“Look, you’re not my therapist,” I said to my mentor Marisa Wikramanayake at some point into our first meeting last night. She had asked me if I was working on anything, and in the midst of explaining this piece-in-progress I had segued into a tangent which involved me briefly commenting on my poor relationship with my blood family. Naturally, it didn’t have a whole lot to do with the essay.
The mentor/mentee relationship is an interesting one. It’s mostly professional, sometimes transactorial, but comes with an element of the personal, only because being an “artist” is deeply subjective. It doesn’t matter if you’re a “critic”, “short fiction writer” or “poet”—the output will be psychical in some way, whether that’s immediately obvious to the reader or not. A mentorship feels akin to an obligatory social situation like work or school where one is expected to maintain a measure of decorum while exuding a sense of familiarity, a balance I’m bad at striking.
Most writers I had spoken to both online and off—at least in Australia anyway—prior to finding Marisa said they either didn’t have a mentor, were matched with one via a grant/fellowship situation, or found theirs incidentally. The novelist Anna Spargo-Ryan said she had blindly emailed someone whose work they admired and hoped for the best. Luckily, that person responded favourably and ended up giving her valuable insight with regards to the publishing world, which she credits to the publication of her first book. Someone else said they did something similar and got rejected, but was recommended another writer who was thought to be a better fit.
As a person, the concept of “blind” anything fills me with dread. Even when I was wankerishly writing long pseudo-intellectual email exchanges as a young adult on OKCupid, I never met up with the person on the other side. Anxiously cycling through workplaces and doctors remains par for the course. As a writer, higher stakes seemed at play; my grant acquittal and the size of the Australian literary c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ scene notwithstanding. Going through Writers Victoria felt like a safer option: if the entire process was streamlined in a structured way then perhaps both my mentor and I would be more accountable, if not to each other then at least to the organisation.
Maybe #notallwriters are as neurotic as this. Either way, Marisa is a very vocal yet affable woman of colour who not only understands our respective positions as writers of colour in a white literary world, but thinks widely and sharply about writing in a clear-cut manner. She showed me David Conley’s “instant wheel-o’-rama” (pictured below) from a journalism textbook that cost $66.95 to buy. Despite not being a journalist, I found this model useful in unclogging some ideas I had about creative non-fiction—it also dawned on me why I used to read the Reader’s Digest in my primary school library front to back and why I still find random articles in the New Yorker so pleasing to read. A 90-year old Alzheimer sufferer’s relationship with their dying horse? Weird savant hyperpolyglots? I’m there.
This first meeting made me think about the way(s) I write: long sentences, big words, liberal uses of em dashes and semi-colons. Like all arrogant writers I’m not going to drastically change how I approach writing, and what represents a style I feel most at home in, but being able to consider other methods was refreshing. Sometimes punchy sentences work! And if I can use “follow”, I don’t have to use “subsequent”.
“You can weave magic with simple words,” Marisa said sagely. I blamed my 26-year appetite of white bro-lit.
Every writer inadvertently absorbs their tastes, be that those they have long ago abandoned or those which still shape them now. How much of me is Dave Eggers? How much of me is (shudder) DFW? Why are they both named Dave? Even as I attempt to decolonise my mind by actively reading 95% writers of colour now, these reading and writing habits linger within. It’s a conscious effort to be open to and appreciative of writing outside of the so-called “canon”.
Marisa noticed these schisms astutely, pointing out that I was disavowing the Institution in one breath while fretting about their validation the next. This made me think about the mentor/mentee relationship again—not unlike a therapist and their client. A sense of professionalism but with the utmost care. Writing is a solitary pursuit, but you can’t do it all by yourself.
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This week’s recommendations:
This interview with Chelsea Hodson in The Creative Independent — “I love having friends who aren’t writers, because it gets you out of this mindset where small things take on the biggest significance.”
Rachel Ang’s very beautiful Dream Diary — “I start telling him about the bleeding, the baby, and finally, that I have become a kind of biological dispenser of condiments.”
This conversation between Nell Painter and Lynne Tillman in The Paris Review — “When I wake up in the morning I’m still miserable, so being prestigious is beside the point.”
New n+1 editor’s note on our new reading environment, mostly cultivated by social media, left-wing legacy publications and outrage culture — “Transparency about readership has led, in turn, to formal transparency, an internet house style that conceals nothing but delivers no pleasures. Agreeing with something has never felt less gratifying.”
This interview with Stephen Pham in The Pin — “I’m also learning that there is no one defining piece of writing in my career. It’s all just a record of where I am at the time.”
Anne Boyer’s Twitter