Is Writing Elitist? Yes. But It Shouldn't Be
If you live to write, you deserve to be in the room. Period. End of sentence.
I’ve been writing for as long as I could remember. My first publication was in second grade—a haiku in which I likened my mother’s voice to thunder. Before I was 10, I’d seen junkies overdosing in parks, bodies carried out on stretchers; cocaine on glass tables and heroin shot into abscessed arms; The Shining in a movie theater; my neighbor Sylvia, who subsisted on cans of sardines and died alone in her bathtub; my other neighbor Sam, the sixty-year-old crack addict, who walked with a cane and told knock-knock jokes; and my mother’s face slammed into a wooden coffee table by a man she thought she loved, a man who, in a few months time, would be dragged out of his car by two men while everyone sat on the stoop, watching the beat-down. Inside, my mother smoked a Kent 100 down to the filter.
I had a lot of material.
From an early age, I was taught that fear and vulnerability belonged to the weak. Better to swallow your voice than to cry. Better to lock your pain away than to endure it. Better to write than to speak. So I spent much of my early childhood alone and silent, but I was writing. Paper had become the provenance of my freedom, and I wrote about all the things I had felt and seen with a calm detachment that, looking back as an adult, bordered on disturbing.
Writing became a refuge, a way in which I could make sense of what was happening around around me. Writing was also a refuge from my shy, introverted, and awkward personality. Frequently the target of high school bullies, I replaced their cruel, daily taunts with daydreams of me enacting revenge against them or crafting a version of myself where I’m surrounded by invented friends living our best lives.
Mine was a fiction where I was pretty, popular, and normal; my days were unblemished and uncomplicated and the endings happy. But I couldn’t reconcile the imagined life lived in my head with the real sorrow I committed to paper.
I have this problem, still.
In college, I abandoned short stories for internships at investment banks, and the one story I wrote and submitted to the literary review was met with an incredulous response from the editor, who stopped me on my way to the cafeteria to ask if I actually wrote the story I submitted. He couldn’t believe that a baseball cap–wearing finance major could write like this. After the story was published, the editor cornered me again and wondered why I hadn’t written more. “You’re really good,” he said.
I laughed and said writing stories about my mother wasn’t going to pay the rent.
For nearly three years, I played the part of the woman wearing dark skirt suits who spent her days plugging numbers into spreadsheets and evenings binge drinking with clients. Yet I hated everything about my job, from the patrician snobbery of the boys’ club to the stockings that made my legs itch.
Three years out of school, I started filing applications to graduate writing programs. I had my bosses pen letters of recommendation because they thought an MFA was a degree in finance, and when I was admitted to the Columbia program and subsequently resigned, everyone wondered why I was pursuing a degree in writing because, come on, Felicia, writers don’t make money.
I’d made money, and I wasn’t happy. I wanted to be a writer; I wanted the prestige of an Ivy. My wants were pure and palpable and, I’d soon learn, misguided.
In the spring of 2000, when the writer Judy Budnitz phoned with the news that I’d been admitted to Columbia’s MFA program, I thought it was a prank. My admissions application included references from bankers and a large, rambling essay about my mother. I hadn’t yet received an acceptance letter from the admissions office, and I’d never heard of this Judy Budnitz (a writer whom I would come to revere), so it took three phone calls to finally convince me that this was real. People actually liked my work.
Come fall, I arrived, petrified, on the Morningside Heights campus. During orientation, I was surrounded by mostly white, affluent college graduates who hailed from Princeton, Bowdoin, Yale, and Harvard — English or creative writing majors who lived to rhapsodize about Joan Didion and obscure 14th-century poets. With a requisite eye roll, they’d talk about how they’d done workshop, and then proceed to rattle off an exhaustive list of contemporary writers I’d never heard of.
When asked about my influences, I replied with Virginia Woolf (nods) and Bret Easton Ellis (strained silence). Only one other person, who became a close friend during that time, said she also loved Bret Easton Ellis because his writing reminded her of Los Angeles, of home. Behind her back, fellow students mocked her uptalk and penchant for tight clothing, and she knew it. We’d laugh, but really, we were misfits in a writing program filled with jaded college grads who wanted an ICM agent, a six-figure book deal, and an internship at the New Yorker.
We felt as if we didn’t belong. We didn’t have the pedigree or literary references or sophistication. Before my the program, I had no concept of how to structure a short story—I just wrote until the character died.
