And We're Off!

Ellen Santasiero | October 2025

Photo by Oliver Sjöström: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-holding-black-backpack-1223649/

"The thrill of our first class was revealing myself and beginning to see myself as a writer before such supportive, talented people.” –2025 Forge student

In my twenties, I sailed off the coast of Maine as a student on an intensive Outward Bound course. On the first day, I felt so nervous as we hauled life jackets and oars and kitted out the boats because I didn’t know what to expect of the program. Could I do everything required of me? Would I make it? Or would I have to bail?

During the Forge’s first class last Saturday, I was reminded of that day in Maine because I imagined our new cohort of creative writing students may have been feeling nervous, too. After all, every intensive course is designed to coax people out of their comfort zone so they can achieve a higher level of mastery.

We started with an easy ice breaker for introductions, just like we did at Outward Bound, except in the Forge class we learned about grammar pet peeves, GI Joes, swimming with jellyfish, and that some people, apparently, hold strong positions on the matter of top sheets.

Because we believe that the best writers possess skills in critical analysis, we asked students to start building these skills by reacting to short readings we’d sent them in advance. To calm any existing jitters, we invited them to sit in small Zoom breakout rooms so they could test out their responses with one or two others before sharing in the larger group.

Back in the main Zoom room, we were pleased to hear their comments on point of view and word pairings, and questions about titling and structure. We heard several students point out how a poet played with language and syntax, another student admire the conciseness of a two-sentence short story, and another say how listening in the breakout room helped them understand the readings in new ways.

The best part, always, of any Forge class, is when students read their writing out loud. For this first meeting, we asked them to read a 500-word piece they are especially proud of. For some, this is a big, scary step, but we can flex to meet students where they are (much like my Outward Bound instructor, who, when I announced that I would only be doing the lower portion of the ropes course, just looked at me said, “OK”). Our rationale them to read on day one? They begin to build confidence in performing their own work, and we all get to hear each writer’s voice.

Throughout, there were appearances, planned and unplanned, by pets, including one student’s magical, disappearing dog. I held my terrier up to the camera and presented all sides of him for no apparent reason, not even to me.

As for that ropes course, once I got done with the lower portion and it was time to climb to the higher level, I saw that it would be awkward for me to come down, and that the next platform up didn’t look so high anymore. I was still nervous, but I climbed up. I climbed up and up until I finished the ropes course. I felt pretty good about myself then.

I could say more about the Outward Bound analogy, but I won’t, except for the fact that by the end of that program, I had got over my nerves, and achieved way more than I thought I could.

I’m confident that our Forge students will, too.

"Dirt Being Dirt": Creative Writing from the Breaks

by Irene Cooper

photo by Hannah O'Leary

The poet Carl Phillips won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection, Then the War. Phillips is a favorite poet—sensual, surprising, and cerebral. He’s a Black man, and gay, and has embodied and explored those identities throughout his body of writings, starting with his first collection, In the Blood, published in 1992. In 1992, AIDS is rampant, and riots break out in Los Angeles after four police officers are acquitted of the beating of Rodney King.

Bouncing around Google just after Phillips won the Big P, I came across a video of the poet reading his poem, “Dirt Being Dirt.” Obvious to say, but it bears repeating: A poem is one thing on the page, and another on the tongue. The last line hits hard, and differently, across experience: “You broke it. Now wear it broken.”

Some weeks ago, Sherrilyn Ifill, who for ten years served as the head of the Legal Defense Fund— the non-profit civil rights organization and law firm founded by Thurgood Marshall—gave the annual Robert B. Silvers lecture at the New York Public Library, entitled, “How America Ends and Begins Again.” Friends, it is an example of rhetoric such as we have not seen in some time—honest (brutal, even), informative, and, impossibly, hopeful.

I’ve seen a lot of references, lately, in creative nonfiction and elsewhere, to kintsugi, the Japanese art of finishing the mended seams of broken pottery with gold: Cracks not only visible, but celebrated. It’s often difficult, however, to celebrate our fractures and fissures, our breaks. But there are other, perhaps more practical responses.

Ifill talks about listening to the people in the margins, the falling off places, if you want to hear the truth. She offers, too, a number of actionable suggestions on what to do with that truth. Phillips writes:

The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon, it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless:

Writers sometimes worry they have nothing to write about, that their writing is merely decorative, or otherwise unworthy of attention. I would argue that the pull to write indicates the need to write, and a need for that writing. Creative writing takes courage, as well as time and energy and fortitude. That is, if the writing is trying to get at something. Which is not to say that truth is always the catastrophic fracture: One may crack a joke, or break into a grin, or bust out laughing.

The bold, golden seams of a vase or bowl that has undergone kintsugi suggest to me that the piece is stronger, now, at the site of the break—and that the piece was worth the attention to repair it. Ultimately, we may not want our revisions to be exhibited quite so nakedly in our work. But as I read through my first draft and start to be aware of the various fault lines and fires, I understand that this is where the beauty begins, in the attention to the unfinished, needful edge.

This is where I’ll learn how to wear it broken.

Learn more about how to invest in and develop your creative writing at The Forge. Already a Smithy? Go write.

Image by SEBASTIEN MARTY

The End?

Mike Cooper

When we tell a story, even a “true” one, we have a beginning and an end. “One day…” eventually rolls into “…and so, that’s what happened’ (or, as Forrest Gump says, “That’s all I have to say about that”). We look at a story as a “slice of life,”—a moment in the cosmic timeline, an experience where someone (possibly ourselves) saw the world one way, and then something happened, and now it’s seen a different way. The impact and meaning of a story depend on where we end it. It’s where and how we leave our readers/listeners. The story can end with a “happily ever after,” or with our character staring out at the snow that is falling, falling, and falling “upon all the living and the dead.” It can end in chains, or the release of chains. It can end in true love, triumph, or the deepest loss.

But it is still only a moment. How do we capture the truth of life? Isn’t that what we’re after? Where is our beginning? An amoeba crawling from the primordial ooze? The Big Bang? The birth of God? And where is our ending? How could we even speculate?

This is, I think, why we write: in order to capture the whole picture, the meaning behind our happiness and suffering, the reason we push on, the understanding of our impermanent permanence. This involves acute speculation and introspection on our experiences, and most people aren’t interested in going there. The writer is a philosopher, a logician, a truth-seeker, a theorist, a dreamer. We look to other writers for their insights, we lean over the page or the keyboard and make an attempt to explain w-h-y.

As far as I know, no one has come up with the definitive universal truth. So we approximate it, hint at it, catch a glimpse of it as it walks past our window, stand next to it on a crowded bus. The end of the story, of the good story, leaves us (and our reader) on a trajectory toward discovery—the open-mouthed, chin-scratching, finger-in-the-air, “I had it on the tip of my tongue” moment that keeps us going, and thinking, and wondering, and trying to figure this whole thing out.

Jackson Browne says it quite well in the song “The Road and the Sky”:

When we come to the place where the road and the sky collide,

Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide.