My entire life as an artist has been an ongoing struggle to overcome that initial confusion and where it lead me. My friend the novelist Jonathan Baumbach said a number of years ago that it had taken him twenty however many years to get a Ph.D., and it remained to be seen how long it would take him to get rid of it, if he could. Picasso said he could draw like a master when he was young, but it took him a life-time to be able to draw like a child. My experience of your workshop was one of being led away from such intellectualizing. Since the substance your classes was the materials of students' own lives, we were called upon to confront material which was nothing less than the physicality, anger, joy, pain of memory rendered on the page moment by moment.
Artists move in the opposite direction, trying to embody it, embody it, whatever it is.
Young artists and wannabes, careening into their first attitudes and understandings, are likely to be at risk under the influence of intellectuals. I most certainly was. It's an occupational disease of the intellect to sound a whole lot smarter than it is. If you sit around brilliantly analyzing your circumstance of the moment, only to walk away helplessly into your stupid life enough times, you end up understanding that the intellect can be a sucker and power-crazy. It plays a secondary role in creative work, and sometimes no role at all.