I decide to go balls out, because, really? That’s the only way this can go.

It’s Sunday night, 5 p.m.—week six submissions are due and I’m on the hot seat. Five weeks earlier—my creative confidence flagging–I almost quit the writer’s workshop, but tonight, tremulous and excited, I flip open my MacBook and ready my first essay for review. With one last check for glaring errors, I bless my piece for scrutiny by 12 people who were perfect strangers just weeks before. I hope their analysis is constructive and fair. I worry though, that the dissection of my work—like a careless slice job on a high-school science class’ formaldehyde frog—will leave me splayed out catawampus, my guts a grayish gumbo all over the tabletop. I do not like gumbo, and my guts, those that I’m mustering right now to steel myself against the cold winds of critique—I’m kind of fond of them—I pray they remain intact.

(Photo credit: Bascom Hogue@Flickr)

—-

Simon Moth hates my essay.

It’s Wednesday, workshop night, and of my submission, “Mother Fixer”—an essay about my step mom, over which I have agonized, scrutinized, and poured buckets and buckets of heart and soul and time and love and loss and neurosis and heartstrings and everything else into—Simon says, “I think its flat.”

“The beginning of the essay is no more compelling than the end,” Simon, a furrow-browed octogenarian intones. The first of the group to speak, he is dismissive, resolute, not at all concerned with starting the critique on a positive note. To punctuate his point, Simon scrawls tangled black letters, echoing his sentiment—that my essay royally sucks—into the margins of a printed copy of my piece, which he will give me at the end of class. When sufficiently finished scribbling, Simon cups his hands around a porcelain coffee mug; phantom wisps of white steam, fine as translucent vellum, float up and then evaporate into the tension-filled room.

“What I wouldn’t give,” I think, “to disappear right now, just like those fine white wisps.”

… But then, bright spots.

Irene, our instructor, her hair piled high in a haphazard bun, her large, gold earrings hanging like chandeliers from earlobes exposed, says she likes it; she thinks the essay works. “It’s a portrait,” she explains, “it’s not supposed to be revelatory. It’s a conjuring of a mother—and the literary world is full of mothers.”

“I loved the main character. She is larger than life!” Jen, the schoolteacher at the end of the table exclaims.

Miriam, the soulful Belizeer with the infectious smile, says that the work is great, beginning to end. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” she emphatically says. “I would not change one thing.”

—-

Later that night, back at the apartment, Andrew—languishing on our green tufted couch, his jewel-eyed Siamese stretched out alongside—asks how the critique went.

“It went well,” I say. I am pleased that my work, good or bad, resonated with a real-world audience. And then because the impulse strikes me, I corset my arms in an “x” across my stomach. I feel side ribs, soft flesh.

What do you know? I think. My insides are still intact.

Simon Moth be damned, it looks like I’ll live to write another day.

The jewel-eyed cat looks in my direction, purrs her approval.