This guest post is part of our ongoing web series MARGINALIA about all things writing, reading, & learning. To submit your own experience, please read our guidelines.

Your draft story is your unborn baby. A writing workshop is your baby shower. You don’t know the sex of your child. It’s a surprise. You’re going to be a single parent, so if you’re male, congratulations! You’re pregnant!

I had 14 babies this past fall. One baby each week for my flash fiction workshop. We played a few party games during my showers, like What Is Going On In This Paragraph, I Don’t Know What This Means, and Cut All Of This Out.

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Welcome to MARGINALIA, draft’s new web series featuring voices of writers, editors, teachers, students, and readers sharing their experiences from their walks of the Writing, Teaching, Learning, Editing, and Reading Life.

I find solace in talking with others about the writing life, the teaching life, the editing life, the reading life. It’s remarkable how helpful it is just to hear that another teacher or writer has had the same frustrations, or a similar delight. We would like to start that conversation here. Tell us your story. Listen to others. Both misery and joy love company.

If you’d like to share your experiences, write us at draftjournal@gmail.com and include “MARGINALIA” in the subject line.

So let me give this a go.

In late college and graduate-level fiction writing courses, I wanted more guided homework. The homework of a creative writing workshop is simply to write a short story. On the one hand, that’s a really cool and fun and challenging assignment. I remember thinking, This is homework? People are actually allowed to major in writing? There’s actually graduate school for this? Hell yeah! But on the other hand, “write a short story” often proves to be an assignment that’s almost too difficult, too free form, too liberating, and thus, paradoxically, constricting. I craved more rules for the story to write for homework.

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