How MFA Students Learn to Read Like Writers

Or, What the heck is an annotation?

---

Hi Everybody,

Since Legacy&Lore is now officially MFA Lore, I thought I should give you a view into the beating heart of MFA education: the annotation.

A graduating MFA student at Goddard once said to my colleague

Richard Panek

: "I see annotations everywhere!" And with good reason. In our program, students had to write at least 45 “annos” over their four semesters with us. They could focus these very short critical responses on books, films, plays, or even museum exhibits, but the goal of every annotation was to unpack a literary tool that the student could apply to their own work.

Annotations teach us to read like writers. Simply reading for pleasure, or even like an English major, will not do the trick. Writers need to cultivate the particular focus on craft that goes into every annotation. Only through this process will our reading make us better writers.

Nevertheless, most new MFA students find the idea of annotations daunting. And folks who’ve never gotten an MFA may never have heard of them. So I thought I’d use this post to deconstruct an annotation for you.

One of my former students, the dazzling writer

Jaimie Li

, has given me permission to use her annotation on poet EJ Koh’s memoir The Magical Language of Others as our example.

---

---

Annotations are not book reviews

We’re all familiar with book reviews. I remember writing one on Anne of Green Gables in grade school (showing my age, but how I adored that series!). Today, millions on Amazon and Goodreads write reader reviews, and what’s left of Main Stream Media still publish professional book reviews. The purpose of all these reviews is to share opinions of books, either with an eye toward recommending or warning other readers away. To accomplish this, book reviews summarize the major themes, characters, and vibe of the book and recap the basic plot without giving away the ending.

Annotations are not book reviews. They’re more like mini-excavations or brief exploratory surgeries. When you write an annotation, it’s immaterial whether you “like” or “dislike” the book you’re annotating. All that matters is whether some particular aspect of the book has something to teach you about the craft of writing.

You’ll dig into that something for as long as you need to — a couple of paragraphs or several pages. Some annos can be expanded into critical essays, if you’re so inclined. But the annotation itself is solely for your own benefit as a writer.

First, read wide open

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to assume you’ll annotate mostly books. Know that you can use this same process to closely examine any experience or design.

---

Some of my other posts here at MFA Lore are annotations at heart:

Did Steinbeck Foresee Jan. 6?

Every Tale Is A Tale of Two Stories

---

But my purpose today is to show how annotations can help you read books like a writer. So, what’s your first step?

Read widely.

MFA students don’t annotate every book they read. Their reading lists may cover 100 titles. They imbibe these initially with an open mind, absorbing style and story, characters and atmosphere, theme and meaning. They might flag turns of plot and phrase, record their own emotional reactions in marginalia. But not all these titles will justify an annotation because they won’t all offer craft lessons that the student needs.

Jaimie Li

chose to annotate EJ Koh’s memoir The Magical Language of Others because [all quotes below are from Jaimie’s annotation]:

Koh tracks her journey toward forgiving her parents, particularly her mother, for leaving her fifteen-year-old self and her older brother alone in a house in California for several years while they worked abroad in Korea.

It just so happened that Jaimie was struggling with a parallel situation in her own memoir. She, too, had been left by her parents to live alone and finish high school while they worked in a different location. If she could understand how Koh wrestled this difficult emotional tapestry to the page, Jaimie might gain some valuable tools to apply to her own memoir.

What did you notice?

Among the many details of story and approach that Jaimie noticed in Koh’s book, two stood out.

1. Koh didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the parents’ choice to leave their children. Instead:

She dispenses with the unusualness of this arrangement early on—“It was better to pay for your children than to stay with them. That was how it had always been.”—in order to focus on the emotional impact of this abandonment (11).

2. Koh used an intriguing literary device at a pivotal moment in the plot:

When EJ [young Koh as subject] develops emotional agency, Koh [as author] employs litany to deepen a tacit association between EJ’s external circumstances and her internal condition, raise narrative tension into a crucial apex, and signify her familial connection to forgiveness and faith.

What do you need?

Both these observations served Jaimie’s writerly needs. She’d been wondering how to frame culturally-informed decisions by her Chinese parents in ways that would make sense to non-Chinese readers. So the quick dispatch of their reasoning in a short, explicit line from their point of view could be a useful strategy for her own memoir.

But the use of litany was more complex and intriguing. As a reader, Jaimie had noticed that this device intensified the emotional significance of EJ’s parents’ decision to leave her. How did Koh, the author, employ litany to pull this off? That question gave Jaimie the focus for her annotation.

How did the author do that?

The goal of any annotation is to help you figure out how an author accomplishes something that you’re struggling to do in your own work.

