, I talked my way into a new definition of how I approach the theses and how, if at all, the collaboration with the writer may or may not be successful. Sandra declares she is not a teacher and yet she has done some teaching. Her life focuses on her successful costuming career with others eager to be in her trail, to glean from the master techniques, approaches and vision --(http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=4839)
I couldn’t help a little bit of envy at that moment—that her protégés sought her out because her work is magnificent and there—in front of the world. The writing students in my program often haven’t read my work, sometimes haven’t even taken a class with me, but they cobble together a set of particularities they imagine would be useful to them. In a weird kind of way, they get stuck with me. And for better or worse, we forge ahead until an agreement of some sort is struck at the point of “completed;” “ready to sign off.”

In my handling of the manuscript, I realized in my conversation with Sandra, my students and I have our moment of apprenticeship. I am positioned as the authority and my student/writer, the protégé. After reading the work, letting it guide me toward insight for its particular needs, I craft pages of response—rarely about what is working; mostly about what needs to be considered/changed/re-visioned/scratched/re-ordered/or left right where it is. The moment feels harsh to the writer and sometimes to me. Like my colleagues I spend hours with each of these manuscripts, sometimes days. I talk aloud to myself to articulate their composition, their weaknesses; the ways I need to speak about them. Often I shatter their goblet of completion euphoria so utterly that it takes days for the writers to recover and look at the work again. It’s a surgery, without anesthetic – and in most cases, the patient recovers, better than ever.

Although the process grinds April to a pulp, I appreciate the moment to take the writer to the side, to have the conversation with them only; without the exhibition of the class, the vying for critique and the performance of workshop sparring. The moment is a luxury for the writer and for me, although both of us are smothered.

Apprenticing has traditionally been a baptism by fire, but has also had the necessity of years, so that the apprentice grows into the artist she was meant to be and hopefully cherishes the process in the end.

    The MFA programs don’t really allow that except for a favored few, so the last semester struggle distills the process into a bleary-eyed, sleepless, drama sometimes with battles, other times, with appreciation; often times both.

    As part of this machine, I try to make the moment valuable and encourage a vision for their futures as writers and perhaps as teachers too. I take them seriously, their work becomes intimate to me; as important as mine, and in the foreground for the time that I have their attention. If this is their moment of apprenticeship, then I must be the wise counsel, the unselfish teacher, the master of the art. I must believe in what I say, so that they can believe it as well. The position is intimidating to me and carries a responsibility of “seeing” their work as clearly as I see each writer and her own character, her own voice, and a piece of work that defines them to the world.

    I am almost done, this April. Two more to go: a poetry manuscript and a memoir—writers who are crazily different from each other and who have been working through their pages and their heaviness to make next week’s deadline. I am sure they will come through. I want that moment when I read it, slowly, page by page-once, twice—sit back and get ready to sign.