So, I’m running in this loose bra, right? Sweat’s trickling down my back and into my butt crack. My stomach is in knots because it is the first day of my Creative Writing 101 class. Row after row of fabric shops blur past me as I beeline toward an innocuous brown building in New York’s Fashion District.
I get there on time, by the way. The classroom is unimpressive. White walls. Gray desks. Quiet lumps of human staring at their phones. I join the lumps and take out a small notepad half-filled with my grocery lists, jokes, and people I’ve slept with. If you can keep track of everyone you’ve slept with, then you’re not a promiscuous person is my sexual mantra. I flip past the list of names to a fresh sheet of paper and wait patiently. I don’t know it at the time, but this class is going to change the trajectory of my writing career.
The thing no one tells you about adult classes is that the affordable ones are filled with foreigners (hey, me too!) and broken women (hey, me too!). My class was no exception; most of the people were working on their English or getting over a breakup. I’ve since taken many classes in different types of institutions and found that city colleges are my favorite. The majority of students in city or community colleges are so damn happy to be there that you catch a little bit of their happiness. A lot of them are ebullient immigrants who have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I am particularly drawn to these people because: 1) They remind me of my own clumsy-tongued family, and 2) You will not find a more hopeful, motivated, smart, and fascinating group of people. If you ever feel down on life, hang out with an immigrant for a day—they’ll check your privilege so hard you won’t know where to turn.
Initially, learning how to be creative in a classroom felt counterintuitive. “You can’t learn art in a room, man,” I told Rebecca, who is an English teacher by profession.
“Yeah, but you can get better at it,” she shot back. I buttoned my lip and signed up for the class.
I chose this particular writing class because it promised to “guide you surely and safely into the writing life” and because my teacher, David Yastrow, was very adorable. He looked like the wispy love child of Ira Glass and Woody Allen. In fact, he had such a 1930s shtetl face that my parents congratulated me when they saw his photo. “Is he married?” my mom asked.
David began the first class with a roll call. It felt warm and familiar. When he got to my name, I said “I’m here” with more certainty than I had in a long while. Two people were missing. Who, in New York, has $66.66 to spare on a writing class? I wondered.
We started our time together with a simple bell chart on the whiteboard. It had five points that added up to a narrative arc, which, I now know, is at the heart and soul of every good story. That arc made writing seem devastatingly simple. Like a math problem: 1 + 2 = story.
After he’d finished going through the details of a narrative arc, David told us a story about a girl. “I was once in love with a girl named Astrid,” he said, before launching into a diarylike spiel about how Astrid was the one who inspired him to write. It was the first of many times that he exposed his romantic history on an intimate level. David liked to wrench open his ribcage and let us peek in at his heart. Like Otto, David was a musician. His words were dipped in wine, his stories sounded like lyrics, resulting in an overtly saccharine class. I was learning more about his ex-girlfriends than about sentence structure, but his honesty and openness were so endearing to me that my crush grew deeper with each class. But that’s mostly because I was twenty-three years old and attracted to any man who talked about love.
Not every lesson unraveled into the David Yastrow and His Exes Show—sometimes he’d go over the basics of writing. One of our more straightforward weekly assignments was to write about our day, any day from that week. Getting homework when you’ve aged out of school is kind of like getting adult braces—inconvenient, but it could lead to an uptick in confidence.
Although I loved the assignment, I had zero motivation to write about my days, especially because they were so boring. I wanted to improve as a person, I really did. I wanted to try to be a real writer—but I also wanted to have a nightcap at my neighborhood dive, or spend the weekend playing cards in Prospect Park, or go out with the cute guitarist from Bushwick. Anything but homework.
In high school and college, I was motivated by the superfluous competition created by assigning letter grades to everything. It didn’t matter what was absorbed, as long as my GPA was higher than my intellectual nemesis Joe Schein’s. But, adult classes are strictly for bettering yourself, which is a difficult concept to grasp when you’re used to a different kind of reward structure.
In school, I spent a long time beating myself up because other people wrote better, faster, and funnier than me. I tried to mimic my smarter, more successful peers, but noticed that my process didn’t fit into their mold. It turns out that “process is messy.”1 It’s just throwing noodles at a wall and seeing what sticks. You can’t be upset that your wall or your throwing technique looks different than the person next to you—that’s what makes creating so fun: there’s no correct process! (Same goes for losing weight.) The only piece of writing advice that has ever helped me was simply “finish what you’re writing.”
The night before class, I still hadn’t finished my assignment. I opened my computer to write and, after an hour of nothing, decided to read a few pages of a book. When I’m having grand troubles with writing, a good book will often give me the right amount of inspiration. Inspiration, procrastination—either way, for me, the work eventually gets done, even if I have to force it.
During that particular week, I was getting my inspiration from Jonathan Ames’s What’s Not to Love?—a book I found on a stoop in Williamsburg. I like to read the first couple pages of stoop-books, to gauge whether to keep the book. When I found Ames’s book, I read the first few pages and then proceeded to polish off the entire first chapter, standing there, at a stranger’s doorstep.
