Another twenty pages. Another week of reading. Another week of feedback. 

Two pages, single spaced. Summarize, check. Analyze, check. Discuss the point of view, check. What’s the story about? Why is it being told? How close are we to the narrator? Check, check, and check. 

Constructive criticism: Were you confused? Maybe. Did you want anything expanded? Maybe. Was the conclusion satisfying? Maybe?

Done. 

Another twenty pages. More reading, more feedback. 

Thing not to say: 

            “You submitted this two days before, how do you expect me to give feedback?”

            “You haven’t read any of my submissions, why should I read yours?”

            “Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. Do you even care?”

Another twenty pages. Reading. Feedback.  

A flurry of tenses. Past melts to present. Are we now, or are we then? Back to past. Back to present. Present, past—does it matter anymore?

DO YOU EVEN CARE?! I clutch the pages. Shake them, rattle their prose. Grit my teeth and wreck their worlds. Periods and commas fly like dust and land among the rubble of sentences, yet still somehow make more sense than the alien vistas that were presented to me. 

Another twenty pages. 

A miasma of perspectives. I am God—no, I am me. We are we. Omniscience means nothing. This is my story, your story, our story. Whose story? Paragraphs bleed and bleed, but is it you? Is it I? 

Another. Another. Another. 

Who are these workshops for? 

Are they for you? Will you fix the ruins I have wrought? Does any of this matter? 

Is this workshop for me? Will I give you ruins, and you give me bricks? 

Or is it even about the ruins? Are we workshopping our writing, or are we workshopping ourselves? 

-JRL