Joanna Siwiec Response: WT, Ch 6: Workshopping a Draft

[Anonymous]

#423

It was Fall 2009, and I was a first year at Hunter College. That day in my ENG 120 class we were to peer review each other’s work anonymously. 19 year old me was still somewhat impractical and naive about what it was to read someone elses work and offer relevant feedback in a positive manner. So, I took my red pen and, for the lack of better words, I made this student’s paper bleed ink. Grammar errors here. Improper sentence structure there. Too many commas. Not enough periods. My pen colonized those three pages. After twenty minutes of revision, we sat with the author of each piece. I sat across my paper’s author for the first time, and after a few moments noticed that she was an international student. I retracted the paper off the desk and onto my lap, so that she could not see the red sea that I had turned her paper into. I looked at her and said, “I’m sorry.”

I taught myself an important lesson that day, and turned my editing snobbishness into a helpful hand. I spent the next few years working on my active listening and passive feedback when it came to reading people’s work. It was not until my first year at graduate school where I took my writing out of isolation. I nervously sat in Wayne Koestenbaum’s class on Life Writing horrified that we had to write a personal piece every week, and at some point even share. My mind flashed to Mr. H’s class in 8th grade where I stood in front of everyone and forgot the poem that I had written. Mr. H’s words rang in my ears, “Wow, I can’t believe you can memorize and recite Shakespearean monologues but can’t remember your own poem.” Sitting in Wayne’s class, 10 years later, I felt the angst of what was to come. The class was in itself a writing group, and on that first day of class all I thought was how I needed to drop the class. I didn’t, and that decision changed my view of writing. Students would bring enough copies for everyone in the class, they would read them out loud as we sat in silence and listened to the way their words were brought to life in such unique tones. I learned what it was to talk about someone’s work, rather than control it. To feel what their work was saying, rather than critiquing the life they have shared. The day came when I read out a piece that was in the style of Franz Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks. The angst of bringing life to my piece brought life to my voice. My peers brought life to new thoughts, and death to my silence.

Workshopping our “Where I’m From” pieces in class last week was my first time discussing my own life writing in an intimate setting where I felt vulnerable to my audience. All three of us having different styles, tones, structure, but encompassing the same act of trying to make each other understand who we are through memories of where we are from. I did enjoy it, especially knowing that another is invested in seeing the meaning between lines while noticing things about your piece that your unconscious sneaked in there.

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