Ames’s writing was uncivilized and interesting. He painted a perverted picture of being a young writer in New York, and I kept getting lost in that picture. So lost, in fact, that when I sat down to read a chapter the night before class, I ended up finishing the whole book.
In the epilogue, Jonathan Ames talks about giving up on three years of sobriety due to a wine-soaked dessert in Florence. He does a breathtaking job describing what it’s like to tumble off the wagon and succumb to his dipsomania. Even the term he uses to describe alcoholism has an enviable elegance: dipsomania. Dip. So? Mania. A great word, fun to say, with underlying darkness. Ames leaves the reader with a final vow to “get back on the water wagon.” I shut the book, craving a glass of whiskey.
The homework was still unfinished, so I grabbed my laptop and woke up my foster dog, John. “What if I let you decide where we go tonight?” I whispered into his floppy ear. He didn’t seem to mind the assignment, although he was perturbed I’d asked him so late in the evening. We stepped out into the street and he immediately sniffed out a pathway toward one of my favorite neighborhood bars, Mission Delores. Everyone who hung out there was a musician, writer, or disillusioned with life—I loved it. Mission Delores made me feel close to the creative world without actually needing to be a part of it.
I let John off his leash and he scurried toward a group of people crowded around a man. The man’s oval face and downturned nose were familiar, but the rest of his face was obscured under a newsboy cap. He crouched down to pet John, spilling a little of his beer as he knelt. I got a better look, only to realize it was—I kid you not—Jonathan Ames. Jonathan Ames with a beer. The book I was reading just moments before—the one that inspired me to go on the hunt for some fun—came to life in front of me. I watched him rub John’s face for a moment before I got up the courage to walk over. It was too unbelievable of an opportunity to pass up.
“Um, Mister Ames?” my mouth turned to mush, “You’re never going to believe this, but I was literally just reading your book. I love it. I can’t believe you’re here. I love you
,” I blurted.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Jonathan Ames replied, tugging on John’s ear. “What’s his name?”
“John,” I said, realizing that they shared the same name and I’d just told Jonathan Ames that I loved him.
“Don’t get a boner, ha,” I said, immediately regretting my choice. I was referencing an essay from his book in which he mentions getting an erection while petting a golden retriever. I later realized that the essay had been written ten years earlier and my comment had zero context.
Jonathan stood up, and I scooped up John. It is then that I noticed he was standing awfully close to a perky-breasted young girl who I recognized as the bartender’s girlfriend; not only had I accidentally walked into a potentially salacious situation, but I’d also said the word boner.
“Can I buy you guys beers?” My impulse after doing anything awkward is to buy alcohol for the people I did it in front of.
At the bar, I ordered two beers and quickly realized that the bartender and his cronies were planning on smashing Jonathan Ames’s skull in. “No one treats my boy like that. My fist, his face…” said a man who looked like a hamburger. My breath caught in my chest. My new mission for the night was to protect that beautiful bald head, with all of its dirty thoughts and penchant for prose.
Before I could pay for the beers, Jonathan came up. “You don’t have to pay for me,” he told me, while waving a twenty in the air. He smelled of alcohol and talent.
“Jonathan, that girl?” I said, pointing to Perky Breasts. “She has a boyfriend.”
The speed with which I went from reading about his life to inserting myself into it was wild. In his novel, Ames constantly mentions that he’d often black out while drinking, which will explain my actions in a minute. Jonathan let the information sink in for a moment before frantically scanning the bar for the bartender, “Oh no, no. Where is he? I didn’t mean to … didn’t know he…”
“Wait here, I’m going to call you cab.” I went back to the bar and tore a small sheet of paper from my notebook. On it, I wrote: “Thank you for letting me pick your brain over coffee. See you next Monday,” with my email and phone number, then called for a cab before walking back over to Ames.
I patted his chest and slipped the note into the breast pocket of his blazer. “It’s going to be okay, Jonathan.” I was a double-agent, saving my new favorite author from peril while being a manipulative sneak. This is how I’m going to get my start, I thought. We stood at the curb waiting. “Do you have tips for someone who wants to be a writer?” I asked to break the silence.
He thought about it for a moment, slightly swaying in his drunken stupor. “I guess, just pray,” he told me.
It was hard to tell if he was being genuine or ironic, but it didn’t matter because the cab pulled up and he got in. I shut the door and leaned into the window, but before I could say anything he looked up at me, his eyes giant and tired, “Please don’t write about this,” he pleaded. My heart fluttered. He thinks I’m a writer.
I walked to the bar where I’d left John to guard my laptop and sat down to do my assignment. I typed “Just Pray” at the top of my Word document and began to write.
* * *
The most valuable thing I learned during Creative Writing 101 was that everyone has a story to tell. “If you believe you are special and interesting, others will too,” David told us in class one day. I took out a deep green pen and wrote this sentence in the middle of my notebook.
