On February 28, 2009, Aurelie Sheehan and Stephanie Balzar joined us to discuss Getting It On (Getting On With It) After the MFA: A Journey of Life and Aesthetics.
Aurelie Sheehan said that in her experience, the overlap between practicalities and aesthetics has yielded interesting and fruitful moments in her art. But she didn’t glorify the journey. She left her MFA program at City College with loads of debt. “I can’t even describe the pile of paper from student loans,” she said. “The deferments, the letters explaining why payments were late.” She took work as an adjunct instructor because she felt it important to keep her foot in the academic door, but the teaching didn’t pay enough to live on, and she had to take on temp work—“which was fun and everything”—to survive. She realized that the weird schedule and the juggling of jobs was “manipulating and deforming my life, and my writing was suffering from a lack of continuity.” As her credit card debt increased, Aurelie decided to take on full-time work as a secretary. “I remember buying the shoes and the dress—it was like a Halloween costume,” she said. “I sashayed into the office to convince them I had what it took to be a good secretary. And I did. Worst of all, I was a good secretary.” The job was simply something she did for money. She would write early in the morning before going into the office (she was writing a novella set in France and would listen to French radio while she worked which was her way of “traveling on the cheap”). In the end, Aurelie’s secretarial work became the creative impetus for her first novel, The Anxiety of Everyday Objects.
In addition to inspiring her own writing, Aurelie’s administrative skills led to jobs “semi-related to writing” at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C. She taught part-time at Sheridan College and then at Johns Hopkins. Aurelie said, “All of these positions—teaching, Folger, Wyoming, secretarial work—prepared me for my current position in arts administration … There were some bleak months and years, working full-time, trying to find time to write on my lunch hour or before work.” But she found ways to discipline herself.
Stephanie Balzer, who earned her MFA at the University of Arizona in 2004 and is now the Executive Director of Voices, Inc. and the winner of the Mary Ann Campau Fellowship, has also sashayed into offices where people were convinced to hire her. After graduating from college in Flagstaff, Stephanie moved to Phoenix with the idea of getting a job in marketing. “So I ended up at The Business Journal thinking I’d buy their Book of Lists and a lady there offered me a temporary position answering phones. I thought this would buy me time.” Eight years later she was still at The Business Journal, but now as a business reporter on the legal beat, winning state and national journalism awards. Stephanie said it was gratifying to have essentially earned an “MBA on the streets” but said that her journalism career was challenging. “It was exhausting to care so much,” she said. She also realized that for years she had only been reading news. She applied for MFA programs.
When she began her MFA degree she felt behind her peers. She felt like she had no vocabulary in poetry, so she began a self-directed reading program. “I read fifty books in the summer between my first and second years,” she said. Although she began the program with the idea of becoming a professor, after teaching composition and introductory poetry to undergraduates she realized she “didn’t like it. I had a hard time really investing in students.” She also realized that while she enjoyed the fantasy of the academic life, she just wasn’t a scholar in the way that some of her peers were. Stephanie said, “After I graduated it took a year for me to get a job. I must have written 60 cover letters. I free-lanced to support myself, but mostly, I had a killer writing year. Nothing mattered. I cobbled stuff together to make it work.” Eventually she got a job as a communications officer for a local non-profit, which was practice for her current position as Executive Director of the non-profit Voices, Inc., which serves low-income, at-risk youth through the teaching and creation of documentary arts. “It is my first authentic job,” she said, “pulling together my reporting self, my non-profit desire, my creative writing self.”
Although both writers have come into their own professionally and artistically, Aurelie admitted to “many lonely moments as a writer, staring out of the window, wondering, is anyone out there?” She also said that through the MFA, she came to realize that she was “not crazy for wanting to write, for having that impulse. We, in the MFA, were collectively crazy. It gave me the strength and stupidity to do the sending out.” She described “this internal journey” of looking at years’ worth of work and noting patterns. “What was with all the green and the small animals?” she laughed. During the 10 years between her first short story collection and her first novel, Aurelie wrote two novellas that didn’t sell, and then realized she was “the captive of certain things in my subconscious—a type of relationship, an image.” She decided to approach these things directly instead of metaphorically, and she wrote a collection of “intensely personal, non-fiction essays, the stories of my life.” She used a variety of forms, finding that as she wrote “the form would emerge intuitively.” She wrote about things she was “ashamed of, afraid of” until she felt liberated and emptied out. She spent the next five years working on her first novel, which was much harder than she’d imagined. “I’m not a natural novelist,” she said. Still, she embarked on her second novel, History Lesson for Girls, “trying to write what mattered.” The novel is about “teenage girls who felt small in the eyes of the world and I had the feeling of rescuing these two teenage girls from oblivion, and I was passionate about it.” Aurelie continued to write stories, and also book reviews, which she said allowed her “to be part of the conversation” even during the years when she wasn’t publishing.
Of her own aesthetic journey Stephanie said, “Poems were not a refuge for me. I was drawn to poetry because it’s short!” Even now, she said, she is somewhat embarrassed to be a poet. “I tell people I’m a writer, not a poet,” she said. She has tried to write in other forms. She tried to write essays, “but they were too short so I turned them into prose poems.” She tried to write plays but “I’m terrible at plot. In the first draft, nothing happened! Then, in the second draft, too much happened, and everyone thought it was parody.” Stephanie said, “I rarely send out my poetry. I am a very slow writer. I give myself projects – books that have a dramatic arc, prose poems that are all connected. It takes years though.” Winning the Campau Fellowship and “headlining” at a reading has been affirming, but it is still hard to “slough off the cultural weirdness attached to the ‘poet’ title.” Stephanie has kept her art alive by relying on a small group of writers and readers, by “blog-skulking,” and by giving herself permission to drop the pressure of being an academic. Her biggest fear is “being a hobbyist poet—there’s nothing worse.”
When asked about patterns of discipline in keeping their craft alive, Aurelie said that “my writing time has adapted to fit my working life and my family life.” While working at the law firm, she wrote early on weekday mornings, and played on the weekends. At Folger, she wrote during her lunch hour (which meant that she wrote very short scenes—scenes that could be written in 45 minutes). When she became a mom, she “just had to become really concentrated with my time. I knew I couldn’t fool around; I had to get down to business. I have to do it or I get crazy.”
Stephanie said she uses the same computer for work and for personal stuff, “so I always have my poems with me. I can edit while I’m at work, in short spurts, but I can’t write like that.” Stephanie described herself as a sprinter—she takes months off, and then pushes. “I am not a routine person,” she said. “I go to work at different times every day, get home at different time, so I don’t really structure myself like that. I am not a creature of routine.” Living alone, she has the luxury of taking time when she wants it. Taking time to write in the evenings is a treat. “Whenever it happens, it happens,” she said.
By way of closing, Aurelie said, “The day you graduate will be just like the day before. You’ll be a writer no matter whether you are working at Starbucks or wearing a suit.” She joked that “colorful scarves are important.” She said sometimes you’ll think, “What kind of cosmic joke is this?” But if you “keep sashaying it happens.” In other words, “uncertainty and determination live hand in hand the whole time.” Stephanie added, “Why write unless you have to?” She called her writing path “a manifestation of faith. I kept doing these crazy, directionless things because that’s the only way I know how to live.”
