Read, Work, Play

Emily Gaynor. Bennington College student. Working and reading in NYC.

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The End, or, So Many Semi-Colons

It’s all over and done with.

I am no longer an intern. 

What ever will I do with myself?

Honestly, I feel like my last post was enough of a self-reflective dump so I will just add few more things:

Although my job was not always perfect, I genuinely liked the instructors that I worked with. They are smart and interesting, funny and creative, kind and patient. Their students likely don’t even realize how lucky they are to have such talented teachers.

Final reflections on using a blog as a reflective tool: Although it was easier to ignore my responsibility to post than to ignore the responsibility of handing in The Big Essay, I believe that my blog is a more thorough and accurate reflection of my entire FWT experience. A blog has the capacity to magnify the smaller moments that may end up seeming unimportant in an essay compared to sweeping statements about the importance of work.

Speaking of the importance of work: I believe that work is valuable even when it is not the *dream job*. I think it is important to go into a place everyday and do things that need to be done and then to go home and have a drink and complain about all the dumb but apparently necessary things you did that day. Those are the values my parents instilled in me. It is important that I learn to do these things, to show up on time, to button my pants, to graciously take out mounds of smelly garbage because I do not want to be a bum for the rest of my life. My time will come, but I can be patient, at least for a little while. 

Well, that's all folks, Here's to the end of another successful field work term. 

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Pre-sentimental musings

There's a certain torture to my job that I end up savoring. I can detachedly call myself garbage girl after dumping 7 tiny plastic bags of trash in the dumpster (including the recycling, because I just can't figure out what bin it goes in.) I can write this tumblr post at work because there's nothing left in my to-do pile and I have so little motivation to look for other menial tasks. Do I relish these moments because they make me feel like a character on Girls or some other hip tv show filled with privileged yet miserable 20 somethings? Probably.

But after work when I talk about my day, I can't help but call the itty bitty 4 year olds that I work with "little nuggets" even when they are unbelievably misbehaved and purposely dump water on the floor and lock themselves in the bathroom and put goldfish wrappers in my shoe and grab things from the bookshelf WHEN THEY KNOW IT IS AGAINST THE RULES. I even occasionally look forward to their naughtiness.

And I can't help but brag about the stories I've read written by 9 and 10 year olds that show surprising levels of maturity. I truly get excited when I'm paired with a focused and dedicated young writer in order to help them type and develop their story.

This week I edited a story for Writopia's online magazine. I had read several other stories by this writer and had an idea of what to expect: overly cavalier language, misguided romance subplots and many a spelling error. This story had all of those things but as I read farther into the story I became invested in the character's journey. When I had to stop reading in order to set up for workshops I was disappointed. I wanted to keep reading; I was eager to discover what happened in the end. When I finally had the chance to finish the story I was mesmerized- the author had created a beautiful ending that drew from it's beginning. The story came full circle and as a result it had a big impact on the reader.

Was the story perfect? Not by any means. But I completely appreciate the author's intent, and, having read her work before, I can actually see her development as a writer.

After workshop, one of the instructors I assist asked me what publications I submit my work to. Surprised by the question, I answered that I'm a writer in title only, that I'm a tad lazy and that, technically, I don't even have work. She shook her head in disbelief and told me she'd sent me a list of places to send my writing to.

My persistent fear of meaninglessness and mediocrity has prevented me from even creating a body of work, let alone handing one over for judgment. But the kids that I work with proudly send in their stories, poetry, plays and barely comprehensible imitations of all three. They write freely, without even for a second wondering if what they create is good or worthy. They are unburdened by these concepts. I can't reverse time and produce the genius (or not) that I may have been capable of as a child. But I'm beginning to recognize that it's worth it to write something that may only contain a hint of meaning or literary potential. Furthermore it's important to do so if I ever want to mature as a writer/human being. 

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Patti Smith’s Just Kids is a moving book. Literally, it transported me to another time. This book made me want to be an artist, to have the same unwavering passion for my craft that Smith talks about. It was an interesting experience reading this book because, to be honest, I have very little knowledge of the movers and shakers of the art world that Smith ran with back in the day. Smith’s narrative voice is a little reserved and distant; perhaps this is only a symptom of the passage of time or maybe it’s indicative of Smith’s struggle to relive this past, filled with fond memories but hardships as well. Overall a great read, especially while I’m in New York, where many of her adventures took place.    

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Went to the Brooklyn Flea in Williamsburg today, mainly to score free samples and take hip instagrams.     

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Snowed In

Something fun and nice happened at work the other day!

Due to a massive snowfall, all of our workshops were cancelled for the day.

No, the fun and nice thing was not that I got to go home early.

