Poetica Magazine

It was 2001 and I was in my first writing workshop ever.  I turned in my first piece, called Poker Party, gave copies to the whole class, read it out loud and received my critiques, which were good.  I had finally lived through the process that I had always been afraid of:  sharing my work and having other people comment on it. 

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We only had three pieces due for the class because there were twenty students and all of our pieces had to be workshopped.  This took a lot of class time.  In the time period between my due dates I took Poker Party, originally three pages long, and expanded it, and expanded it, until it took over my life.  I added all the elements that we were discussing in class:  dialogue and action and description and backstory, and anything else I could think of, until it was a behemoth of a story. 

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To me, Poker Party embodied all of my young life in Skokie.  In it, my parents and uncles and aunts - all Holocaust Survivors - were having a poker party at our house and my six sisters and I were hiding in the basement watching TV trying not to be noticed by them.  We didn't want to be interrogated about our favorite subjects in school and we didn't want to be forced to kiss the whole group of them goodnight.  There wasn't really a plot or an arc of a narrative in the story - it was like a photograph of my young life, a still life.  Yet I continued working on it.

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One day a bunch of students, including me, were tagging along with our professor after class as she rushed back to her office and I had her ear for a moment.  I told her of my present pressing torment about Poker Party, whatever the problem was.  What should I do?  How should I solve the dilemma I was in?  How could I make the story better?  Would it ever be published?

For that she stopped walking.

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She looked at me and she said, "What do you think, Linda?  That you only have this one piece inside of you?  That there's only Poker Party?"

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And I froze because, of course, I kind of did think that.  So I said, "Um..."

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She said, "Wrong.  This is just the first piece you've written.  Now move on."

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And she whirled and continued walking, some other student now talking to her.

I put Poker Party away and wrote many better stories.  Eventually, when I was putting together my manuscript about Skokie and growing up with my Holocaust survivor relatives - the work that Poker Party would have fit in - I put it in and then took it out.  Turns out that as some of my first writing it was also some of my weakest and most self-conscious.  I couldn't use it.

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And so, when I find myself getting caught up in something, committed to some idea that just isn't working out anymore, I think of my professor's words - do I think this is the only piece I have inside of me?  Is this my only Poker Party?  The answer is always no.  

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Linda Pressman, Blog Editor