read a short story several years ago, and upon finishing it, looked up the writer and followed her on Twitter. “We All Know About Margo” is tightly written, full of vivid descriptions, and leaves as much unsaid as said. It showcases a skilled writer at work, and makes for a memorable read. The short story earned nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and a place in the Wigleaf Top 50 list for short fiction in 2019.

Please give a warm welcome to Dr. Megan Pillow: writer, editor, scholar, teacher, author, and our guest this month! While reading about Margo in 2018, I could not have anticipated that I would come to know the piece’s writer, Meg, one-to-one after I was selected to work with her and a small cohort during a year-long intensive writing workshop, called Craft Year. I’m looking forward to sharing with our WOW! readers some of Meg’s writing philosophies, and to discuss her debut book, Do The Work, co-authored with The New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Roxane Gay.

Meg is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. She is project manager for Dr. Gay, and co-edits The Audacity. Meg’s work has appeared in Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Catapult, Brevity, The Believer, TriQuarterly, Guernica, and Gay Magazine, among others. Her stories have been featured in the Wigleaf Top 50, an essay was honored as notable in The Best American Essays 2019, another story received a distinguished honor in The Best American Short Stories 2020, and one was featured in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. Meg received fellowships from Pen Parentis and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and she completed a residency with the Ragdale Foundation. She is represented by Alyssa Jennette with the literary agency, Stonesong, and lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her two children.

 

 

WOW: Welcome, Meg! Thanks for joining us!

Meg: Thanks so much for the invitation!

WOW: You have a lot of exciting irons in the fire, one of the biggest being your soon-to-be-released debut book in just a few weeks! We’ll get to that, but let’s start off with your Craft Year program, which holds special meaning for me. You describe Craft Year as “a free, year-long, intensive online writing workshop for people without MFAs.” What made you want to launch this free program, such a generous offering of your time and knowledge? What do you hope writers without MFAs will take away from the experience?

Meg: I’ve been lucky enough to be the recipient of a lot of kindnesses from established writers. My long-time writing mentor, Frank X Walker, for example, has been supportive of my writing since he was my first creative writing teacher when I was sixteen, and Roxane Gay, who I obviously work for now, has been encouraging me since I met her when I was a graduate student in 2018. When you see how generous some established writers are, you realize that what makes the writing community work are people who aren’t transactional—it’s folks who share their time without expecting repayment, because they have been the recipient of kindnesses too and who simply want you to pass the kindness you receive on to an emerging writer when you have the chance. I have received so much from other writers. I wanted to do my best to make sure I’m passing it on.

For the writers in this first year of Craft Year, I hope you’ll see this as a space where you learn a bit more about craft, gain some workshop experience, and establish a community, and I hope you’ll take what you’ve learned and build on it in other spaces. Writing is lifelong, so I hope you’ll see the program as one of many that helps you grow a bit more as a writer.

WOW: I was thrilled when I received your email last spring, letting me know I was selected to join you for the inaugural 2023-2024 Craft Year cohort. You published a post on your blog, mentioning that you received nearly 250 applications for 10 spots. I learned about the open application call from your post on Twitter/X, but did you also promote it elsewhere? What surprised you about this strong response? What did it tell you about writers’ interests in joining a program like this?

Meg: I only promoted it on social media, and I was a little surprised by the strong response. I thought I’d get a few dozen applications, because I know there are lots of program opportunities out there for writers, and I figured working with me might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But I think much of the response was driven by the fact that writers are eager for community spaces, especially those that are free, and there are so few of those available. I’ve spent much of my time in the past year thinking about how to better cultivate those spaces, and I have a few ideas, but it’s a huge challenge. So many elite writing spaces, from fellowships to residencies to workshops, either require capital or are funded by organizations and individuals whose values and beliefs don’t always align with our own. I think a lot more writers would like communal spaces where they can interact with and learn from established writers without money being such a barrier or such an ethical quandary. And that says nothing about the challenges we face with too many writing environments still being homogenous, and sometimes homogenizing, spaces.

WOW: Our cohort has spent months learning from you, through craft discussions, close readings of well-known fiction and nonfiction pieces, and our own workshop critiques. Can you share what you may have learned from us, in return? Has anything surprised you?

Meg: One of the reasons I still teach when I can is because I always learn something from my students. And you all are such a brilliant group—not just book smart, although that’s patently obvious, but also so astute about the state of the world and so emotionally intelligent, particularly with the ways in which you grapple with your own emotions and the emotions of your characters on the page.

