Thinking on Past Experiences

This was a nice welcome back to Elbow for me. I can relate to this entire chapter because last year I was involved in a writing group. There was actually a teacher present for this one, but he seemed to more or less fulfill the role of chairman that Elbow describes. "Teacher" was only his technical title. He read some of his own works and asked for our feedback as well because he said that even though he was leading our class, no writer ever outgrows the feedback of others.

I have to agree with his statement. When I first began reading my writing out loud in elementary school, I loved it. I had always been drawn to both performing and writing and it was a way for me to display two favorite hobbies of mine. When the concept of peer feedback was introduced in middle school, it became a bit more of an intimidating procedure. Sometimes when you write something that you are so in love with, it's hard to put it out there open to the criticism of others.

I felt this the most in college poetry workshops. Poetry, especially what I was writing at the time of the classes, is immensely personal. For me, it wasn't just about impacting others; it was using my own life experiences and feelings to make that impact. When my words failed to do so with a member of the class, my initial instinct was to become defensive, to think, "Well, they're not in my head so they just don’t understand where I'm coming from." But as Elbow says, it's our job as writers to "get things inside someone else's head" (76).

I started to really listen to the criticism and to not be so emotional or take anything as a personal attack. I realized that my classmates had a lot of good things to say. In some cases, their suggestions made me go back and reanalyze me writing. I often discovered by reading it out loud that what they were saying had merit, and that perhaps I could spend a little more time into clarifying certain sections of my work. In other cases, I played around with implementing their suggestions and realized that I still preferred the original. And so I left it. After all, as I said, writing, particularly poetry, can be very personal and it's important for the writer to be happy with it.

As Katelyn mentioned in her blog, everytime I read something like this it inspires me to want to be part of a writing group or to start one up. I never write as much as I should, and it's wasted talent. It's because I'm not good at disciplining myself, and because I am one of those people that "undermines my efforts at writing" (80). And along with taking in the critiques of other group members, I also get to experience those really positive moments when someone connects with your writing. It's a feeling that I'd like to experience more often.