Cracking Open the Dressing Room Door

Dear reader, come on in.

Refusing to share my writing is one of my biggest graduate school regrets. Works-in-progress workshops terrified me. They always felt somewhat like someone bursting in your room while you’re still hunched over getting dressed, to tell you how you look (is it just me, or is the act of dressing and undressing a remarkably awkward task in the wrong context?). So, I hid. I wrote alone, edited alone, as much as possible, and only allowed my advisor to see my less shameful drafts.

This complex originated from one incident: 20-year-old me eagerly seeking out a professor for feedback after he gave me a tragically low grade, an outlier to every other grade, before or since. I sat in his office, eagerly asking how I could do better next time, and he responded coldly: “Honestly, I’m not sure you can be helped; you’re just a bad writer.” A sentence that 12 years later, rings in my ears when I pick pen, or stare at a blank page. It struck a cold blow to my creative fire, dousing it to embers with nothing to catch.

These days, post PhD, and newly post-academia, I’m writing more than ever, and the motivation for this page is: practice. To show my working out (as one does in long division) of things I’m learning and thinking through. It is an effort to believe that sharing writing online, or otherwise, is not etching in stone tablets or a claim of permanence or conclusion, but an opportunity to grow as a writer. Sharing works-in-progress is a necessary part of writing for publications, building writing community, and practicing the craft.

So I’m cracking open the dressing room door. Come on in. It’s messy, it’s unresolved, but it’s a place to assemble and disassemble thoughts, to try on an idea, keep it or shrug it off if the fit isn’t quite right. It’s a place to question what works and what doesn’t; to style oneself in curiosity. I’ll be talking about everything: life, literature, history, and Jesus.

Welcome, I hope you come in.