Book Review: Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction
Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction. Members of the Off Campus Writers’ Workshop, edited by Renee James & Peter Hoppock, Windy City Press, April 3, 2023, Paperback, 400 pages.
Reviewed by Jose Nateras.
Established more than 75 years ago, the Off Campus Writers’ Workshop has a rich history of serving as a community for writers of all sorts based in the Chicago-land area. Following in the footsteps of their first collection, 2021’s Turning Points, 2023’s latest developmental anthology, Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction, embodies the ethos of a writer’s collective. Comprised of the work of over 60 writers (49 authors and 15 poets), as well as a slew of editors and group leaders at the helm, Meaningful Conflicts strives to accomplish the mighty task of bringing together a variety of perspectives, styles, and mediums into a cohesive collection. The inherent contrast between the different pieces serves to highlight the very theme of the collection: to explore the potential that conflict presents; potential for healing, illumination, and collaboration.
One of the longest, continuously running writers’ workshops in the country, the OCWW’s devotion to supporting writers and providing opportunities for the growth and development of their craft is readily apparent. The foreword describes the collection as a “Developmental Anthology,” and by contextualizing the process through which Meaningful Conflicts was created it allows the reader to fully embrace and understand the pieces that follow. The foreword allows readers to understand a specific feeling that works its way through the collection: a sense of striving. There is a striving to understand, to reckon and come to terms with the unique human experience of our limitations and the inescapable realities of conflict.
In the first story in the initial fiction portion of the anthology, “Thoughts Before the Group Session” by Peter Hoppock, a father grapples with understanding and coming to terms with his child’s struggles. The piece alludes to the fact that his child is trans, describing their experience with gender dysphoria, yet throughout the piece, the father uses she/her pronouns and refers to them as “Jenny.” The father, whose child is in an Arizona residential facility, understands the gravity of the situation, reminiscing on the suicide of a friend’s spouse. Yet, he repeatedly uses “she” and “her” to describe his child, fixated on the idea of “his daughter,” a mentality clearly conflicting with the sense of guilt he feels regarding the ways in which he has failed his child; the way he continues to fail them by using pronouns they have rejected through coming to recognize their own body to be an “enemy.” In a time where our country is struggling with horrendous attacks against trans people and trans youth in particular, where dangerous legislation is being passed in a number of states, where there is a real and life-threatening conflict between the complex realities of gender and the base fears of outdated societal norms, “Thoughts Before the Group Session” is an example of how writing can be an attempt to understand and come to terms with such feelings of conflict. It is an example of what this collection is trying to do.
A piece entitled “Conversations With Condiments” by Kelly Q. Anderson explores the struggle at the heart of getting older. While a central protagonist considers a friend who died young, he dreams of attending his high school reunion, he faces the reality of realizing that he just might hate himself or at least who he has become: the type of man who misses reunions. The type of man who has lived less of life than a friend who died only three years out of high school.
In “On Seeing Pablo Neruda’s Isla Negra Home in the In-Flight Magazine,” poet Kathy Mirkin explores the gulf between sky and sea. Her verse grapples with an urge, as a poet, to understand another poet, to understand her own father, to ask questions that will never be answered. She manages to illustrate a conflict between the human need to understand one another and the reality that each individual contains within them, the unknowable.
In the Creative Nonfiction section, a piece by Nancy Hepner Goodman entitled “Mother Knows Best” reflects on the sense of conflict that exists between a mother and daughter, or rather, between an adult daughter and the internalized mentality of her younger self. There’s a tug-of-war inside adult children when it comes to dealing with aging parents and this is perfectly explored through Hepner Goodman’s reflection on a visit to her mother that forced her to reckon with a desire to be accountable and her mother’s stubborn insistence on protecting her.
Ultimately, Meaningful Conflicts is a bit on the unwieldy side, volume-wise. With five sections worth of Fiction (“Short Fiction with a Wallop,” “Heroines in Crisis,” “Times of Tension,” “The Troubled Narrator,” “Life-Changing Challenges”), a Poetry section, and three sections worth of Creative Nonfiction (“Overcoming,” “Coming of Age,” “What’s in a Life”), there is a lot of material in this anthology. Yet, the length of the pieces within the collection are more than manageable, and so varied that a reader can indulge themselves and take their time, diving into the abundance of these writers’ efforts, leaving and returning to the collection at their own pace.
A vast and varied anthology, Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction, is the ideal collection for readers looking to reflect on and explore the complex and ever-changing nature of life, which, as much as anything else, is to some degree an experience of constant (and often illuminating) conflict.