Ava Gentry considered workshops and readings, contests and exercises as well as writing prompts beneath her. She was after all, a professional writer despite her lack of any notable success. She’d earned a BA and two masters degrees in literature and writing programs, the creative writing program being very competitive. She had beaten out thousands and been accepted with the department chair waving her out of state tuition and making sure she had copies of her the novels she would need for the course. By the end of this coursework she was given the teaching assistantship and won scholarships and fellowships others coveted. When she read with the class, she seemed to stand out. No one was more aggressively sought out for publication in the literary journals that featured poets of an earnest bent.

Notably, Ava had lined her bathroom with rejection letters from more academic publications, which found her carnality and illicit topics beneath them. Some of the working class, transgressive hipster had started out as dismissive because she was in the program and already over educated, so Ava began omitting details about her her degrees and emphasized her experience as a barmaid, a loose woman and an occasional victim of social injustice.

When this made won he’d favor among the editors who resented academia after the academics declared her too corporal and candid, Ava decided it was all a bunch of bullshit and lost interest in being published . “There’s nothing in it for me.” She and a Mexican grad student who wrote about dog fights in the Barrio and teaching hard core high school kids in East L.A.

Taco—a nickname the young poet was known by and only Ava had bothered to question—nodded as he leaned into his beer. He’d never met anyone like Ava before. She was as marginalized as any Mexican or brother, even appeared to look like a blend of the two with Jewess and Gypsy thrown in. In a way she unnerved him because he had never imagined there was anyone more oppressed and under appreciated than himself and those like him.

“You’re the best poet in the class,” he said sadly.

“I know,” she confessed, not so much with pride but with a dismal understanding that this was a curse. Hearing her own self-pity, she smacked at him and added, “You know I hate superlatives. I mean it’s all about what you like when you talk poetry and art in general. I think you, me, Sam and JD are the stand outs. Sam has that sense of humor and self awareness that gives him an in no matter where he submits. JD is so tight and in control, beautiful command of words. You don’t think any of that is going to come out of a guy from Texas.”

Taco chuckled. He had hated JD that first night in the workshop. Taco was pissed off when JD quietly and adeptly ticked off a few reasons why the poem he’d submitted to the professor for the first round was weak. Like they all would do except Ava, who was too honest to offer consolation if the work was without distinction, JD pointed out elements of the poem was worth reworking. Had Ava not followed JD to echo those sentiments and offer simple changes to fix the draft, Taco would have tossed the poem and held a grudge against JD indefinitely.

“Well?” Taco wanted to know, “why do I make the grade?”

She sighed. “You know why. You and I know why we are that’s List sand so do Sam and JD. It’s unseemly to seek out flattery unless you’re an honorable mention or less.”

“You are brutalist!”

“Thanks. Everyone else thinks I’m a bitch.”

“Bitches are a dime a dozen,” Taco swallowed the last gulp of his draft.

“You better get your ass on home. You may have an assignment in south central tomorrow.”

“You read my mind, amiga.” He was slipping on his battered jean jacket and cradling the motor cycle helmet as he tosses a crumbled five onto the bar.

“Thanks for indulging me. I needed to vent,” she slid off the chair and followed him out to the parking lot where they had said their good nights. This was the last time she really spoke to Taco or anyone else in the program except Doc. Doc was their professor, the grand poobah of the MFA program, though he wasn’t an especially gifted poet. No one appreciated poetry more than he did and few had such an easy going demeanor and could boast the level of excellence he achieved with his students: within the university, he was held in contempt by the liberal academics because the feminists despised him, called him a chauvinist.

He was probably was a chauvinist and when he hit in her, which he did years after she graduated and he retired, Ava felt profoundly sad and full of self doubt. She always wondered if his desire to fuck her was why she was welcomed into that program, which did very little for her professionally as the PhDs and department chairs doling out underpaid part time positions at two year schools always made a point of telling her an MFA meant nothing. “It’s a good thing you did that MA and held the TA too.”

Working for less than migrant worker and scrambling from one college to another to make her nut was easy for awhile, even when she was tutoring Chinese kids for $15 an hour, writing papers for rich illiterate coeds and tending bar on the boulevard near her rent controlled hovel. Somehow she managed to keep writing. In fact her cloud and devices were full of unfinished novella, poetry collections she illustrated beautifully, all kinds of articles she referred to as rants as well as some roundly rejected short stories about her rough first third.

A fan of Neal Cassidy, whose claim to fame was inspiring the beat movement with Jack, Ava Gentry divided life into thirds. She was embarking on the her final third when she got her first bout of writers block. Like Taco , she had surrendered to the lure of the school district and its benefits, which she ended up loving so much she was willing to put aside her liters ambitions. The fact that she wrote and never submitted suggested she’d done this ages ago. Yet the way her students lives and voices occupied her mind when she wasn’t among them, made her scribble and type more frantically than ever before.

