My Ten Students Finished Their Ten Books—in the Middle of the Pandemic

We don’t talk about witnessing when we talk about writing, but I witnessed my students finish their essay collections in a year-long program.

Throughout 2020, I kept hearing myself joke that it was a good time to be a writer. It isn’t exactly a joke, though; I just felt guilty that my profession, for once, was actually enviable, even lucrative, and in line with the activities that were actually doable during the pandemic. Reading and writing, two activities I’ve created my life around and two activities you can do at home. For once it seemed as if I’d made the right career choice, which does not happen frequently, if ever, for a writer—who is consistently being told that becoming a writer is a hard, irresponsible, and financially fraught choice, which is definitely truth-adjacent.

On January 26, 2020, I began the first day of my Catapult essay generator program, “12 Months to a Full Collection,” which means I met the ten women I’d go on to work with for a year. I’d met a few of them in person previously: at a reading in LA, a writing retreat in the Catskills, and a reading in Chicago. Some had taken online classes with me before, but others were total strangers, though not for long. Our class did not make the move from in-person to online due to the pandemic; it was an online program from the start, available to anyone, living anywhere.

This year, I’ve heard a lot of people saying their brains are mush, that they are unfocused, and that it is okay if you haven’t been reading or writing, et cetera, which of course is true. It almost feels fashionable, now, to humble-brag about how little reading you did, how unproductive you were.

This has not been my experience. In my life I’ve certainly experienced blocks of depression wherein I could not read or write, but during the pandemic, I have not found it challenging to focus on reading, and I have enjoyed writing (so sue me!). In fact, both have become even more pleasurable in the pandemic because the voice saying you should be out living life has pretty much ceased to exist. Recently my ten-year-old stepdaughter turned to me and said, “When I get sick of this world, I just go into this one,” gesturing to her book. Exactly.

Searching and purchasing books from Bookshop and my local bookstore, The Spotty Dog, has kept me somewhat sane. (I’m not the only one; see 40 Bookstores in 40 Weeks.) Hot tip: If you are finding it hard to focus on reading, reread books you’ve read and loved before. Not like books you read a year ago—though that works too—but books you read over a decade ago. The pleasure experienced through rereading books you’re familiar with but of which you can’t recall every plot point or detail is soothing. It’s a good feeling when you don’t know exactly what’s coming, but you know you’ll like it.

Let’s make space for those people too. The people who read and wrote like wild in 2020. The people who, in fact, did stay focused and were productive. Those are the people I am writing this essay about.

To witness means to certify, to attest, to vouch. It means to testify to the truth of something. I, hereby, can testify to the truth of my students writing their books over this past year.

Sheila Heti, who records an episode of her podcast, Podcasts with Raisins, every few years, recently uploaded an episode where she spoke for half an hour in the middle of the night. In the episode, she explains she could not sleep because she’d sent her manuscript to three friends and had received feedback from two. She contemplates why she had sent her manuscript to her friends in the first place, eventually arriving at the conclusion that maybe it isn’t about the feedback, after all, but about the cozy intimacy of sharing yourself with someone.

“That’s what we do. We make art and we show it to each other,” she says.

She then wonders aloud about how athletes have coaches, and how she always thought writers should have coaches. I heard Jen Sincero, author of the Badass books, say the same thing on a podcast—how Olympic athletes train with a coach even when they reach the Olympics. So why don’t other industries have this? She was talking about investing in yourself.

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Since January 2020, my class has met every Sunday afternoon (aside from summer break) for three hours.

It’s so funny to me when tone-deaf influencers post about being grateful for Covid-19. I am not grateful for Covid-19, but I am in awe of the domino effect it had on the trajectory of my class. I’d been planning on being in Paris and Israel during the teaching of this class. I would have been commuting back and forth by Amtrak to my other classes in New York City. Instead, this class was the constant, the punctuation of the pandemic. I’d imagined reading their printed-out manuscripts on planes and trains, typing feedback letters at airport bars. It would be chaotic, but it would work out. It always did, because it had to, even when I was teaching from my hotel room in Beirut at midnight because of the time change, or a bed in Vermont on a birthday trip with my mom. In classes I’ve taught before Covid-19, it was only natural that students wouldn’t show up because it was their birthday weekend, or Bruce Springsteen was playing and they couldn’t miss it, or they were on a work trip out of town. Flaubert’s quote, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” definitely applied to us in 2020.

