Like a lot of poets, I’ve been honing and chiseling a
full-length poetry manuscript for a few years. I keep sending it out to
contests and publishers, and sometimes it comes close—it’s been a finalist and
semifinalist, short-listed and long-listed. But so far, no ring.
So when my friends Laura LeHew, Judith Montgomery, and Anita Sullivan said they had signed up for a four-day
Colrain Conference—the only writers’ conference in the country devoted solely
to poetry manuscripts—I decided to scrape together the $1,200 tuition and give
it a try too. For me, the main attraction was that Colrain puts your manuscript in
front of an editor from a respected poetry press, who looks through it and
offers you their professional opinion and advice for improving it. That alone seemed
worth the price of admission.
So now I’ve
done it: In early June, I spent four days at Buckhorn Springs, a beautiful, rustic*
resort here in Southern Oregon, in the company of 17 other poets from around the
country, watching my precious manuscript get turned inside out and picked apart.
And how did it go?
In a
nutshell: I had one bad day and one good day, and it changed the way I look at
poetry. It was totally worthwhile, but it was not without its bumps.
How much work can a
workshop shop?
That one bad day is the only bone I’m going to pick with the
Colrain Conference. After a very short Day One—with most of us just arriving
and getting settled in—the real work began on Day Two, when we broke into small
groups and workshopped our poems with a Colrain faculty member. (This was not
the “editor day”; that came later.) I won’t divulge the format of the workshop
day, since that seems like proprietary Colrain information. But suffice it to
say that it was a long day—nine hours
of workshopping, which, in my opinion, is more than the human body can endure. MFA
students and veterans of big workshops like Sewanee and Bread Loaf may be used
to that, but I was exhausted by lunchtime and completely worthless by 3 p.m. And
we still had hours to go—we went straight through until 7 that evening. I felt
sorry for the people whose work we looked at late in the day; some of us were
so tired that I don’t think we gave it a fair, focused read. And by then, some
snarkiness had started to creep in, a few thoughtless comments that were not
very useful and that of course I remember vividly.**
One thing I
did like about that workshop was the breakneck speed of it. Surprisingly, though
it was such a long day, it was paced quickly. We’d take a few minutes to speed-read
a handful of poems, and then we critiqued them in broad strokes, concentrating
on titles, themes, tone, and generally whether the poems felt strong or not. Does
it work? Does it interest you, bore you, puzzle you? Explain why, but make it
fast. Then boom, on to the next poem.
I found that refreshing and fun, in a downhill-skiing, car-chase sort of way. I
wouldn’t mind getting a group together and trying that at home.
But that long,
long day reminded me of two reasons why I don’t go to big summer workshops
anymore: 1) I just get so tired, and
2) workshopping with random strangers is kind of a crapshoot. If you’re
lucky, a few people will have great insights, delivered with a detached honesty
that you can’t get from your workshop buds back home. But inevitably, not
everyone’s a good fit for your work. And in that “high-level” Colrain workshop,
I found that I gave the negative comments more weight than I normally would
have. A lot of that, I’m sure, was just because I was falling-down tired.
So I can’t
say that first day was all that useful. Really, it was just another workshop—a really
long one, with not enough snack breaks or coffee.
I was beat that
night, cranky and out of sorts and wondering if I’d paid $1,200 to be abused. As
I drifted off to a restless sleep, I hoped the next day—“editor day”—would be
better.
Starting over
On Day Three, we again broke into small groups and headed
off to meet with one of the three editors who’d joined us for that day: Rodger
Moody of Silverfish Review Press, Jeffrey Shotts of Graywolf Press, and
Carolyne Wright of Lost Horse Press.
As the
Colrain organizers were careful to point out, this was not a pitch session; no
one was going to be accepted or rejected by a press that day. The three editors,
as much as we wanted to wow them, were there as educators only. They would give our
books a cold read and offer us an insider’s look at how they judge the piles of
manuscripts that come across their desks.
I don’t
know how they determined who went with which editor, but my small group got
assigned to Jeff Shotts. For me, this was an enormous stroke of luck. Jeff’s aesthetic turned
out to be similar to mine, and as a veteran of the Colrain conferences, he knew
how to do this part: He was kind and even-handed but also very, very honest. At
nine a.m., the six of us sat down with him at a table and, over the course of
the day, we watched him leaf through each of our manuscripts, reading out loud
and stopping to comment on what he was thinking. He scrutinized the cover
letter, table of contents, and acknowledgments page first, and we could see how
much information he was already gleaning from those. From the title, he
expected this kind of book. From the
cover letter, he began to think it was maybe that kind of book. From the TOC, he could see that it was divided
into sections, or not. That the poem titles were intriguing to him, or not.
The heart of the matter
Then Jeff began reading the poems. If there were red flags right off the bat—and there
often were—he said so. If he felt the urge to edit the first poem…red flag. If
he didn’t see some variety, some movement in tone or form or subject matter by
the third or fourth poem…red flag. If he just wasn’t getting what you were
doing by the third poem or so…red flag. He kept reminding us that this was his aesthetic, that not every editor
felt this way. But he was voicing opinions that I’ve held, consciously or
unconsciously, for years. I was astonished that he could articulate them so
quickly on a cold read of all this material he’d never seen before.
