I consider myself a poet. It’s what I like to write, what I like to read, and how I’ve felt comfortable identifying within the writing world for years.
When I started working at Gotham, I knew that in return for my witty tweets (which you can find here), stellar instagrams (which you can find here), and dazzling wit (which you are reading here), I would be allowed to take a 10-week class and a couple one day intensives.
Immediately I assumed I’d be taking poetry. It was what I knew, what I was comfortable with, what I had been working on for the past few years and what I thought I was good at. Poetry.
Around comes the first day of registration for one days, I would be up on a Saturday, greeting students with a smile, and then off I would go to my class. When I got the list of classes, I saw that nothing on that list was even vaguely similar to poetry. Editing, Grammar, Screenwriting, Documentary Film, Memoir, but no Poetry was to be found. Anxious, lost, and very uncertain, I decided to sign up for a Memoir writing class with Cullen Thomas (check him out here). I had never written a memoir before, and the last personal essay I wrote was my college admissions essay over a year ago, but over the past year or so, I’ve collected some stories (both sad and funny) that I know that one day, eventually, in the future, I’d like to share.
I walk into a classroom in a beautiful building in midtown, and there I am, front and center, in my Gotham t-shirt, armed with pen and paper, and no idea of what’s going to happen. We introduced ourselves, and I was the only person under 20 there, and I was incredibly nervous. All of these people were older than me, would have better stories than me, lived more life than I did, and here I was at 18 years old, in the greatest city in the world, feeling small and unimportant.
Cullen walked in, wearing a flannel shirt and loose jeans, and as he started talking, about his time as a writer, books that he liked, books that he didn’t, and just about his life, I started relaxing more and more. I would even go out as far to say as I had fun. Like, a lot of fun. I wrote in a genre that I didn’t think that I would ever really write in, I was talking to people that I likely never would have met in my small New Jersey town, and I was learning from a wildly accomplished author who I never thought would even want to learn my name.
I left with a notebook full of new ideas and notes, and even an idea for a longer work that I may one day eventually write. I left realizing that there’s a whole world of writing out there, outside of my bubble of poetry.
A few weeks later, Dana and Alex (the best humans in NYC) told me that there was extra space in a TV writing class with Jim Mendrinos (check him out here) that Friday, and a spot was mine if I wanted. Now, I love TV, Seinfeld, Gilmore Girls, Arrested Development, Master of None, I love it, but I had never written any of it. I hadn’t even thought of writing any of it. But, I thought, screw it, I get a free class and maybe one day it’ll come in handy.
I woke up that Friday, instantly regretting that I had agreed to do this. I thought about backing out and just retreating back to the office and answering phones all day. But I knew I couldn’t back down now, so, I went. And it was awesome.
It was about the farthest you could get from poetry, we were immediately writing loglines and learning the history of TV and the insider lingo, and I got home feeling like I could actually do that. I wanted to go home and immediately write a script or a movie or volunteer for the Writers’ Guild or anything, I was so inspired.
And that never would have happened had I chosen to just stay with what I was comfortable with and not take the risk of studying something that I never ever thought that I would want to do. As of now, I just started a Fiction I class with Scott Alexander Hess (check him out here), and Fiction has been one of those things that for years I just said was not for me, I just couldn’t do it. It was what I loved to read, but I’ll never write the next great American novel. But so far, I am absolutely loving it.
So here’s to taking risks, y’all.
-Maddy
The Interns Karamazov 