Bad Writing with Benjamin Schaefer
Another essay in part about Aurelie
Dear A30 team, I’m writing here with another essay I ran across that I think will interest friends and fans of the Aurelie 30, since it features her significantly. It’s by Benjamin Schaefer, “We Need to Talk About Bad Writing,” recently published at Electric Literature. You can read the first section of it below, and can follow this link (also at the end) to read the whole thing: https://electricliterature.com/we-need-to-talk-about-bad-writing/
—Ander
In the weeks following her death, I struggled to articulate exactly what Aurelie had meant to me. She was not my friend, though our relationship was friendly. She was not my mother, though she had behaved maternally toward me. When I called my friend Cat Powell to tell her about Aurelie’s passing, she used the term “art parent” to describe the role mentors play in the lives of young writers. That moniker was the most accurate description I’d heard, but even it felt like it failed to fully convey the impact Aurelie had had on my life, especially in my conversations with people who were not artists, and I grew increasingly frustrated by my inability to communicate the exact nature of our relationship. This, I’ve learned, is perhaps the most maddening aspect of grief—the persistent feeling that no one else understands what we have lost because the loss is particular to us. —Benjamin Schaefer
WE NEED TO TALK
ABOUT BAD WRITING
Three years ago I broke my brain. Or, I should say, my brain was broken by grief. That summer my graduate mentor, the writer Aurelie Sheehan, died after a swift and truncated battle with terminal brain cancer. I first learned of Aurelie’s illness in June of 2023, but as I understand it, she received her diagnosis the previous December, and by August she was dead.
The death of a writing mentor is a specific kind of loss. In ways both quantifiable and unquantifiable, Aurelie had perhaps the most significant impact on my development as a writer. She was the only professor I studied under during all four semesters of my time in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, and she had served as my thesis advisor. In the seven years since I graduated, she had written me countless letters of recommendation for fellowships and grants and teaching applications. But more than any of this, my relationship with Aurelie was deeply personal, characterized by love and mutual respect for each other as people and as artists.
In the weeks following her death, I struggled to articulate exactly what Aurelie had meant to me. She was not my friend, though our relationship was friendly. She was not my mother, though she had behaved maternally toward me. When I called my friend Cat Powell to tell her about Aurelie’s passing, she used the term “art parent” to describe the role mentors play in the lives of young writers. That moniker was the most accurate description I’d heard, but even it felt like it failed to fully convey the impact Aurelie had had on my life, especially in my conversations with people who were not artists, and I grew increasingly frustrated by my inability to communicate the exact nature of our relationship. This, I’ve learned, is perhaps the most maddening aspect of grief—the persistent feeling that no one else understands what we have lost because the loss is particular to us.
In the rooms of twelve-step recovery, I often talk about the fruitlessness of comparative suffering. I remind people that emotional pain functions in the body exactly like physical pain does. It lights up all the same pain centers in our brains. And because we carry our emotional pain in our bodies, because both emotional pain and physical pain are physiological experiences, our own pain will always be more real to us than the pain of other people. We may empathize with others, but empathy is an act of imagination: it requires us to imagine another person’s experience and call upon similar experiences we have had in order to relate to them. For this reason, other people’s pain is always an abstraction. It is not visceral, which is to say embodied, in the way our own pain is. And though it’s true that perspective can be helpful when discerning the difference in magnitude between our losses and those of other people, comparing our pain to theirs—and by extension our right to feel our pain—is not a productive undertaking. Everybody loses at that game.
But as frustrated as I was by the feeling that no one understood what Aurelie’s death meant to me, my frustration was compounded by the fact that my grief over her death felt inconvenient.
The summer Aurelie died, I was in the middle of what I hoped would be the final revision of a novel I had spent five years writing. With the exception of my sobriety, I had never pursued anything with the same degree of devotion as I had that novel. For eleven months of each of those years, I had written for at least two hours a day on that book. Some months, I wrote for eight to ten hours a day. I’d written the novel three times from scratch, beginning to end. And even during the months I took off between drafts, I was still conducting research for the project. I read thousands of pages of research in service of that book. And after five years, I was ready to be done. I was so close to being done with it.
And then Aurelie died.
One afternoon shortly after her death, I got on my yoga mat and pushed back into downward dog position, and at the edge of my peripheral vision, I literally saw my grief, a presence hovering at the corner of my mat, waiting for me to let it in.
“I see you there,” I said to the room. “I promise I’ll get to you when I can.”
But, I didn’t say. Not yet.
First, I had a novel to finish. I told myself I would grieve once I finished it.
Looking back, I think I convinced myself that maybe I could out-busy my grief. At the very least, I hoped to assign my grief a timetable that would be more convenient for me.
Needless to say, this did not go well.
Read Benjamin Schaefer’s full essay “We Need to Talk About Bad Writing” at Electric Literature: https://electricliterature.com/we-need-to-talk-about-bad-writing/
Grateful to be reminded to read this excellent essay by Ben.