Week one is done, and the workshops roll on. To bring you up speed—since the last post, we’ve started working on pieces in a substantial spectrum–from pieces that spring from each writer’s name, to pieces that ask the writer to explicitly write about something they don’t know. Dragons and Hogwarts are off-limits. They’ve generated lists of rules that they are asked to live by, (sometimes quite lengthy), chosen a few of those rules, and mischievously broken them in writing. Often with unnerving intent. Often with a good piece of writing packaged around that content–and at the very least, a piece of writing that they want to share out loud with our group.
They’ve written poems with a borrowed line, and written 250 word short short stories. They’ve imagined a character who is able to talk to the author, and written it (Macbeth berating Shakespeare because he wanted to be a shepherd, Henry asking Berryman to consider all the community service work that he has completed, etc.)
They’ve written a story with a character that a classmate made up for them; I made Tessa Wagman, a Research and Development associate for Casio Keyboards, with a secret–she sends Billy Joel a mash note every week. The story I got back was that Tessa can actually hear snow falling, and the writer had put such lyric investment into the piece, I was floored. And humbled.
We’ve had these gems crop up in read pieces–and managed to catch them and write them on our walls:
“I want something that makes your mouth jealous the minute you say it”
“geese-licked”
“molars tucked in the tornado alley of Bill’s mouth”
“the sartorially bland splendor of Indiana”
“rain like hemispheres splashing my glasses”
In less exciting words–there has been much worth noting. As the comfort level picks up, the students take more risks–and by this time, each student has taken at least one notable risk–the tough guys writing legitimate tender moments into their pieces, the shy girls writing about something where true love is no where in sight, not even in the vicinity of the poem. All of them are leaving behind the prescriptive, didactic voice for a conflict, an image, a metaphor. (Okay, not all the time–but we’re getting better.)
They’ve had an all-star cast of writers here to read for them: P.F. Kluge,
Writer-in-Residence at Kenyon; G.C. Waldrep, Visiting Assisant Professor at Kenyon; Nancy Zafris, the fiction editor for KR; and Dan Laskin, the Director of Publications for Kenyon. Each night has been great, and each reader has had explicit advice for the writers–from avoiding dream sequences to trusting your vision.
The weekend is their first extended period of unstructured writing time–and they need to be pushing things they’ve started in the workshops, revising what they are working on, readying them, so that they’ve got something for their own readings that will happen next week.
The momentum right now is self-perpetuating–fingers crossed that effort keeps spawning effort, that good writing keeps becoming more and more of the same…