Merriam-Webster defines litany as:

1. a prayer consisting of a series of invocations and supplications by the leader with alternate responses by the congregation

2. a resonant or repetitive chant, recitation or enumeration of a sizable series or set

Jaimie wanted to understand why Koh used this chant-like device at the climax of her memoir and whether it created the desired effect.

So first, her annotation cited the text of the litany, which appeared in a scene when EJ sought help from a psychiatrist in college after having hallucinations of her late grandmother [emphasis Jaimie’s]:

“Times I had forgotten came to me now; like when a classmate and his friends in Davis groped me between my legs; like when I was sent to the principal’s office after I threatened to kill a boy who squinted to look like me; like when an older man with glasses, a family friend from the southern coast of Korea, promised to roast live eels in a barrel of coal, described how hard they banged against the drum, and he casually glanced at my feet before his eyes traveled up my knees and higher, above my stomach, settling at the height of my heart, and maybe I thought it was beautiful, the soft earth of that country, the sea breeze like sweet vinegar to soothe bitterness from my life because what harmed me did not appear to endanger the foggy trees, our sesame-oiled tongs, our coolheaded smiles; like how it was my fault that I had cleaned out Mieko’s cage thinking it was one more burden; and how it was I who had made my parents and grandparents believe I never heard them and it was I who could not forgive anyone or I who did not try to get away from where I was and it was I who had put myself inside a room such as this.” (138)

Excavate like a writer

Now Jaimie dug in. What was Koh talking about here? What emotions was she pushing through the page? Why the long continuous list of memories, moments, confessions? How did that list change tone and tenor and direction as it flowed?

Koh tracks the moments of EJ’s powerlessness—to the rages of brother and to sexist and racist abuse by her peers—through to the moment where she receives sexual attention and finds that she can accept it and even invite it, thus creating a turning point in which EJ seizes agency only to misdirect it against herself.

Shame, blame, guilt, desire, and agency are potent emotional gongs. Packing them all into a single paragraph, a single river of memory, in a way that musically links them without ever literally naming the emotions— that is a neat trick.

But for Jaimie, the most crucial element of the story was the absent mother, so like her own. Where was Koh’s mother in this litany?

Throughout the memoir, Koh’s mother was revealed poignantly through passages from letters sent to Koh during her teens.

In them, her mother often instructs EJ to subjugate her emotional truths: “be happy,” “don’t give Mommy heartaches,” “be well and have fun with your life,” “Don’t cry when Mom is not with you” (3, 24, 119, 140).

Yet Koh’s mother appeared nowhere in that pivotal litany. Why not?

Koh’s decision to leave this pressure implied by showing it in the letters but not in the crucial passage of self-blame subtly deepens the association between the two elements so that it signifies her subconscious internalization of her mother’s enjoinders throughout her youth...

Of course, loving from afar is not parenting, and even as EJ strives to be the daughter her mother asks her to be, Koh layers the internal impact and the external cause in order create a sense of mounting despair and to illustrate rather than explain EJ’s conundrum of wanting to let go but, at the same time, being unable to. 

And then Jaimie examines another crucial facet of the litany: the subtly colloquial phrasing that gives away EJ’s perspective as a Korean-American teenager.

The repetition of the casual “like when” and “like how”  followed by the repetition of the highly formal “it was I” creates an irresistible momentum that drives toward and mirrors EJ’s irresistible conclusion of self-recrimination.

The winding stream of language manages to meld EJ’s voice as an American teen with Koh’s stylized voice as a mature poet; her conflicting views of her Korean identity and her sense of responsibility for her independent agency. Through this continuum, the litany embodies the change occurring in EJ’s character.

There is a dramatic sense of ownership in the passage that is tied to the almost theatrical cadence and expectation of confession.

What would you do?

The end of an annotation confronts the central question of purpose. What useful lesson has this analysis uncovered?

Some of my students would wrap up their annos with explicit strategies for applying the lesson to their own work. Jaimie didn’t do that here, but she did nail the take-away:

By bringing the story to a climax in a litany, Koh paves the way for the catharsis that comes. She forgives her mother and lets her go for “the first time” (209). EJ’s connection with her own past and her family’s history, once punishingly traumatic, becomes an abiding act of faith.

And then she summed up the lesson even more succinctly when giving her annotation its title:

Litany as Self-Recrimination and Belief in The Magical Language of Others

That title would serve as a clear reminder, a kind of filing label, whenever she wanted to revisit the possible uses of litany for her own purposes. She wouldn’t have to re-read Koh’s whole memoir to refresh her memory. She had what she’d need as a writer right here in her annotation.

---

P.S. For a deeper dive into the sum and substance of the annotation process, read Francine Prose’s classic Reading Like a Writer.

---