The Kitchenette Writers' Collective

 

A friend of mine once said that most people want to be something, but are not interested in becoming something.  I have a list of wants along those lines.  Everyone does.   For example, I want to be an engineer.  I like their mindset.  I like the idea of suspending actual bridges, not just crafting fictional ones out of sentences.  It would be great, for a day or two, to look at the world through an engineer’s eyes.  I once dated an engineer.  We went to the Phoenix Art Museum, and he spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how a wooden sculpture was fastened together.  For those 15 minutes, I wondered what it would be like, taking a work of art and disassembling it in my mind, sizing it up, running my hands along its lines, with all those numbers in my head, all those bolt sizes and potential tools.  But that want only lasted those 15 minutes, because I don’t want to take all the required math classes, and the writer in me was more interested in the old couple arguing underneath an abstract painting.

    

“What I would say is this:  writing poems doesn’t make you a poet…It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet…And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is.  Someone who puts this thing [poetry] first.”—Franz Wright

                “What I would say is this:  writing poems doesn’t make you a poet.”  Wright is sometimes criticized because of his attitude towards MFAs and workshops.  I don’t always agree with his views, but I agree with him on this topic.  Being a poet or a writer is more than just dabbling with words in a journal.  Writing is a craft, and if you want to be a poet or a playwright or a songwriter or a memoirist or a novelist, you have to work (I think Wright would use the word toil) to become one. 

There is a transformative element to this, and there are many ways to earn the change.  A man or woman can sit at a desk, typing or printing three pages, ten pages, no pages a night, learning to say what they must.  A young kid can take a workshop and then another.  A woman can join a critique group or she can write and send out submissions and hope an editor is kind enough to send critique and learn from here rejections.  The journey is a must, but the way we travel is up to us.

Here is my new path.  I have started a collective with other like-minded writers, and it’s called the Kitchenette Writers’ Collective.  And it’s my hope and my wish that as a group we can explore new ways to become writers together.

In upcoming blogs, I will discuss how the group ties in to what I am exploring in this blog.  The blog and the group are connected, by the questions I have been asking in this blog and in my writing life.  What can a workshop be?  What is necessary to foster creativity and experimentation in a workshop?  Is there a better way to run a workshop? 

In the meantime, check us out at:

Meetup.com:  http://www.meetup.com/kitchenette-writers-collective/

Facebook:  www.facebook.com/kitchenettewriter

Website:  http://thekitchenettewriterscollective.weebly.com/