One child apparently didn’t get the message because she and her mom showed up anyway, so we invited her to stay and hang out for a bit as a consolation prize. One of the instructors started playing a writing game with her and asked me and another co-worker to join. The game is simple, the rules are:

1) You are assigned an emotion and a setting by one person in the group.

2) Without using either of the words you are given, you must demonstrate what they are in a written scene.

3) Then each member of the group reads aloud their passage and everyone else tries to guess what their emotion and location is. This was mine:

I inhale the stale, sterilized air. I rock back and forth a bit in my hard plastic seat, trying to find a comfortable position.

“Mr. Balister?” the receptionist calls.

Mr. Balister puts down the Men’s Health magazine he was reading, stands up and exits the room. As he passes me I look on fondly at this Mr. Balister, his pale, balding head dotted with liver spots, his stately tweed jacket. He looks perfectly healthy.

My gaze reluctantly trail down to my hand, which is now throbbing and has taken on a purple-ish hue. I can only look for a few seconds before I have to pull my eyes away, lest I faint, again. I feel a twinge in me, a pluck of agitation. "Why should Mr. Balister have all the luck? He’s probably in here for just a routine check up!" I think, simultaneously hating Mr. Balister (his name is probably something like Rick), and wishing I were in his place.

Well, did you guess it? I was jealous at a doctor’s office.   

It’s just a little game about the importance of showing instead of telling in writing but I had a really good time playing. This reserved little nine-year old kid wrote something I really liked and respected, as did my co-workers and that made me happy. Something I do appreciate about my job is that a lot of what I do requires me to go back to the basics of storytelling, things that I usually consider myself too sophisticated to bother with, which I think will ultimately strengthen my writing. 

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I just finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Required reading for any college-age feminist/ aspiring manic pixie dream girl. What can I say about this book that hasn’t already been said? Likely nothing. The Bell Jar is Plath’s autobiographical novel that follows Esther Greenwood through her experience with depression, suicide attempts, psychotherapy and electroshock treatment. Plath has an amazing grasp of language; she’s incredibly witty and I love her interesting, often lovely and perfectly lucid descriptions. While avoiding being flowery, her tone was wonderfully poetic. Go figure. The book explores the tension between academic ambition and societal pressure to conform to the standards of traditional femininity, and Esther’s supposed mental descent as she attempts to navigate this rigid 1950s landscape.

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I like to take photos of interesting looking books I find while browsing to remember for when I go on my next book buying binge. Here is the most recent batch since coming to New York. I've been to a lot of book stores in just two weeks.

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I stopped by Book Culture (ugly website, pretty store) on this fine MLK day and got sucked in. They’ve got a great, and neatly organized, selection on the first floor and while the second floor is a bit messier, it’s just as fun to browse. On sheer whim I picked up Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color and once I began the first few pages I couldn’t stop. I may have some sort of addiction problem when it comes to reading but we’ll worry about that later. I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. Blue is the Warmest Color is a beautifully and carefully told story about Clementine, a teenage girl who falls in love with blue-haired Emma and learns to accept her homosexuality even when the people around her don’t. Julie Maroh really used the graphic novel medium to her advantage. Its depictive power enhanced the story immensely and the book was also just plain nice to look at. The book is quick but moving. It is not an epic tome, which was one of my favorite things about it. Aside from allowing me to read it in one sitting without paying for it, its succinctness intensified my experience reading it. Plus, now I feel super hip for having read the book before seeing the movie. I’ll end on this interesting quote I found from Maroh in an interview with AfterEllen.com:

"Blue isn’t autobiographical. That’s the main question people ask me usually, and I recently had to face a journalist who basically insinuated that I was lying to him when answering “no” to that question. And that made me angry because… OK, I’m a lesbian, but it doesn’t mean that every time I write a story with lesbian characters they’re gonna be inspired by myself. I found this idea really sad and actually… alarming."

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Merry MLK

For the past two weeks I’ve been trying not to compare my job this year to the job I had last year. But that’s dumb. I’m going to compare this field work term to last year’s because, truly, there's no way not to. My experiences do not exist in a vacuum. It is a little unfair because I already know the ending to my last internship, know that throughout my time I continued gaining responsibility and ended feeling like an important member of the team. Unfair because I have nostalgic rose-colored memories of my last job, unfair because, hell, I worked at a comedy club, a completely different atmosphere than the one I work in this year. Well, tough, life's not fair.

I am as disposable as the plastic cups and goldfish wrappers I throw out every day. My unique skill set is not being utilized. There is nothing I do that could not be done by anyone else, aside from my editing which I am generally very pleased to work on.

This is, perhaps, a selfish attitude; after all, I am contributing to an organization that helps kids of diverse backgrounds discover the joy of creative writing. Why should I deserve individual recognition?

But I don't actually see it that way.