The school district would push her out ten years into her unlikely career as a high school teacher in the hood, making up something about her punching another teacher in a faculty meeting.

Her colleagues wrote letters saying this never happened and the hearing at the district headquarters was a farce, with the union rep ready to throw her under the bus as her accused, a notoriously unfit teacher in every sense smirked at the judge and lied through her teeth. When the judge winked at her after the tribunal, Ava was sure she would prevail. But weeks later a judgement was rendered in language that was decidedly unlike any legal document she’d ever read before.

She eventually resigned, believing she’d now write at last and become who and what she wanted to be since the first third’s early stages.

Being a fired teacher with tenure made any future work as a teacher impossible and at that point she was aware of too much to stay on without becoming complicit in the gruesome crimes of public education. The pension was enough to cover rent and utilities, and Ava got work here and there doing this and that. She shamelessly accepted food stamps, deferred to public transportation and allowed some sugar daddies to enjoy the joy of her company, no more than that, and she made ends meet.

Everything was set up so she could finally flourish, and suddenly Ava found herself beset by writers block. It was even worst than that though as she could’ve returned to any one of a thousand unfinished pieces to edit I’d nothing else, but she couldn’t bring herself to open the documents much less decided the inspired scribble she left in stacks of notebooks hidden in her closet, occasionally, she ran a cross something and when her eyes fell upon it, she didn’t recognize it. She was reading because it was good, sometimes very good, but she felt it wasn’t hers. Whatever it was, it didn’t compel her to finish reading it much less dive in an work on it again.

About all she write were lists of things to do and groceries got buy. She couldn’t bother to read or revise them either, she just repeatedly wrote the lists down and tossed them out when she had enough energy to find some small amount of order in her growing chaos.

She wrote angry letters to people who betrayed her, which she threw out and write again only to toss them. She thought this effort would release her rage but it didn’t do anything but obsess her. Memories of Taco and the MFA program we’re ignited an unlikely and desperate remedy she happened across one day while downloading noisy games on her cell phone, which became an anecdote for the venomous letters.

The app was for writers, offering prompts and little contests with small prizes to create a kind of online workshop.while she could readily imagine the losers who played bingo and solitaire all day, she couldn’t fathom the sorts who participated the online writers game. She simply assumed they couldn’t write. She proved herself right by reading the submissions, noting that the most cliched and dreadful responses to the generic prompts were by far the worst efforts of the lot .

She paid for a year of the writing app because upon reading one simple writing assignment she felt a jolt of inspiration and tapped out a story far too long to be considered in the contest. She never finished it either, but was surprised to feel that jolt again when she read the latest prompt.

The situation became a minor habit and every now and then she’d sit down to transcribe an exchange she shared with a neighbor or overheard on the bus. These things went nowhere, but could eventually be useful. While they didn’t fill,her with the same raw purpose as her former inspiration, the prompts begat stunning unfinished paragraphs that unraveled with sleek ease and made her remember why she was a good writer. It wasn’t just the lurid dimensions of her life in the lower caste or her extreme lexicon. It was her empathy and insight for human beings.

At some point she was exploring the various sections of the app and she realized her unfinished work had posted automatically for all to read. She was again stunned when she didn’t recognize her own work but pleasantly surprised by how good it was. It didn’t sound like her at all, and she couldn’t remember writing it at all, but it gave her hope until she read the statistics.

People had read the fragments which offered compelling titles but weren’t completed. She knew from experience that people rarely read the work of their peers in workshops or other situations unless they were being graded as they offered commentary of an elevated sort. To do this one had to be serious. Still, no one offered her a single annotation or explanation on why they didn’t like the work.

One person had given the weakest example a positive mark, and this was all. Ava was unnerved by how little passion she felt as she read the more recent winning stories. The first place story was so badly written and predictable it could’ve been filler in Women’s Daily or a C paper in some adult school writing seminar.

Like the games she wasted hours on now, her compulsive reaction was merely an aspect of her own sinking confidence. She didn’t need these half wits to tell her she was good. In fact, if they had actually praised the writing, Ava would be worried considering how poor the quality of their winning work was. Still, she kept going back for more, and the writing prompts subverted her addiction to games that she deplored.

It wasn’t like anyone knew she was wasting the last third on those annoying games or the writing prompts. Ava was sequestered with her misery, rarely leaving the apartment and only vaguely communicating with people she knew or didn’t really know on social media.

That too had become an addiction which she cut herself FB from cold turkey . She noticed that this was always easy, but admitted this was because she already had a new distraction in place,

It was like the coke head who quit snorting low to smoke crack. When he was a full blown crack head, he found crank, which “saved his life.” He’d itemize all the reasons frank was better than crack , which cost more, drive him into desperate situations to score and was a constant need he couldn’t neglect. It was like her friends who were bad at romantic relationships. They’d have some asshole who beat them up, cheated and couldn’t find a job. They kept going back for more until something really bad went down. They’d be heartbroken but knew they couldn’t go back again. To head the urge off at the pass, they’d find a new lover only to discover her was a new version of the last.