What I’m most impressed by is how quickly you all have taken to generative critique. I mean, I tried to model some approaches, but all of you took that model and made it your own, often coming up with questions, critiques, and insights that are both compassionate and insightful before I even stepped in to offer feedback. Workshop has too often functioned as a space where people tear each other down, and you all have easily made it a space where people’s work is treated with rigor but also respect. I admire that so much, because I rarely experienced that in environments where my own work was being workshopped. I love seeing writers tear down antiquated and harmful practices in our artistic field and build new ones that reinforce the reality that writers are people, and that critique can and should treat them and their work with dignity.

WOW: I agree, wholeheartedly, that irresponsible workshop critiques can go sideways fast and devastate a writer. I’m grateful my experience in Craft Year has been so supportive. I’ll also take a moment here to plug our own fantastic team at WOW! I’ve taken several WOW! Workshops through the years, and each has been a wonderful experience where my writing has improved and I’ve maintained strong friendships long after the class has ended.

What expectations did you start out with when Craft Year began, and—now that we’re more than halfway through it—what might you change or enhance for a follow-up program?

Meg: Honestly, I tried not to start out with expectations, because I’ve learned that in many cases, having expectations of a group of people is a recipe for disaster. I try to have benchmarks and goals to work toward instead. But my biggest goals were to try to establish community, to give everyone a chance to share their work and get feedback, and to have consistent meetings. I think we’ve done well at establishing community and giving folks a chance to share their work, although we still have a few months left, and I think we can still cultivate more space for that. I think consistent meetings have been trickier because of my own family obligations and because we have a group from all over the world in varied time zones. I’ll definitely establish a set time for meetings beforehand the next time I do this, so that folks who apply will know whether it will work with their schedule. And I’m hoping to have more of a presence on Discord next time, too.

WOW: I thought it might be fun to invite our readers into the Craft Year classroom, as proverbial flies on the wall. One of your teaching philosophies is that in order for our workshop critiques to be helpful to one another, the feedback we give needs to be actionable. Otherwise, it’s just a preference. Can you expand on that?

Meg: We are all readers, and we have characters, plots, language, and stylistic features we prefer to see on the page. We often gravitate toward those features in what we read and in our own work. And that is totally fine as personal craft and reading guide, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something that other people need to implement in their own work. One of the things I ask writers to think about when they’re reading someone else’s work is: “What is the goal of this piece?” Not, “What do I think the piece should do?” but “What is it doing, and what is the writer trying to accomplish?”

Your first goal as a reader is to figure that out. Your second is to ask yourself realistically whether you can help the writer reach that goal without changing the work to make it more like your own. Because the point of workshop and feedback isn’t to shape a piece into something that’s more like what you would write or what you like to read. The point is to help the writer achieve their own goals.

We have to be able to separate our preferences from what is best for someone else’s work. And we have to be specific with our feedback—that’s what I mean by actionable. You can’t tell someone, “I don’t think this works” without telling them why. For critique to be effective, it has to say: “I think this is what you’re trying to do, but I don’t think it’s working yet, and here’s what you might try instead.” If critique isn’t seeing the vision and aim of the work and offering specific feedback to help it get there, it’s a good sign that it’s not effective.

WOW: Such great points, Meg. Our tendency is to want to color the world according to our own views. You also encourage us to advocate for our decisions; to be prepared to back up our choices for why we wrote and edited a piece of work, or even just a passage, the way we did. Why is this self-advocacy important? How does it protect our work? How does it help us balance the editing process?

Meg: Self-advocacy is something I was never taught as a writer, and it took me years to understand how important it is. So many of the craft guidelines and rules we’re taught about what makes good writing were developed by and for white male writers (even though we well know that important, innovative work has been created by writers outside of those categories for as long as writing has existed).

I’ve seen so many writers who are not white and male get bullied into removing the heart from their work because it doesn’t adhere to writing standards stamped with the approval of a singular, historically powerful demographic of people. And that shouldn’t be happening. Writers, whatever their background and perspective, have always had something meaningful to add to the writing landscape that makes it a bigger, more welcoming place for all of us, and people should be encouraged to understand and cultivate what makes their style or perspective or narrative unique. That doesn’t mean we throw away all the lessons from the white male writers. It simply means we disrupt their hold on literary power: we learn their lessons, we evaluate their efficacy and usefulness, and we apply the ones we wish to apply to our work and discard the others. But in order to do that, we have to invigorate our own sources of knowledge and power, and understand why we are making the decisions we’re making on the page.

I ask writers to think carefully about why they’ve made the choices they have, in part to learn to defend their decisions and in part so they can better understand the intimacies and patterns of their own writing practice. If you know why you’re making the decisions you are, over time it becomes easier to see which decisions are serving your work well and which ones are not. And if you’re learning that you shouldn’t simply attempt to fit your work like a puzzle piece into the larger framework of the history of literature, but that your job is to help explode that framework, to expand it, it helps you become more thoughtful, discriminating, and compassionate—not only with your work, but with the work of others, especially those who are taking risks.

WOW: On the flip side, can you share when it might sometimes be appropriate for a writer to rethink or change a piece of writing, based on collective workshop feedback?

Meg: I think when a trusted writer or group of writers, folks who understand your vision, tell you something isn’t working and may not work, it’s a good idea to at least entertain their advice. I also think when you’re struggling with something and feel like you’re hitting a wall, it’s a good idea to step away and to seriously consider new perspectives that might lead you in a different direction. The great thing about writing is you can always save and return to the old draft—just copy the whole piece into a new document and play around with it to see if it’s fruitful, and if not? You can always go back.

I also think it’s really important to listen if someone says that something in your work is feeding a harmful stereotype or demeaning a group of people. We have to come to terms with the fact that no matter our intentions, sometimes we make mistakes in our work, just as in our lives, and we hurt people. That’s not a sign that we’re evil or malicious. It means we’re human. And one of the best things we can do as writers is understand critique as a form of love: listen to legitimate, evidence-based critique, to understand the work and thought that someone put in to bring that to us, and to consider the impact of our work, not just the intent.

There is no shame in saying you were wrong, to apologize, and to rethink something. We need to be more receptive to, and understanding of, those moments—both when we’re the person doing the calling in and when we’re being called in. It’s pretty embarrassing, however, to watch grown adults dig in their heels and deny it when they’re presented with evidence that they’ve done something wrong. It’s especially important in artistic fields that we learn how to meet these moments with grace and humility because growth in our fields only comes from taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from them.

WOW: Taking it outside a workshop setting, how might writers balance self-advocacy if an editor asks them to change a piece? Each writer’s goal is publication, after all, so if we stand our ground with an editor, do we risk our chance at publication? What does a happy medium look like to you?

Meg: It’s tricky when you’re standing your ground with an editor or publication. It’s also usually not realistic to refuse any changes. Chances are if you do, you’re going to miss out on a publication opportunity. A happy medium would be evaluating an editor’s feedback, prioritizing which changes you feel the most strongly about, and making sure your reason for asking to hold your ground is sound. Have an open conversation with an editor that respects their expertise, while also asking for a compromise in a few places and explaining why you feel strongly about those changes. In many cases, editors will respect that and will work with you. If they don’t, you should evaluate whether or not that publication is actually a good fit for you if its editing practices are so firmly dictatorial.

Publication is often our goal, but we have to balance that desire with our integrity as writers and also understand we will not win every battle. But we should also begin to set goals beyond publication alone. We should set goals to write and publish work that aligns with our principles, and to be one more person pushing editing practices in traditional publishing markets more towards functioning as conversations between people with different kinds of expertise and less as hierarchies where one person calls all the shots.

WOW: You recently spoke to our class about writing from catharsis vs. writing from craft. I think our readers would benefit from your take on this. Can you share what you mean?

Meg: In short, I think writers often feel like they have to do one or the other: write from catharsis or write from craft. But I really think you can and should do both, and we should remove our assumptions about rigor from the craft category alone. You can write something that adheres to all craft guidelines and it can be shallow as hell, and you can write something purely from catharsis that is a masterpiece of craft. You can start from catharsis to produce your draft, then move to a more craft-focused revision, or you can do the reverse.

When we tell ourselves that one of these is more valuable than the other, however, we’re again falling prey to stereotypes about what kind of writing is most important. It places our writing in a hierarchy, and I think that’s a narrow-minded and unproductive way of thinking about our work.

WOW: You also encourage us, continually, to “be more generous on the page.” What do you mean by that, and how can writers put it into practice? Does this mean something different for fiction writers, vs. nonfiction?

Meg: I tend to think of generosity on the page twofold: both more generous with ourselves and generous with the critique we offer others, which I’ve already spoken about. Too many people approach writing with the expectation that they need to produce a Great Work of Art. Not enough people approach their work with a desire to share something meaningful, or accurate, or spellbinding, or simply really good fun. But it is in those moments of being true to ourselves and our impulses that we have the opportunity to produce something deeply moving and inspiring to others. I think generosity means really believing that your work, whatever it is, has value, that you have something to say. I also think that we would be better served thinking more about the process of our work, than the final product.