Although Fordham has one of the few business programs where a liberal arts education (classes in, for example, philosophy, theology, social sciences, and literature) is embedded in the curriculum, I felt light-years behind when I started my first year at Columbia. I hadn’t read any of the authors everyone casually name-dropped, I didn’t know the language of the mechanics of writing (structure, point of view, tense, story arc, character development, voice), and I wasn’t used to the cold butchery that was workshop.
Until then, few people had read my stories, and I wasn’t accustomed to having my work torn apart with their words. That first semester, I sat mute in class and watched everyone else speak what I assumed to be an alternate version of the English language. I felt perennially trapped in a Twilight Zone episode where everyone was hyperintellectual and took pleasure in inflicting psychological torture on those who weren’t part of their invisible club.
Workshop. Ah, workshop. Workshop was like sitting through a botched surgery where the attending doctors learned their trade by binge watching the Discovery Channel. I wrote thinly veiled short stories about my life, which were summarily dismissed — my characters were unrelatable, unlikeable, unbelievable. Borderline annoying. Meanwhile, I wanted to shout, “HELLO! THIS HAPPENED TO ME!” But I couldn’t because I had to wait until everyone in the room finished wielding their scalpels before I could respond. By then, I was mostly catatonic from the massacre.
Some of the feedback was helpful, and some of my peers, in their written critiques, were kind in educating me on my story’s mechanical issues and plot fault lines. But what I mostly remember is how students savored eviscerating one another’s work in a tone that balanced boredom with condescension.
One workshop, which was evenly composed of traditional story writers and “line writers” — students obsessed with the likes of Ben Marcus, Gary Lutz, and Amy Hempel and believed that innovation on a line level was superior to traditional character and plot development — felt like a semester straight out of Battle Royale. From across a table, experimental writers practiced their extravagant sighs in response to the chapters I’d submitted from a novel that had nothing to do with my life, a novel whose characters would resurface in my second book, Follow Me into the Dark.
They countered with, “Family stories are over, Felicia. They’ve been done to death.” Back then, I was writing nothing new, according to my peers. Plot-driven stories were boring, played out—yawn, can we move on?
I spent most evenings after workshop crying on the corner of 116th Street. I cried more during that first semester than I had during the whole of my childhood.
Useful criticism isn’t a subjective evaluation of whether you like someone else’s work — that’s a matter of taste — rather, constructive feedback is supposed to be in service of the writer in moving the work forward. How are you helping someone who writes thrillers by telling them to write romance novels instead, simply because you enjoy reading a good love story and still sleep with the lights on? Workshop is supposed to be about advancing someone’s work by giving them tools, insights, and ideas, not pushing one’s personal preferences or agenda.
But workshop made me tough. Now I don’t flinch when I read negative reviews or get upset when people say they hate my work. Instead, I home in on the feedback that will make my next story, essay, or book better. I focus on the people who get what I’m trying to do instead of trying to convert the masses.
While other workshops during my time at Columbia proved helpful for my writing, they were also an uncomfortable display of faculty favorites. Everyone touts the advantages of making connections at MFA programs, of gaining access; however, I felt like I was part of a coterie vying for the affections of a published author who held the keys to the proverbial publishing kingdom. Mentors are powerful in the sense that they can offer insight from experience and perspective, and while I studied under remarkable authors and journalists, I watched many of them cleave to miniature versions of themselves.
The anointed students got the special after-office-hours insights and meaningful connections, and while I couldn’t help but feel envious, I was reminded of the fact that you always have to fight hard for the things you want.
I didn’t get an agent, a book deal, and jacket blurbs because I graduated from Columbia — I earned all of these things by writing cold query letters, spending years on my manuscript, publishing a literary magazine, taking a marketing job in publishing to understand the business of books, sending fan letters to authors I admired, and going to countless readings, book launches, and events even though I felt like an outcast who tried too hard to be cool and all the cool kids knew it.
At a party, a friend introduced me to a lit-mag editor who had acquired some minor fame, someone with whom I’d spent a semester in workshop. He looked through and around me, acting as if he’d never met me, searching instead for more impressive people in the room. His rudeness embarrassed my friend. I waved it away, saying, he knows me; I’m just not connected to anyone at Knopf or the Paris Review.
After my first semester at Columbia, I took a leave of absence because I had a drug problem. I remember hearing the gossip and invented stories that followed. I also remember walking home from work one day and seeing two of my “friends” standing and laughing outside the front door of my apartment building. It was like high school, only we were 25-year-old adults pursuing graduate degrees.