These ten essay collections: I know their DNA. I have seen some go from three pages to 150. I have witnessed these writers render epiphanies, add peripheral narratives, figure out what they really (no, really) want their books to say. I have watched titles change numerous times, themes develop, the page count go up, up, down, and back up. Over summer break, I witnessed some students write ten thousand new words. I have witnessed friendships bloom, blossom, and all of the other flower metaphors. I have witnessed the kindness they have shown each other: snail-mailing cookies over the holidays; sending pens, journals, and flowers when a student lost a family member; being there for each other not only in writing but in life.

There isn’t much posturing in good nonfiction writing, which is what I like about it. There isn’t much posturing with people who are drawn to writing nonfiction, either, so honesty was a key component in the class.

We were honest to one another about the shitty things that happened over the year: Cats, fathers-in-law, grandmothers, and cousins died over the course of the class. Two students contracted Covid-19. There have been migraines and menstrual cramps, food poisoning, writing residencies, and family visits. Flights from New Jersey to Paris and back. So many rejections. My students were published in literary journals big and small, and they got to the third round of contests, only to finally be rejected. I personally had an agent breakup, then a book deal, though that sentence makes it sound much simpler than it actually was. And then, more happily, I was talked into getting a puppy by my stepdaughter and wrote about it for The New York Times. We were introduced to each other’s kittens, dogs, kids, and partners.

What is a year? It is hard to know how we, collectively and singularly, will describe the year 2020 in twenty years. There’s the obvious pandemic; millions of lives lost. The Black Lives Matter movement and anticipation of our now president.

But there’s also the less obvious, the more personal, the quiet writing of books. I will look back on the year with admiration for these ten women who committed to themselves, to their process, and honored their writing.

There isn’t much posturing in good nonfiction writing.

We don’t talk about witnessing when we talk about writing. I haven’t exactly had witnesses for writing my books, and sometimes what lives rent-free in my head is this time my mom said to me, about one of my books: “When did you write this?” No one had seen me do it, so had I really done it?

Chelsea Martin says, of Caca Dolce, “I can remember approximately one hour of writing it.” I don’t remember writing my books either.

But I do remember when my students wrote their books. I remember when pieces fell into place, whether it was a subtitle, a theme, or a structural decision. I remember the way their faces looked, or their emails sounded when they’d had an epiphany. Even if I recounted these conversations to you here, they wouldn’t mean to you what they meant to me, to us, those of us who spent the year with our heads in these books.

When you get married, you need a witness. You need two witnesses when you write your will, and you need a witness when you sign a mortgage. In Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, you need a witness for an absentee ballot. In Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Maryland, and South Carolina, you need a witness for a divorce decree. The woman checking me in at the Women’s Health Center last week had to sign as a witness for my appointment.

We don’t talk about witnessing when we talk about writing.

What about when you write a book?

“More than many friends, this book witnessed me become who I am,” Aaron Gilbreath writes in “How to Let Go of a Book You’ve Been Writing for Twenty Years.” Aside from the editors who have eventually purchased my books, I have not had a witness for the writing process. Plus, those editors swoop in when the draft, arguably the hardest part, is done. They have not witnessed the shitty first drafts (okay, the shittier first drafts), the hurdles, the generative months, or the book printed out and hung up around my apartment.

My husband witnesses me wake up early and go to my desk, of course, and he witnesses the all-day closed door, but witnessing the actual process? Until this program, I’ve never seen anything like it. The book is your witness.

Where will their essay collections end up living? Will I receive an email in a year because one of them won a contest, or got an acceptance in her favorite literary journal, or has an event lined up with an author she’s always admired? Sometimes I get emails from past students that say, hey, look at this nice rejection from my favorite agent. Sure, it’s a rejection, but it’s still illuminating. In some years, will a past student ask me for a blurb because she is finally getting her book published? God, I hope so.

I’m not clairvoyant, so I don’t know. What I do know: So very many people want to be writers. It is shocking, actually. As Sari Botton told our class during a class visit, in book writing, there are more applicants than there are slots. This is a hard and painful truth.

These ten women didn’t just talk about wanting to write a book; they did it. It was magic, it was writing; it was the magic of writing. It was showing up again and again, when you don’t want to show up, but you do it anyway. They made art and showed it to each other. And I’m honored, because I got to witness it.

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If you’re interested in reading some of the work generated in Chloe’s class, find excerpts from our recent 12-Month Essay Collection Generator graduates below:

• Elle Brooks

• Allyson Darling

• Stephanie Dinkmeyer

• Haley Hamilton

• Amanda McNeil

• Courtney Kocak

• Diana Ostrom

• Elizabeth Teets

• Raena Zupan

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Chloe Caldwell is teaching a second year-long essay generator that begins later this summer. You can find out more information and sign up here.