I often think of writing as problem solving: I’m posing a problem for myself, a what if, and attempting to solve it. When I’m being generous, I remember that the way I’m solving that problem might be meaningful to someone other than myself, and that sharing that work is also a way of passing along what I’ve learned from other people. We have to believe in the urgency and value of our own work—not that it necessarily will change the world all on its own, but that it will reach someone, change someone, make them feel like they have something worth sharing, too.

WOW: A great practice to internalize: to be generous to ourselves in the writing process, as well as to our readers. Let’s turn now to your work with Dr. Gay. How did you uncover the opportunity to become her project manager? You co-edit The Audacity, a newsletter I read beginning to end every time it hits my inbox. Each is packed with current events. I chuckle at some links (pop culture) but find many tragic, where I share the outrage. Given the breadth of current events, how long does each newsletter take to pull together? How does the team decide what to research and include?

Meg: My job is thanks to Dr. Gay’s generosity. I met her in 2018 when she agreed to speak to the Women’s Literature class I was teaching while I was completing my Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky. After the class, we stayed in touch. She shared some of my writing on Twitter, and eventually she asked me to write an essay for her former magazine, Gay Magazine. After that, I kept applying to positions she had available, and I kept getting rejected, but I received encouraging messages from her with each application. Finally, I applied to co-edit The Audacity a few months after I completed my Ph.D., and she offered me the job. It was freelance work at first, but after about a year, she asked me to join her full-time as project manager.

As for the newsletter, we are a pretty small team. I do most of the editing for the Emerging Writer Series, and I contribute to some of the writing for the book club. Dr. Gay and her personal assistant, Kaitlyn, handle most of the gathering of links for her Roundup, although I send her some to consider. Dr. Gay reads widely, so I know much of what she includes comes from her own reading, but also from friends and colleagues who share things with her that she might find of interest. I know the Roundup is in part a peek at what she’s regularly reading, and in part a gathering of disparate things she thinks her subscribers will find interesting. I read it every week because I know she’s going to share something that I’ve likely missed.

WOW: Staying with Dr. Gay, you recently co-authored a book with her: Do The Work: A Guide To Understanding Power and Creating Change. It will be published in just a few weeks, on June 18, by Leaping Hare Press. I love this summary: “Challenge your biases and broaden your understanding of power and how we wield it.” Why is this book the right message for society, right now?

Meg: I’ve mentioned this in other places, including on social media, but we’re constantly talking these days about culture and justice and politics. Too frequently, those discussions don’t utilize any kind of analysis of power. I think that’s in part because we’re living in a world in crisis, and we’re constantly dysregulated and under stress because of those crises, so it makes productive conversation, particularly about how to best identify and show up for the people who are most vulnerable, really difficult. But I also think in part it is because collectively, we don’t have either the tools or the vocabulary to talk about power effectively. We’re taught to respect and defer to narrow categories of power, but only rarely are we taught to analyze it, challenge it, or reframe it.

We’re hoping this book will be one tool that can help facilitate that. I’m borrowing a little from what I’ve written elsewhere about this book, but our goal is to give readers a framework for better understanding power and how it shapes our lives and communities. We wrote this first for readers who are looking to improve their knowledge and understanding of power dynamics and their relationship with social justice issues. We also wrote it for people who are interested in becoming involved with local organizing efforts in their community, but who aren’t sure where to start. So many of us have good intentions when we enter organizing spaces, but success in those spaces requires a certain level of self-awareness, a shared social justice framework, and a community mindset rather than one that’s hyper-individualized.

I also want to stress that there are a lot of great books out there that talk about organizing and power. We mention some of them in our bibliography and resource section. We hope our book will be a contribution to that body of literature, and we hope it will also be one that’s an approachable resource for people who may be new to thinking about power and to organizing, especially the individual work that you have to do before you’re ready to work effectively with other people.

WOW: Do The Work: a simple, yet powerful title. Why was it chosen?

Meg: I honestly don’t know! The title was chosen before I was invited to be part of the project. But my best guess is because “do the work” is common communal lingo right now, a phrase that lots of folks are familiar with and which has meaning that’s significant both to activism and the work of improving self-awareness. Whoever chose it probably felt like it would resonate with lots of readers.

WOW: How did you and Dr. Gay determine what research to include? How did you divide the research and writing, as co-authors?