When I returned to the program a few years later, I was guarded and not as receptive to making friends as I had been. While I worked full-time and took out student loans to pay for my tuition, many of my classmates blew off classes that their parents bankrolled. Rarely did I go out for drinks after workshop; I was there to finish my degree and work on my book.
That’s the thing about my MFA experience — it shone a light on just how uncool I was. All for the low, low price of $130,000 in loans that I’ll be repaying from the grave. Meanwhile, I wondered why I needed to be cool to tell a good story.
Here’s the $130K rub: What made me a better writer? Writing groups with regular people.
These groups were retired men in their sixties and seventies who wanted to write about the wars they’d been through and the people they had loved who were no longer living. These were second-generation immigrants who wanted to pay homage to their families by telling their stories. In one group, both a mother of an addict and a brother who cared for his disabled brother his whole adult life broke down in tears during workshop because this was the first time they had shared their stories with anyone. They felt safe.
Some of the people in my groups went to college. Most didn’t. But we all came together because we wanted to share our work, learn from one another, and maybe make a few friends along the way. At first, I came to workshop armed and ready for battle, but I soon learned that one could receive impassioned, constructive feedback without being patronizing. The people in my writing groups encouraged me to abandon the novel I’d delivered as my Columbia thesis because it was clear to them my heart wasn’t in that story. My real story was what got me into Columbia in the first place — my mother.
Better to speak than to be silent. Better to write the words that had been buried for too long. My writing groups’ kindness gave me courage, and I think that’s what was missing from my shiny, overpaid Ivy League experience — empathy, compassion. Perhaps we were blinded by our ambition, youth, unlimited possibility, and want.
I’ll be honest. For a brief period in my twenties, I was the worst version of myself. It was as if all the insecurity and alienation I’d experienced at Columbia and all the gatekeepers faded and was replaced with my snobbery. You didn’t matter if you didn’t write literary fiction. And I spent time with people who were also snobs and while I was connected and working in book publishing, I slowly lost sight of the true thing I loved—writing.
Everything else was meaningless, and it would take me leaving it all for a full-time job at a digital agency where I worked upwards of sixteen hours a day and the only writing I’d done was Keynote presentations and scopes of work. It would take my leaving that job, publishing a second book five people read, parting ways with my agent, and feeling irrelevant to make me realize I focused on everything but the work.
In my forties, I discovered my love of crime novels. I used to eschew genre fiction—now I loved it. Give me smart science fiction and mystery. Because at the end of the day, good writing defies genre. Good writing comes from someone who can tell a story in a way that seizes you. And you need not have attended a fancy program or know all the agents and editors to create work that matters.
I also learned that all the snobbery and gate-keeping comes from a place of fear. People who are desperate and cleave to the status quo do so because they have nothing if they lose their status—or so they believed. They’re frightened of all the new voices and stories that challenge them, replace them, make them work harder to be better at their craft. Opening the gate frightens them because they now have to make room and share the space.
I think of this because of writers like Shannon Ashley, who write out their heart but are openly mocked for their honesty. Mocked because she doesn’t fit the idea of what a serious writer should be without realizing this idea is rooted in whiteness, patriarchy, the old boy’s club before everyone else kicked in the doors. I’m reminded of this because of beautiful writers like Deenie Hartzog-Mislock, who question if they should be in the room without realizing the room wouldn’t be beautiful without them.
And isn’t it wonderful to usher in the flood of voices—black, white, brown, purple, gay, straight, trans, the whole kit and caboodle—because wouldn’t our lives be boring if we heard the same stories from the same people? Wouldn’t our world be so small if we didn’t open the doors and let all the beauty in?
Post-script:
I have a new story on Medium. Please clap, comment, or share because stories aren’t seen by anyone in this new algorithm unless you’re “boosted.”
I’m moving back to Los Angeles on Saturday and I’m so deliriously excited I might very well pass out.
I read this essay and you need to read it too. TRUST. I used 12ft to bypass the paywall.
For those who have asked, my knee is less fucked, but still fucked. I start physical therapy in October. Bending my knee right now is a war crime.
For those who have asked, Felix continues to prosper. I nearly sobbed when he paw-swatted me. His insouciance has returned.
Dear Felicia,
This is a wonderful story, for many reasons.
I earned my PhD in English Lit. at Columbia, back in the 1970s, and your story resonated with me in all kinds of ways.
I am delighted to be following you on Medium and Substack.
Keep on keeping on.
Cheers, Dr. Ray
Mmmmmmm.... thank you.
I just read this whole piece out loud to my lover beside me who is a writer who has experienced so many similar things to what you shared here.
Thank you for doing the work 🤍