I see the kids that I am working with and I don't feel like I'm helping anyone in need. These kids look just like the ones I grew up around, spoiled, selfish (but really, aren’t all kids selfish?) and it makes me very unmotivated to work with them.

But what does in need mean anyway? Must a child be dirt poor for it to be important to teach them? Why am I so averse to helping this specific set of kids? Is it because I want to assuage privilege-guilt from my own fortunate upbringing? Or is it because I don’t want to be reminded of my childhood? Are these kids, who did not choose which family they were born into, not worthy of the chance to learn about creative writing? Creative writing has always been an important outlet for me and could be for these kids too.

So these are the things I am thinking about. It’s easier to be a good person in internet musings than in real life though, so I will probably continue resenting my job and stealing goldfish as quiet revenge.

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I took this. 

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I ate these

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One Week Down

5:55pm, close enough to the end of the day. I put my coat on, say “Goodnight everybody,” and walk out the door, each step weighed down slightly by all the stolen snacks I’ve hastily shoved in my pocket.  

I don’t like my job.

I realize now that, in my haste to live in New York City, I ignored the core responsibilities of my internship, which are administrative duties and working with children. Also, I take out a lot of trash,

The best way to sum up my job is with a little anecdote.

The other day a friend I’ve made at work (we bonded over job dissatisfaction,) informed me that the “higher ups” really appreciate when…

At this point I thought he would say something to the effect of, “they love it when you ask for more responsibilities and really try to step up and be a part of this organization.”

Instead he said that it’s much appreciated when the bosses can pass off the grunt work onto somebody else.

Fine, I can understand that. But after last year’s FWT, I feel like such a capable member of the work force and that I deserve a certain amount of respect- or at least a paycheck. I suppose I had heightened expectations for this year.

I’m really enjoying working as an editor for my organization's literary magazine. It’s the only thing that I have any sort of ownership over. I'm learning to respect authorial choices even when I don't necessarily agree with them, a skill that will be useful in reviewing all types of writing aside from kids' stuff. If I don’t ask anyone for any work when I come in, I realized that I can edit all morning.

Additionally, I love living in New York with so much independence. I’m sure once I run out of money I will change my mind about that.

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I started reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore over the summer. I had heard so much buzz about it, and had easy access to a copy because I was working in a bookstore. I eventually gave up on the book due to boredom and the availability of flashier books, but I recently revisited it. Here’s the poop: Clay Jansen works at a strange bookstore, with very few paying customers that is open 24 hours a day. When he goes digging to find some answers, he discovers a secret society that, well, I won’t spoil it for you. The book was… cute. A cute story with a happy, we-learned-a lesson! ending. I wasn’t all that impressed with the writing- and I’m a college student, it shouldn’t take that much to impress me. All the characters were weirdly perfect with no real development and each obstacle was so easily overcome, which made for a quick, but not entirely gripping read. There were some interesting tidbits though. I learned some neat things about typography and that magical thing we call the *Internet.*Overall Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is a tidy little story about the awkward collision between old knowledge and new and the search for a peaceful co-existence between them.            

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Although I haven't technically started my internship yet (or even arrived in New York...) I have started reading! Two Boys Kissing was the first on my to-read list. It immediately jumped out at me at the bookstore. The YA section, although littered with gems, is often full of unoriginal, not to mention boring, stereotypes. This young adult novel, however, almost transcends the YA genre. Basically, the book tells the story of several gay teens living in nearby towns. Harry and Craig are broken up, but trying to set the record for world’s longest kiss. Avery and Ryan just met but it seems like there could be something between them. Neither Peter nor Neil can drive yet but they have been going strong as a couple for a year. And Cooper is alone and hopeless. The book is narrated by the collective voice of the generation of gay men that died of AIDS, which gives the writing a sense of profundity and elegance. Simply holding the book sometimes felt like a political act, which I don’t doubt was intentional. The title is stamped largely, boldly on the cover along with an illustrative photo. Although at times a little overly sentimental for my embittered taste, the book is beautiful and I look forward to reading more of Levithan’s work.

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Welcome to the Wonderful World of Literacy!

Hi there world/ a small portion of the Bennington community!

This winter I will be working at Writopia Lab, a non-profit children’s writing center in NYC. I’ll be assisting the teaching in writing workshops as well as editing their literary magazine, The Parenthetical. I hope to learn more about my own writing process by learning about the processes of children in order to better my overall writing skills. I chose to blog my progress (as any good millennial would) because I believe it will allow me to reflect on individual experiences closer to when they happen as opposed to struggling to remember what in gods name my first day was like how am I going to write this reflection essay but seriously what have I been doing for the past six weeks….. I digress. Plus, as an added bonus to my dear readers I will also use this space to document the books I read this winter. As I've always said, read 100 books, write 1. I came up with that. 

I'm off!

Emily