Hi everyone,

I have been thinking about our class this week as I work on a paper for another class (sounds counterintuitive, yes). I am reading Amy Poehler’s comedic memoir, Yes Please, for my course project in my English class and I find her preface applicable to our current writing projects, because she discusses the difficult process of writing a book. Before I share that text, I have a few reflections on criticism as we move from readings on context and into another week of writing.

If you are like me, you are left with questions about authority as a critic after finishing our readings this week. I think a common source of insecurity that I often feel is related to justifying my choice of text and my choice of context to include in my argument. Why this text? Why discuss these particular influences? How can I do justice to my text and represent it most faithfully? How can I craft the smartest argument, or the one that others will find intriguing? In the spirit of “lifting the veil obscuring the critic’s artistic license,” (Bonnie Dow), I thought I would encourage us to be artistic with our essays on narrative this next week, but not necessarily “artistic” in the sense of finished art. “Artistic” criticism sounds polished and beautiful, but the process of getting to that finished place is ugly and messy.

Here is what Amy Poehler has to say about writing:

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their “morning ritual” and how they “dress for writing” and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to “be alone”–blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing dirt away from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.

I hope this encourages you, classmates, to embrace your texts with a sense of the artistic process as messy and imperfect. We are artists and we have the authority to create important criticism. Writing is hard but the results can be great. If the writing doesn’t turn out great this time, it will eventually. Keep hacking with that screwdriver.