#maggie Ilersich

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The Economics of Creativity

The following is the second in our weekly blog posts for December exploring both the gifts of writing and the many struggles of being an artistic creator in a heavily monetized society. It’s December, and I spend weekends working for the richest man in the world. I box roughly 205 units of merchandise per hour, which is 45 items short of the team goal. I calculate my rate of failure and leave my 10.5-hour shifts bruised and sore. Last week, a children’s book slipped from my hands onto my face. I bled. I kept packing. I’m still scabbed.

While the blood was beading near my nose, a young man standing a few stations away came over to give me a high five. He exclaimed, “You’re doing awesome! You’re awesome! Thank you for your great work!” This reminds me of my freshman year of high school, during which dropping a glass in the dining hall earned a person a hearty round of applause, but this guy wasn’t kidding. I squinted from his face, hanging earnest and open, to his raised arm. He actually wants me to feel better, I thought. My hand met his in the air. I blushed.

People who work in places like this cannot be summed up. There are college students, single mothers, high school dropouts, former servicemen, musicians, retired teachers—the list goes on. There’s a man whose daughter is attending the University of Virginia for graduate school. Upon hearing the name of my undergraduate institution, he blurted, “How did you end up here?” He didn’t just mean how did I end up working for this company; he wanted to know how I ended up at Texas State University, a second-tier state school, for my graduate degree.

Stung, I rattled off facts about the Creative Writing program’s national standing and its incredible faculty. “Oh. I didn’t know,” he said.

In truth, I don’t have a satisfactory answer to this man’s question. This was a good program that took me. This was, of the small number of places I applied, the only program that took me. This program gave me a tuition waiver and a job. I was in a serious relationship with a Texan and wanted to move here. I was depressed. I was directionless. I was only good at writing. I wasn’t even that good at writing. I wanted to be a writer.

I don’t know what I want anymore.

I’m graduating in a couple weeks. Soon, this weekend job will be my only job. Though I hope this won’t be the case for long, sometimes I think it’ll be a relief to have fewer friends and academics tell me that Octavia Butler worked in a factory, too. Facts like this remind me that I probably don’t have the right stuff to make a career of writing. I’m not brilliant like Butler, and I can’t handle economic instability for much longer. I’m tired most of the time, and I feel dimmer because of it.

There are moments, though, that deserve a space in print. Tonight it snowed fat, wet flakes—the kind only possible at the upper threshold of freezing. A house full of students down the street screamed, “Snow! It’s snowing!” over and over, and those screams reverberated up driveways and around trees. Girls outside the grocery store threw snowballs at one another, laughing as they dove behind parked cars. In the courtyard of my apartment complex, a man stood under a set of stairs with his hood up and asked, “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” I wrapped the day’s mail in my scarf and looked up, “Of course it is.”

Maggie Ilersich is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Austin Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and elsewhere.

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Toward an Empathic Poetics by Maggie Ilersich

One of the earliest pieces of advice creative writers receive is “show, don’t tell.” This phrase has been repeated, with varying degrees of nuance, in every workshop I’ve taken—from high school through my MFA. In poetry in particular, this saying tends to be treated as law and for good reason. In the condensed world of a poem, a writer must quickly get the reader on their side.

Often, the best (and quickest) way to do this is by establishing an image or scene that readers can easily access. An example of this may be found in Ezra Pound’s well-known “In a Station of the Metro,” which, in its entirety, reads, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / petals on a wet, black bough.” As one of the founders of Imagism, Pound relies on the title ground the scene and second line to clarify the more abstract “apparition” of the first. Because the reader knows exactly where the poem takes place and the items that populate it, the sense of alienation the speaker feels is, with no explicit mention, clear. The reader derives the speaker’s innermost feelings from place and objects alone.

 But, what of a writer who feels joy or jealousy or sadness and names it as such? What of a writer who plainly states the emotional impulse of the poem? In a workshop climate that privileges Imagism, this move isn’t well received. I admit, even in my own reading, that lines that rest in the immaterial frequently turn me off. William Carlos Williams’ declaration, “no ideas but in things,” knocks against my head, and I stop engaging, by default, because I was never encouraged to accept these moments. I was always instructed to demand more from them – to demand a place for myself.

Last year, however, I fell sick. I read much less than usual. I stopped writing entirely. At first, these changes were born out of necessity, but even after my symptoms were managed, I couldn’t bring myself back to poetry. I started writing in my journal—lines like, “I’m just so tired. […] So frequently, even now, disappointed in myself, the body.” I wrote details about each day, sure, but what felt of value to me lived in this vague language. And so, with my impulses running counter to my teaching, I concluded there was no room for me in creative writing.

My feelings changed upon reading Joanna Klink’s Raptus, a book that owns a particular loss, a particular grief. Though I, too, was sorrowful, I could not read Klink’s poems and place myself in her experience. I had reservations. My discomfort reached its peak in the poem, “My Enemy,” which is full of lines like, “I stared all fall at that old / hopelessness” (35-36). Though lush, natural imagery precedes this declaration, what the speaker points to isn’t quite clear. Is the space being referred to in the abstract, or has the space become the abstract? Hazy as it was, there was no way for me to put myself in this moment.

My first impulse wasn’t a kind one: I chalked up the poem, or at least this moment in it, as bad. Yet, I so admire Klink that my reaction felt cheap, and after a couple days, I committed to reading the poem again and again until I better understood my initial coolness. In doing so, I realized that my first impression was rooted in the selfish demand for my place in another’s heartache. I had wanted to see and feel and touch as the speaker did; I wanted my body to fit inside hers. But, of course, it couldn’t, and of course, this isn’t empathy.

 As a result of this interrogation, I have come to challenge our writing culture’s attitudes toward telling. The kneejerk reaction against it comes, I think, from an anxiety about misreading— as in, “If I cannot be sure where to locate a declaration or thought, how can I successfully read a given poem?” I worry, though, that the reader’s desire to interpret correctly (by no means bad in itself) might become a risk for the poet, who then must always extend compassion to the reader over asking for it themselves. As readers, we ought to be aware that when poetry does away with the heavy words so often associated with abstraction and telling (think: “peace,” loneliness,” “hope,” “soul,” etc.), it risks losing heavy ideas and heavy feeling—the complex and porous engagement of a self with the world that makes our genre so compelling.