In most
cases, he only read the first five to ten poems. That was as much as he would
read if he were sitting in his office, reading this manuscript that had just
arrived in the mail. His job was to decide whether to hand it off to another staffer
for further consideration or pack it up and send it back to the poet. So in
this exercise, as in the real world of most publishing houses, “I’d continue
reading” was a thumbs-up, or at least a foot in the door. “I’d stop at this
point” was a no.
Jeff spent about an hour and a half with each manuscript, with lots of time for
discussion. He took care to walk each of us through his thought process and
offer advice tailored to our own kind of writing. He kept coming back to
certain ideas and techniques, but again, I hesitate to give away Colrain secrets.
(You could pry them out of me with a beer and a good dinner.)
By the end
of that day, I felt buoyant. Sitting next to an editor of Jeff’s caliber and
watching him think out loud made the whole Colrain weekend worthwhile; it was
something I couldn’t have experienced anywhere else. I probably got more out of
seeing him read other people’s manuscripts than my own, since I could listen
more objectively then. (When he looked at mine, I was a nervous wreck.)
I’d like to
think that regardless of how my manuscript “did” that day***, I would have come
away feeling pretty good, like I’d learned a lot and that was enough. But I’m
not sure. When all 18 of us conference attendees sat down to dinner that night,
fresh from our sessions with Jeff or Rodger or Carolyne, a few did not look
happy. Some felt their editor wasn’t a good fit; others were struggling with a
“thumbs-down” verdict. But the thumbs-up/thumbs-down business was not black and
white; a “maybe” was the best score you could get that weekend, and a “no”
might only mean the manuscript needed some reordering or minor work. Still, at times it was hard to remember that.
The wish list
So that “thumbs-up/thumbs-down” business brings me to one
thing I would like to have seen: I wished we’d had another day to do it again
with a different editor. Having each of us consult with only one editor put an
awful lot of pressure on that one thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If we’d circulated
among the editors instead—even just two—it would have reminded us that there’s
more than one opinion, and that no one person should be the arbiter of what we
write. I would happily have given up half (or all) of that long, grueling
workshop day for that.
I also wish
they hadn’t held the conference at such a gorgeous place as Buckhorn Springs. It seemed like a
waste of a beautiful location, and a frustrating tease outside the
windows; our schedule was so packed that I had no time, not even a single
minute, to explore its woods and hiking trails****.
Similarly, other
than mealtimes, there wasn’t much time to hang out with the other conference
attendees; there were people I never got to meet, even though it wasn’t that
large a group. Again, I would rather have taken some time out of that workshop
day to—I don’t know, go swimming or something. Play ping-pong. Say hello.
Taking it home
Day Four was another short one: a morning wrap-up and
discussion about publishers and contests, full of good information. And then we
all headed out on our separate ways. I drove the 20 minutes home, vegged in a
daze all afternoon, and then stayed up late that
evening working on my manuscript. So the Colrain effect was positive and immediate: I now
had a much clearer idea of how I wanted to order the poems, and I was ready to slash
and burn a few that had never felt right.
In the
weeks since, I’ve felt like I have new eyes. I see poems differently, books
differently, even my own work differently. I do feel a little less patient with
my own workshop groups now; I feel burned out on critiquing and get restless with it more quickly. How that will pan out remains to be seen. And I’m not
anywhere near done with editing the manuscript. But I do think that some of the
insights I gained in that weekend will last me a lifetime.
Out of the fire
The bottom line is that I recommend the Colrain
Conference—with a couple of major caveats. First, it's not for beginners or
anyone who hasn’t been tempered by many, many workshops, unless you
have skin made of steel. If I’d done that conference back in my 20s, I think it might have soured me on poetry. Certainly on workshops.
And it’s
not one of those vacation conferences where you can dip into one class and dip
into another, and then sit on your hotel balcony writing in your notebook,
inspired by all you heard. (Remember those? Aren’t those great?) No, this one
was work—hard work that dredged up some stuff that I wasn’t always happy to taste.
Thank goodness there was wine at the end of each day to wash it down. (That was
a definite Colrain plus. Now I’ll want wine at all writers’ conferences.)
I do feel
like I’ve been through some sort of crucible, and ultimately I think it will
make my work better—much better than any of those softer vacation conferences would have. It was also a great bonding experience
with my friends Laura, Judy, and Anita,
who were right there with me the whole time. We’ll be talking about what we did
on that summer vacation for years to
come.
*Part of our visit included a lecture on ticks.
**At some point we talked about that very phenomenon: how we
tend to remember the negative things people say about us, and not the good
things. I’d never thought about it much, but it happened several times over the
Colrain weekend: Someone would come out of a workshop thinking they’d just been
slammed, when the rest of us didn’t hear that at all and thought their work
actually fared pretty well.
*** Jeff gave my manuscript a tentative “I would keep
reading”…if I made some changes, including a drastic edit on the first poem and
resequencing the early part of the book. I considered that a win.
****I did manage to peek at Buckhorn’s organic garden as I
walked out to my car one afternoon. It’s a huge wheel-shaped planting area
surrounded by a tall post-and-wire deer fence. It had some of the blackest,
most luscious loam I’ve ever seen, and their bean teepee—a good 10 feet high, constructed
of 20 or 30 thick bamboo poles—is now stuck in my mind as the image of a
perfect bean tower.
[Title is with apologies to Kelly Clarkson. Photos by Mummelgrummel, Loty, Graphophile, David Benbennick, and snty-tact.]
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