ART / CATHY CURTIS : Critic Gets Some of What She Dishes Out at Writers’ Conference : Workshops give insight into the mental and emotional effort involved in trying to make a work of recognized value.

Normally, I wouldn’t dream of using this space to tell you about my summer vacation, but this vacation was far from normal. I decided to taste life on the other side by offering up my own “art” (short stories) to the stern scrutiny of authors at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, one of several summer workshops in the United States dedicated to analyzing the craft of writing fiction, poetry and plays.

It was a pretty brutal way to spend a holiday, but it did give me a sharp new insight into the extraordinary mental and emotional effort involved in trying to make a work of art of recognized value.

The annual 12-day conference--dedicated strictly to “literary” fiction, not the blockbuster or genre variety--is held at the University of the South in Sewanee, a muggy hamlet in the Cumberland Plateau of Southern Tennessee that’s so tiny, it doesn’t even rate its own McDonald’s. The sole taxi driver died last year. There is no bus or train service, no car rental. If you don’t bring your own set of wheels, there is no escape from this literary boot camp where “night life” is mostly a matter of listening to the frogs rasping in the lake.

Students wake early to stumble through a daily onslaught of classes (taught by award-winning, widely anthologized but not quite household-name writers such as Tim O’Brien and Stanley Elkin), lectures, and readings by authors ranging from William Styron (“Sophie’s Choice”) to younger authors published mostly in literary magazines. These events are punctuated by pale, starchy institutional Southern meals, daily receptions where cliques and schmoozers flourish, wee-hours rounds of beer at the dormitories and talk, talk, talk about writing.

The 90 students accepted this year included many teachers of English and creative writing, several doctors and lawyers, a bartender, an architect, a psychologist and a ghost writer. But conversations about our “real” lives or current affairs were set aside in favor of constant discussions--at once gossipy and analytical--about the business of putting words together. Even the most casual remark was liable to be sharply questioned: “What exactly do you mean by that?”

In my class, praise was reserved for exceptional efforts and criticism often had to be swallowed without the sugar-coating of encouragement. Even the most gifted writers were not immune. I’d find myself enjoying fellow students’ stories because they were funny or seemed true to life, while my savvier colleagues pointed out serious structural flaws or a lack of emotional depth.

It finally dawned on me that I had to learn to read fiction with the super-critical eye of a writer , not as a casual reader, if I hoped to get anything out of the workshop experience. A similar distinction exists between viewers who glide through an art exhibit, expecting eye candy, and those who come prepared to carry on an energetic, if silent, dialogue with the artist.

I was fairly confident about my own work. I had spent weeks writing and rewriting, trimming my sentences and buffing my images. I felt I had reached deeply into my own experience and plucked out moments that would speak urgently to readers. Well, OK, maybe not urgently. But I was pretty sure I had captured a few corners of life in a unique and truthful way. I daydreamed that someone would introduce me to his or her agent or call up a magazine editor on my behalf.

Back in the real world, however, my stuff was coolly and devastatingly picked apart by the experienced writers who teach the workshops and by my fellow classmates. My stories weren’t interesting enough; they had nothing sufficiently remarkable to recommend them. My critics agreed they were full of nicely written sentences but, frankly, who gave a damn?

I was accused of writing thin snippets of autobiography unflavored by the fresh and novel perceptions of life that make for real fiction. Several subtle and canny points I believed I was making were ignored by my classmates. When I called their attention to one of these items, I was told it seemed puzzling and superfluous.

I felt weirdly as though my normal self had turned into some wanna-be starlet with a few walk-on parts who was trying to sell her life story to the tabloids. How could it be that I’d received more praise for my social dancing at the Saturday night party than for my writing? What was I doing here?

My faculty “reader,” a woman of about my age who has published two volumes of eccentric, ultra-hip short stories, was the first to give me the bad news. It didn’t help that she was unable--or unwilling--to tell me how to try to remedy my deficiencies, or that she seemed to lack a sense of humor.

It wasn’t until several gloomy days later that I was able to get a second and a third and fourth opinion from other writers, ranging from a veteran novelist on the faculty to someone who recently published her first book. Nobody said my stuff was wonderful, and everyone pretty much agreed about its flaws. But I did get several usable suggestions and a morsel of ego-sustaining praise. The process was somewhat like searching out another medical opinion: I felt ready to go ahead with the operation once the doctors all agreed.

Depressing as it was, my conference experience seems to parallel the ordeal of fledgling artists who begin to show their work and expose it to critical opinion. Early reviews serve mainly to tell artists what their work looks like to another pair of eyes. A critic is likely to perceive only a small part--or maybe even none--of the intellectual or emotional resonance artists believe they’ve evoked. Often, only a small fraction of the work’s content will strike the critic as particularly interesting or significant.

Of course, it’s entirely possible the critic is obtuse, ill-informed or lazy. But let’s assume this person has proved a trustworthy guide in evaluating other artists’ work. Let’s assume further that more than one critic makes similar negative points about the art, or fails to mention the special qualities the artist worked so hard to achieve.

The piece in question still might be the breakthrough of the century, proving everyone wrong. But it’s more likely that the message never got through, or got confused by competing messages, or is just too obvious or derivative of other artists’ work to count for much in the larger scheme of things.

It’s also possible that the artist is not entirely committed to working in the high-stakes world of Serious Art. I don’t think I fully realized just what that means until I went to Sewanee.

We all want to succeed, and sometimes it seems as though it’s enough just to be somewhat entertaining, or to come up with a nice little image or a few fairly interesting thoughts. They may be the very best we can muster right now--or ever. But we delude ourselves if we believe these small achievements are actually big achievements.

Art is not something you can make in a half-hearted way, in your left-over leisure time, or when you feel “in the mood.” Again and again, writer-teachers at Sewanee emphasized that writers have to write all the time, have to feel literally driven to write. Someone said that the point wasn’t to survey your life to find usable situations for your fiction, but to determine which situations want to use you . Much the same goes for making visual art that rises above the mundane.

The refinement process--paring away the dumb, inexact, redundant stuff--is equally arduous, because there’s no room for “good enough” in art; every little thing counts. You have to find the exact word, the right proportion, the most appropriate materials to express the precise thing you have in mind. There’s ample opportunity for incredible exhilaration, and also for prolonged unhappiness and self-doubt.

There aren’t too many would-be artists who have the combination of ability and staying power to marry themselves to the demands of this life. But those who do are the people whose art I’m always anxious to see.