Ava reasoned that if she was guilty of the same treachery at least she aimed hers in the right direction.

Sure enough, she was banging away prompt responses all day and well into the night. Unlike her many future opuses and beloved projects, the short stories were not passionate or part of her daily thinking. She didn’t even feel inclined to congratulate herself when she was writing well, which she noted she was. She was doing much better with these exercises than she was with her own ignitions, she knew this because of the way the characters took off,speaking on their behalf as the story unfolded without her interference. These prompts were predictable stuff. Write about something that happens after nuclear devastation. Tell a story where two characters who have a conflict run into each other in unlikely circumstances. Write a story about a character who is lost and meets people who cannot communicate.

She occasionally veered off into such unlikely directions she wondered if this was why no one liked her submissions. She began to study the prompts closely and when she was done deconstructing them, decided they were too broad to be so picky. Most of them conceded one merely need to include an element within the thousand words allotted. Notably, the winners tended to dwell heavily within the guidelines, which she saw as counterintuitive.

Rather than drive herself into another funk, she avoided dwelling on her obvious exclusion from the winners circle. She felt obligated to read the submissions though, and some new quest began to occupy her thoughts. She wanted to know who wrote these things, good or bad.

She could only take so much. A snob, maybe a con issuer, Ava had stopped reading voraciously as the years unraveled. Her eyesight was failing and her patience was contingent on the quality of the writing, she heard this book or that writer was excellent but more often than not she was disappointed.

After getting her BA, she began reading student papers, had a seven foot pile of books she was supposed to read for her coursework ( but often didn’t , knowing the papers she had to write were expected to have a barrow thesis, which she figured out had to be tied into her professor’s critical bent and easily fashioned out of the sources she cited and read instead of tomes like Finegan’s Wake and Chaucer’s wor, allowing her to offer impressive contributions to the class discussions which figured heavily in the grading process since the instructors had to read so many papers, write critical papers, syllabi and academic shit just to survive the semester.

Cutting corner was the only way anyone could do it all, though she took more pleasure in reading texts from the high school curriculum which allowed her to have fresh perspective thanks to the students.they actually read the books like her undergraduates . Most of the kids in sophomore Anglian were not plebe bound. She thought about how much better the kids from hoods responded to literature than the kids rom the burbs, but couldn’t quite figure it out beyond the obvious. She knew her 15 yea olds had lived much more than most of her fellow educators, but no one believed this was why they had astute insights about Holden Canfield or Atticus Finch. “It’s all the dope they smoke,” some bitter old English teacher snarked once. She considered herself the best teacher in the department but refused to read the essays she assigned in her AP classes. All the students were stoned. College kids, high school kids. Even she was stoned for fucks sake.

She was pretty sure the further one went in school, the less joy they took in reading though she still devoured a great read in one sitting once in while.

Reading the top contenders on the app was not like getting through Proust or a novel by Willa Cather, which was worse than a catheter she’d told a favorite Writng professor when he corrected the way she said the author of Oh Pioneers ‘ name.

The way Proust goes on about the cookie, she thought as she finished a quick read of a very armature story about a woman confronting the loss of her looks. The writer of this self indulgent short story had the cavalier diction of someone ho always won.

Ava assumed she was a woman hitting middle age, maybe dumped by her husband during his midlife crisis and running around with a woman half their age. She was getting alimony and her half of the assets. Her kids were all but grown.

Pretty girl problems, Ava thought. Why was her ennui more profound than the ache of loneliness felt by an out of work spinster who had been fat all her life. Was it because she had lost more even though she still had tremendously more than the fat lovelorn character?

In the past, Ava would have been angry about that, especially as she realized the editors and readers who voted on the story were all entities white bitches of the same ilk.

“No wonder I will never make it,” she said out loud one night as she actually finished a showy about a waitress who spend her life waiting for the three horsemen of the apocalypse. It came in at under a 1000 words with the waitress driving up to the apparition of Pestilence, Disease and War in her old truck as she flees the city. She realizes the apocalypse I may be upon her at last but the god damned horsemen are a holograph. Realizing she’s part of some cosmic joke, she leaves anyway , feeling free for the first time in her life since the nightmares began when she was a wee girl.

Ava thought the character was a lot like her even a anabolic doppelgänger of sorts. The story itself was mediocre and she bet someone would read it and leave one of the rare pithy criticisms she got. “I hate when stories open up with dreams.” Or something to that effect.

She got up, her knees aching as she stretched, and noticed a familiar buzzing in her ears. Her joints popped amid she she yawned so wide and so long tears spring forth in her eyes. She hit the lights and wandered to her unmade bed. When she got in, she realized she was shivering and took great pleasure in the warmth of her blankets as well as the pillow that cracked her now empty head. She was asleep before any doubts or dreams could pounce on tomorrow, which she may sleep well into , Godswilling.