Meg: For this project, Dr. Gay gave me a rough outline of where she thought it might go, and I took that outline and fleshed it out with ideas and research. I returned it to her, and she fleshed it out with more ideas and research. She asked me to tackle the first rough draft using the outline, and then she did a heavy revision of that draft. Once we sent it to the publisher, we of course did several more rounds of revision. It was a relatively streamlined process, to be honest, but I think that’s because Dr. Gay and I have worked together for a few years now, so we have some solid workflow practices that rely on trust and a lot of give and take.

WOW: What do you want readers to take away?

Meg: I hope they’ll have a better vocabulary for talking about power. I hope they’ll be more aware of their own sources of power and of how power works at societal, institutional, and governmental levels. And I hope they’ll have a better idea of some tactics they can use individually and collectively to disrupt power, so that it can better benefit the many instead of the few.

WOW: You’re represented by Alyssa Jennette with the literary agency, Stonesong, and I know you’re working on a fiction manuscript. Can you share with our readers what it’s about? Are you on submission, and if so, how’s that going?

Meg: I’d love to! I’m working on a mosaic novel, a term I borrowed from Sequoia Nagamatsu’s beautiful novel How High We Go In The Dark, one of my favorite fiction reads of recent years.

My novel is comprised of a series of related stories, all set in the same world with similar characters. The anchor story is “Long Live The Girl Detective”—a story I published a couple of years ago in Electric Lit. The story was born out of a comic that was meant to celebrate Nancy Drew’s 90th anniversary and supposedly killed off Nancy Drew and had the Hardy Boys solve her murder. It was a premise I hated, so I wrote a story where a dead Girl Detective solves her own murder. The novel moves beyond that original premise, delving more into Nancy’s relationship with her children and her father, the secrets behind her mother’s life and death, and the complications and connections she navigates with other people, mainly women, as she tries to help them solve their problems and mysteries while managing her own life. I also try to tackle a bit more about the tension between Nancy as a character and Nancy as a cultural totem and legend, and how that informs so much of her life in the book.

It’s in part an homage to Nancy Drew, who I was a massive fan of as a kid, and an homage to the work of people like Kelly Link, Pauline Hopkins, Carmen Machado, and Octavia Butler, all of whom have opened my mind to what fiction is capable of. I’m currently working on my second manuscript revision, based on my agent’s feedback. I hope to have it back to her in the next couple of months. So I’m not on submission yet, but I hope to be out there soon.

WOW: Love your book’s premise, Meg! Your writing has been included in The Best American Essays 2019, The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022, the Wigleaf Top 50, and in some of the finest literary journals. As we prepare to wrap, I’d love to hear about your first publication, as those are always memorable. Tell us about it, and please share a link if you have it!

Meg: My first publication was so long ago! I believe it was a piece in my local indie magazine, the Louisville Eccentric Observer (we call it the LEO), somewhere around 2000 or 2001. I won their fiction contest with a very overwrought story about Italy and longing and art and lost love. I had just read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and was overwhelmed with fantasies of tortured romantic love. My piece is unfortunately—or perhaps very fortunately!—not online, only available in print. In retrospect, it wasn’t very good, but it was very passionate and earnest, and the language was lovely. I remember getting a lot of compliments about that. I very much appreciated that the staff believed in the piece, and I’m glad I published it because I like seeing my evolution as a writer. I like that the evidence of it is out there. And it will always mean something to me that someone believed in my early work.

WOW: You write essays, you write fiction, you write flash. Even reportage, and commentary. Which is your favorite, and why? Each is challenging, but which is most challenging for you, and why?

Meg: I’m honestly not sure I have a favorite—I love writing in all of these genres. But as for challenging, I think they are all really damn difficult in their own ways. The most challenging, for me, is probably personal essays. It is very difficult to be vulnerable enough to do a personal essay really well and to offer a perspective on an experience that’s both deeply individualized but also in some way universal. It’s even more difficult to be willing to use the essay to identify and recount your own flaws as clearly as you can identify, and recount the flaws of other people on the page. That’s something I think the most powerful personal essays and memoirs do, and I’m still working on it. I think I’m still likely to give myself too much grace and to be too hard on other people. But I’m going to keep trying.

 

 

My thanks to Dr. Megan Pillow for chatting with us today—and, for personally supporting me this past year through Craft Year. Her generous classroom guidance, along with the time she has given me in our one-to-one Office Hours, always renews my energy and confidence, sparking insights I can immediately apply to my writing.

Despite Twitter’s implosion and strange morph into a single letter, Meg still drops in from time to time on X. You can also find her on Instagram and at her website.

Be sure to get your copy of Do The Work, available for pre-order now! Until next time ...

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Ann Kathryn Kelly writes from New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals. https://annkkelly.com/.