The Workshop Virgin

I suppose this blog post is an update of sorts. Wednesday has come to an end and the VONA Voices experience is now heading toward a speedy wrap up.

I find myself still feeling lost about this whole process. The questions remain unanswered. Do I feel any where nearer to accomplishing my three stated goals? Not sure. But I am conscientiously embracing the ambiguity of the process. The excitement, its still palpable. Yet I realize a week is absolutely worthless to the whole writing-crafting-process.

In short, I am a workshop virgin and its clearly playing out externally from the internal commotion. Also, I feel like these posts are capturing the internal self doubt and casting it out there for the whole world to read.

This is my constant internal state. Constantly feeling like an imposter, feeling like I just don’t amount, feeling like I have to try ten times harder then other people, when in the end I will fail and therefore I should just give up immediately to go relax at the beach. Anyway.

I would recommend VONA to others. Except, I would share with them the following:

1. Try to experience a workshopping experience locally first. Craft a piece and take it in to a space where others can read your work and critique it for you. This feedback and working on your piece is what the workshopping experience is all about. Unlike me, you may have a clear(er) idea of what your end product is. I submitted a piece that was meant to be a stand alone piece. Whereas, I find that others who have a larger book length piece, from which they submitted a select number of pages for workshopping, truly benefit more from the VONA Travel workshop experience. Or maybe everyone does and I just dont know.
2. When you come to VONA, come with your piece as an end goal. Unlike me, where I am coming with the personal insecurities of being a writer and trying to learn what a writer does in terms of craft. I seem to be coming in at a much lower rung of the actual VONA experience offering. I think in that light, I am not fully benefiting from what awesome sauce VONA has to offer.
3. If you want to pursue an MFA, then this is definitely a good place to test run an MFA experience plus make some impossibly awesome contacts with folks teaching and going through an MFA experience. One thing I realized from VONA Voices, which is crystal clear, I don’t want to pursue an MFA. I never had an inclination to do it in the first place, but I now know that its not even an iota of a possibility. I believe there is a way to DIY the MFA process for those serious enough about writing.xT