THE GREAT CROSSOVER by Susan Wingate

THE GREAT CROSSOVER: How Nonfiction Inspires Fiction And Vice Versa by Susan Wingate

In 2020, during Covid, I like most everyone, got a little stir crazy. With my husband, Bob unable to care for himself, social interaction became nonexistent for us. I wasn’t allowing friends or family to come to visit for fear Bob would get Covid. We were in lockdown—literally and figuratively. We weren’t going anywhere and, instead, were having everything shipped to our home.

By May 2020, I was thinking about returning to school. Bob could still talk a little back then. After watching tons of the legal mumbo-jumbo of 2020, I said to Bob, something to the effect of, “I should have gone to law school.” To which, he responded, “Why don’t you?”

However, after searching several online law programs at several universities and finding no online juris doctoral programs and only master level degrees in law, I decided to go for my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Ultimately, I chose Lindenwood University’s fully online program. At the time, Lindenwood’s online writing program was ranked second to Harvard’s fully online writing program. The cost per tuition hour at Lindenwood was far less expensive than Harvard’s so, the decision was easy. Plus, I thought the education would translate well to academia if I decided to teach at the college or university level.

This is how the program works: each 16-week semester includes two 8-week terms. My very first term started late August 2020 and was so easy that I thought, “Oh, I’m going to breeze through this!” I sort of wondered about Harvard’s program. Like, “I can’t believe Harvard is this easy.” I also thought, “Well, maybe, because I have so many years of writing under my belt, the MFA will go super smooth. Easy peasy.” Please, forgive the hubris of my thinking.

For the second term of that very first semester, I took three classes. What an error in judgment. By the second term, I was in panic mode and extremely, let’s say, disquieted.

Apparently, the very first term of study, which your counselor selects for you, works as a sort of dipping-your-toe-in-the-water kind of first eight weeks. Because the second term was so difficult—I didn’t think I would pass any of the classes and I started to freak out. I did pass. In fact, I passed all three with 4.0s but I was shaken to the core. What had I gotten myself into. I still had to oversee our business in town, to take care of a house and yard, to care for Bob. I thought about bailing out.

Instead, for the next year-and-a-half, I took only two classes during the regular school season and only one during summer session. I wanted to hurry-up graduation but decided it best to slow down my aspirations. I graduated in August 2022, but, had I been able to handle three classes each term, I could have graduated within a year instead of two years. I didn’t realize the extent of reading there would be for the program.

Between two classes it isn’t unusual that instructors will assign two and three novels to read. So, it wasn’t unusual that I had to read six novels a week. Plus assigned other readings about each concept we were to study. Plus, our writing assignments. Plus, the required reading of all the other fourteen students within the same program.

Anyway, phew! That explanation was a long way to get to here...

The program’s reading was incredible—from classics to contemporary novels. Several stories stuck in my head. Stories written by more obscure authors. At least authors I hadn’t been exposed to. Authors like Jhumpa Lahiri, Jenny Offil, Justin Torres, Carmen Maria Machado, and many, many more. Exquisite authors who have received many deserved honors.

But the authors like Jenny Offil, Justin Torres and Carmen Maria Machado stuck with me.

Jenny Offil’s novel The Dept. of Speculation and Justin Torres’ We the Animals are both short novels and considered autobiographical fiction with both written in short, punchy segments. Let me write that again, autobiographical fiction. What’s that, you say?

Carmen Maria Machado writes with hauntings and sometimes out-and-out ghosts in her stories. One of her exceptional short stories is called The Husband Stitch. It takes the old scary campfire story about the girl who wore a green ribbon around her neck. If you remember that old scary campfire story, you must read Machado’s reimagining of the tale. Hell, if you don’t remember that old scary campfire story, you should still read Machado’s retelling of it. She’s so amazing how she knits the story together, contemporizes it, and then blows your mind with it. I absolutely love her writing. She writes feminist and lesbian fiction. Anyway, since the program, it has been these three storytellers who affected my writing the most.

I have always written short. Even when I was supposed to pen novels, I found myself finishing the bones of most novels at about 33,000 words. After editing for word choice, sentence structure, and depth of characterization, my stories grew longer. Some are still relatively short around 45,000 words with others much longer, around 73,000 words.

What I appreciated about Offil’s and Torres’ short punchy stories is that they told the full story in relatively few pages.

What I appreciate about Machado’s stories is that we all have experiences that haunt our past. Call them ghosts, regrets, or sins, we each have something in our past we wish we could change whether that past is from twenty years before or last week.

Jump to my latest story, The Heartbreak of Time Travel—a memoir and what I consider a somewhat fictionalized telling of my time caregiving Bob during his dementia. There have been so many times that I wished I could change things I’ve said and done, thought, and felt.