At that time, my age group had the dark mark of narcissism, entitlement, and unrealistic expectations hanging over our heads. Anyone in their twenties who carried any sort of confidence or wanted to do something besides mundane office work was considered to be a (pause for eye roll) millennial. Sitting in a class where the teacher told you to believe that you are a little bit special built a thin layer of protection against the growing despondence about my generation. I began to think that maybe, just maybe, I was a tiny bit interesting.
At the end of the six weeks, during which I missed only one class,2 David came in with a single sheet of paper. “I’m going to read to you a story that has all the concepts we’ve discussed in class. It’s a nonfiction essay published in the Modern Love section of The New York Times,” he said. This was typical; he’d often start out with a piece of writing that perfectly encapsulated the lesson of the day. The atypical thing about this particular essay was that it was written by David himself. Sure, he had told us stories, but he’d never read his own writing.
A hum of excitement rippled through the room. I shifted in my seat uncomfortably. Earnest people performing their own work is a nightmare. Poetry readings, interpretive dance recitals, they all give me an inexplicable amount of stress. “No one cares!” I scream in my head. I am, in fact, a monster.
David read his story with a sort of poetic cadence. Slow and calculated, he made sure we heard all his words clearly. David’s essay was an ode to a young musician he’d met when he first moved to New York. He was captivated by her talent, modesty, and beauty. I guess you could say she was his muse, but this muse was clearly uninterested in David. Parts of his essay dissected her lyrics, her words, while other parts dissected her as a person, her gummy smile and childlike hands. As the story progresses, David becomes more and more set on getting her to notice him. Because they are both musicians, he decides to demonstrate his love by crafting a handmade musical instrument. At the end of the piece, David is left alone, standing in a line of other suckers who have fallen for the young musician girl. All of them holding a present.
As soon as he was done reading, four words popped into my head, words that have launched numerous creative careers and continue to inspire successful individuals to this very day. Those four words were: I can do that. That night I came home, pulled up David’s essay on my computer, and read it again to make sure I didn’t miss any subtle nuances. It was sweet, cheesy, but not at all ground-breaking. As the last pangs of my crush faded, I shut my laptop and whispered: “I can do that.”
5
ADOPT A DOG
John came to me in a pet adoption newsletter I signed up for after four glasses of wine–induced loneliness. I cannot recommend getting a dog as a young, unemployed city-dweller, but I do know that if you end up getting one, you’ll love that dog more than you thought was possible.
My mother was skeptical of my new life change. “You can’t have a dog. You’re not even married!” Olga yelled over the phone. My mom is a sniper; she can sneak my relationship status into just about any conversation.
“It’s like having a baby,” my dad chimed in. “A baby that never grows up, Marina.”
I hate the pet-mom comparison—I cannot stand it when people add “hyphen mom” to anything. Dog-mom. Cat-mom. Plant-mom. It’s too much pressure to be the mother of a cactus. I didn’t push the thing out of my vagina. I’m not going to put it through college or criticize its taste in men—I’m not its mother. You’re not either! “Mother” is a remarkable title, and should be treated with reverence, not callously assigned to anyone lording their power over a defenseless creature.
John celebrating moving into our new apartment.
“A dog is nothing like having a baby,” I told my dad. “You can’t breastfeed a dog in public—”
“That’s girl’s stuff!!!” Vladimir interrupted. He calls anything from periods to imaginary scenarios in which I breastfeed a dog Girl’s Stuff. I vividly remember waking up one morning to him swinging my bra like a lasso, screaming, “Why is this Girl’s Stuff lying on the stairs!?”
But here’s the thing about Girl’s Stuff. As you get older—around your mid-to-late-twenties—it begins to whisper in your ear, “Wouldn’t it be great to have something to keep alive, you beautiful Goddess?” You begin with plants, then you get more plants, then your house is covered in greenery—most of it dead—then your Girl’s Stuff starts asking for more. “Something easier to kill,” it hisses. One night, when you’re vulnerable, you sign up for a newslett
er and stumble upon a courtesy post for Randall, a man in the middle of such a nasty divorce that he can’t get through a sentence without his voice quivering.
John, his dog of eleven years, was a big obstacle in Randall’s apartment hunt. He needed someone to take John in for a few weeks while he looked for a place. When Randall came over to my apartment to drop off John, he looked haggard. I’d never met him before, but I could tell the divorce was taking its toll on his skin and posture. Randall was about half my size and a little shifty, like he was on the brink of offering you drugs or bursting into tears.
“He’s a hunting dog,” Randall told me as he pulled John out of his carrier. He held John in his arms like a football before continuing to describe his beloved dog to me. “John likes to burrow.” Randall gave a big, sad sigh before continuing, “And he’s built for catching small animals.” He lifted John by the tail and his wiener-body dangled in the air. “See?” Randall pointed to his spine, “It splits here, so he’s designed to be pulled out by his tail. You know, from badgers’ burrows and stuff.” John hung motionless in the air.
He’s going to snap this dog in half, and this block is too loud for anyone to hear my screams, I thought.
“Don’t do that, please,” I said, louder than intended. Randall placed the dog on the ground and John joyfully wagged his entire body, like a little snake. “He burrows in bed sheets, and make sure to keep him away from stuffed animals,” Randall continued.
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