Telling secrets
Photo by Jeff Watts |
Graduate programs assistant Kristin Toburen had a 100-pound secret when she first came to AU as an MFA in creative writing student in 2002 . But it wasn’t too hard to hide, because the secret was invisible. The 100 pounds was the weight she’d lost before she entered the program. All she had to do to keep it secret was never mention it. “AU was the first place I’d been where no one had known me before the weight loss, and I really liked that,” Toburen recalls. “When people know you’ve lost a lot of weight like that, that’s all they see when they look at you. It’s like there’s a stigma, and now I didn’t have that stigma . . . so it was the last thing I wanted to write about. I didn’t want to tell anyone.” That all changed in the second semester of her first year in the program when creative writing professor Richard McCann asked her and the other students in a creative nonfiction class to write a personal essay about the body. “That workshop blasted open all these things,” says Toburen. For the first time, she says, she was able to speak openly about a weight loss issue most people rarely recognize. “Everybody talks about getting thin, but nobody talks about staying thin and what that feels like,” she says. “Everyone thinks that if I just got thin, then I wouldn’t have any problems, and you don’t necessarily have the same problems, but a whole bunch of other problems come up.” Those problems, Toburen found as she uncovered her secret, ranged from anger at constant reminders of the weight when people asked how she’d lost it to deeper questions about who we are independent of our bodies. “It’s really all about identity,” she explains. “It’s like, I don’t feel like the same person, but yet I am the same person, and what do I do with that? . . . How do you deal with this huge life change?” Out of such questions grew her thesis, “Me, Massive,” a collection of seven personal essays on life after weight loss, which Toburen continues to revise after earning her MFA last year. The challenge now, she explains, is trying to turn these thematically linked essays into a coherent memoir. Though she admits that it’s more difficult to find writing time now than it was when she was in the program, working as assistant to the graduate programs in literature helps keep her focused. “I really like working in this kind of academic culture,” she explains. “It helps to be still immersed in the writing world.” Being “still immersed in the writing world” also allows Toburen to share some secrets outside of her writing. As a former MFA student herself, she enjoys being able to offer MFA and MA students in the literature department the inside scoop on their questions about classes or thesis procedures. “I don’t know how someone who has not experienced the 300- or 600- level classes, for instance, can explain what goes on in them. It lends me a lot of credibility. I’ve been in the classes. I’ve completed the thesis. I’ve done it all.” —MG |