Guilt is one of the biggest complaints caregivers have. Guilt and exhaustion. Depression too. The weight of caring for another adult human being is brutal. A girlfriend took on caregiving for her mother when her mom became Methuselah old. I told her, “You will feel the weight of their life on yours.” A few weeks into caregiving she relinquished it over to a facility for others to take on.

Caregiving for a mother as opposed to a spouse is different from the onset. Obviously, the relationships differ greatly. The love differs greatly. Our parents are not supposed to outlive us. That’s not so true with our spouses. Plus, we have the additional “through sickness and through health” clause in wedding vows that predisposes us to taking care of our spouse. I’m not saying everyone should keep their spouse at home, like I have. Some should never if not for practical reasons but for mental health reasons too. I’m just saying a relationship with a spouse is a different one than one with a parent.

When I finally rested from the MFA program, I woke to a new realization: Writing is an art.

I know. I know. Writing has always been called an art but at some point, writing for me became something I needed to do to generate income. The genres that generate the most sales are the commercial genres—romance, mystery, SciFi, et al. Not the punchy, literary stories I so love to read. Those stories mostly garner honors and most of them lag (sadly) behind other commercial stories and generate the weakest sales.

Since I quit my day job as an accountant in 2004, I have worked in my craft. I have seventeen published books to my name. I have another six novels published under a pseudonym written for a NY Times bestselling author. I remember loathing the writing of those six books. And why? The contract needed all six to be completed within six months. Because I wasn’t doing it for the art but for the money. Plus, it was mostly for the other author’s money although I was paid handily for the work. Still, the writing was very unsatisfying. I remember needing a break and vowing I’d never write for another author again. No matter who the author was.

By 2021, I was still in the MFA program when I started journaling about Bob, dementia, and caregiving. The journaling wasn’t required writing for the MFA program, it was outside that and because Bob was getting sicker and I needed to get the words out of my head.

His doctor had put him into home hospice care. Home hospice happens this way: nurses and other medical staff visit the patient’s home rather than putting the patient into a facility. Early after his diagnosis of aphasia and again, two years later when he got a secondary diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), I promised Bob I would never send him away. When Bob’s condition worsened in June 2021, I stopped writing.

However, six months later when I re-read the journals about Bob’s dementia, I realized I had written a number of what I call “wishful thinking” entries, what some call magical thinking. Further yet, some entries read like outright fantasy and others like science fiction.

As well, the entries described a commonality of hopes and regrets, of sadness and euphoria. Since Bob was doing a little better, I decided to continue the journaling but mix the entries with some sidesteps into fiction. In other words, mix it up a little. Splatter a little color on the canvas. I did this not only between genres but in formatting and tense, grammar and punctuation, in point of view shifting. Basically, toss caution (and all our writing rules) to the wind!

A few months later, I paid a reviewer to give me feedback in the form of a written critique. I asked another five nonwriter readers the same. The reviewer said he didn’t have much to say other than he loved it, the art of it, that it was fresh and easy, fun to read. The nonwriter readers’ comments were similar to the reviewer’s comments but, mostly their overarching comments were how much they loved it. Almost three years later, this coming November, the book will be released under the title, The Heartbreak of Time Travel. The reviewer thought up this title and I fell in love with it.

So, as things happen, months before the book’s release, a couple of previous students as well as new students began prodding me to do another workshop. I thought, what the heck!? I want to show other writers how writing fiction is not exclusive of writing nonfiction and vice versa, that fiction and nonfiction can cross paths into each other’s territory.

As well, I want to tell people how my writing career has grown and blossomed. It has become much more than a fight for the dollar. My writing has become my raison d’etre. If my fingers disintegrated off my hands, I would throw my body down a well. I would run headlong into a train. I would thrust myself off the landing of our stairs. You understand, right? I would wilt away without writing.

That’s how art should be. You become nothing without it. And, honestly, it becomes nothing without you.

That’s what I hope to get across to participants in my workshop. How art evolves and becomes more than art. Art becomes you.

If you’re interested in signing up for Susan Wingate’s 3-hour, THE GREAT CROSSOVER: How Nonfiction Inspires Fiction And Vice Versa workshop for only $79, go to: https://www.susanwingate.com/product-page/the-great-crossover-a-writing-workshop

AS WELL, ALL ATTENDEES must go to:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAqf-2urjkqHdSs57Zgz1i76OlA0vgHPsPc#/registration to secure a seat at the workshop whether online or in-person.

Date: Saturday, October 26, 2024

Time: 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Standard time. In-person seating limited to 10 people.