michael feingold has sharpened his claws on me

We've been working our way through mentors in what appears to be order of severity, culminating with the aforementioned, who writes for the Village Voice. The review we turned in this morning was our last (all that remains to be written is the long feature and an assessment), and I was in the first group to work with Feingold. For a week and a half he's been presented as the bad cop to our string of good cops (Papatola, Winer, Rousuck, Novick, Sullivan, Phillips), and we've been shaking in our sandals accordingly. He made someone cry, the rumor goes around. He'll rip you a new one, says someone else. Although we've been told repeatedly that this is the place for us to take risks and try different things with our writing, although we've been told that we shouldn't worry about failing, the imminent arrival of El Feingold has been nervewracking, to say the least.

Because honestly, we're not just learning from these people. We're showing ourselves to them in the hope that they'll recognize how brilliant we are, and that this will somehow advance our careers. The rivalry between us remains unspoken but hangs in every exchange. And this tension has become particularly clear as we've talked about what Feingold might be like.

Through a trick of poor alphabetization, I was the first in the group to read my piece.

I have survived the experience; I am largely intact. I did not cry, I did not jump up on the picnic table to defend the four paragraphs I used to deconstruct the 1948 musical version of Charley's Aunt as a poor use of drag, I did not waste my breath pointing out that I haven't gotten enough sleep in the past two weeks and that of necessity is going to affect my writing, and to hell with whether I mentioned the director's name or not. I did feel my nostrils flare once or twice, and I was vibrating perhaps just a tiny bit, but I survived.

I'm proud of that, considering that he went over my first three paragraphs word by word. Seriously. Word...by...word. And he liked very few of them.

I take some comfort from the knowledge that once he'd spit me out, things would be a little easier for everyone else because he could just say, you did the same wrong thing here that Indri did. I mean heck, just think what would have happened if he'd started with openmouthguy.

Bloodbath.