Just some critiques and things I want to be able to come back to.

As some of you may know, I was accepting into the MFA program at a really great university in California. My classes are run through blackboard and the way things work is that after a few weeks the class is deleted from your roster once you've passed. I finished my nonfiction class two weeks ago and in that class I had them look at the essay I wrote about Matt and my father. Using parts of an old essay I wrote when Matt was still among us where he and I walked in a graveyard and laid flowers on graves.

My professor was really cool and knowledgeable. I appreciated his critiques a lot.

Here is what he wrote for my final grade:

"I continue to think this is a very strong essay, and I also understand completely that it may be difficult to revisit it so soon after the events it describes. This is the hard thing about having class deadlines that may or may not conflict with one's own emotional chronology. So I would by all means recommending letting this one sit for awhile--it's great, and it will still be great a year from now, when perhaps you'll have a bit more distance. At that point, whenever it may come, you'll be able to approach this essay and future revisions with enough distance that you can preserve what's great about it while continuing to refine it. And that's something worth waiting for, believe me."

Here is what he wrote on the rough draft for my workshop:

"The description of laying the flowers on the neglected tombstones is particularly lovely, and conveys a great deal of information about these two people through one simple gesture. The ability to capture someone’s life through one or two actions is really a difficult thing to do, but here comes across very well. As a testament to a lost loved one, this essay is very powerful and moving. And the image of these graves strewn with purple flowers is not only immediately evocative and easy to visualize, but your writing of that moment is quite strong as well: “We had brought along sixty flowers and laid them upon graves of stillborn babies, graves without headstones, mothers, fathers, children, and teenagers. We laid them on every stone no matter the religion or ethnicity of the human it was for. I imagined, then, countless souls walking behind us following our procession through the rows of the stone garden.” The litany of the forgotten here is powerful, like a testimonial, and it works well to help bring that moment alive for your reader. And I agree with Dea that the opening question—why are these people celebrating Day of the Dead—is a good hook that’s satisfying and endearing once answered.

This piece is haunting throughout, but nothing compares to that final image, which is breathtaking in its eerie sadness. It’s the kind of image that changes everything that’s come before, adding a layer of coloring to all that we’ve read in a way I can’t quite put into words, but which I found incredibly compelling nonetheless.

Structurally, I think this essay is put together well: you have the framing image of the night in the cemetery, which helps us understand who you and Matt are, and your relationship, and then you’re able to deviate from that as you move into subsequent events. To bring us back to that night at the end is incredibly effective, since now we know that this is all being written after Matt has died, so the final scenes take on an added weight.

What I notice as a reader is that as you get closer to narrating the deaths of your father and of Matt, the writing tends to get quicker, more superficial, as you run several ideas together in the same sentence (“Christmas morning, I got a message from Matt’s cousin, they had found him dead in a car under mysterious circumstances”). It’s almost as though you’re not ready to quite face these events again. It may be, I found myself thinking, that you’re still too close to some of this material. That is totally understandable; grief is insanely hard and we all process these things on our own time scales. It may be that an essay like this needs time; you may just need to have a bit more distance from your own emotions in order to bring the reader fully into the emotional impact of this piece. I wouldn’t feel bad about just giving this essay a rest, and coming back to it at a later date. It may help to have that additional perspective.

But another way to think of it is to focus not on these tragic losses themselves, but to focus on everything around it. If you think of throwing a pebble in a pond: you quickly lose track of the pebble but you can see the ripples for a long time afterwards. There’s a way to write something like this where you focus on the ripples, not the pebble—if you give us the periphery, we can often infer what’s at the heart of the matter, and often it will hit us with more emotional impact. You write, for example, that the days following your father’s death felt “like scenes in a movie that I was an unwilling participant in. I detached from life and only remembered a few things by allowing myself to feel and be in the moments.” If it’s possible to reconstruct any of those scenes, including the detachment you may have had, they will resonate with your reader a great deal more, since the weight of the loss will be felt through that deadness.

...I think this essay has so much going on, and offers so many points of reflection as to how we confront death, and how we mourn and celebrate those we’ve lost. When you’re ready to go forward with it, I think it’ll be incredibly powerful and moving."



That being posted will help me in the future when I decide to pick up the essay again.

In the events of the past week I wrote a quick facebook post where I used my professor's pebble analogy (inadvertently) as it relates to the aftermath of death.

I think I'll just repost that here as well, as it still is valid.

"Life is so fleeting and precious and I have great respect for my life and the lives of others. It scares me and deeply saddens me that other humans feel the need to harm innocent people and disrespect the short lives we as humans get to have. Whatever their reasoning, it isn't enough, it isn't enough reason to take away and destroy.

Death doesn't just end a life, it ends love, it severs the thousands of connections someone has made, it ripples out like boulder falling into water. It ripples into tidal waves that tear apart the shores of those left living over and over and over again.

There is no breath of air, we're always drowning in the loss."