The joys of losing

So, I didn't win the NSAL competition, but it was an interesting experience. I met a lot of really wonderful and talented writers, plus everyone involved in the organization is just so sweet and charming. The judges of the contest were Lauren Groff, Larry Leichman, and Bill Luvaas.

Lauren and Larry had an interesting back and forth going, because Lauren is a staunch supporter of literary writing, and Larry (he works for a publishing company) was more interested in telling us how to make money (even if that means writing genre). They got into it a little bit during the Master Class we took on Saturday morning.

Bill was pretty quiet during the whole thing, but he definitely fell on Lauren's side.

The audience (yes, there was an audience for the class) asked us what we wanted to do with our lives, and how we wanted to fit writing into our lives (this was a question based pretty solidly on Lauren and Larry's argument). I wanted to be eloquent. I tried. I don't think, however, that it came out right.

This is something like what I said (don't worry, for veracity's sake I'm going to liberally sprinkle in likes): My dad's been a writer for like 45 years, and I think that part of me rebelling was like thinking I didn't want to write and trying not to write, but I've always just kind of written anyway. I'm lucky in that I teach and I love it. But like writing for me isn't really a need, it's something of me, like how my fingernails grow?

And then people came up to me later and said stuff like "Oh well, you didn't win, but that's okay because you love teaching!"

And this is true and not true. Of course I didn't think I would win, and at the same time I was disappointed not to win. And yes, I love teaching with all my heart, but I don't love writing any less than that, you know? I think I have trouble being sincere with people, especially when "people" means an audience. I just don't really have it in me to stand up in front of a room of people and say "I love this thing so much" (this, incidentally, is one of the reasons I spent about an hour of my wedding crying; it's difficult for me to make such private things public).

But! I suppose that's what I'm doing now, eh? Making something very private as public as it can be? This is one of the reasons I love writing. I can take my time and say what I want to say in exactly the way I want to say it. I think that's a beautiful thing. Not that I'm so very eloquent, but at least I have the chance to try to say the thing I want in the way I want it to be said.

All in all, it was quite an intense and quite probably life altering experience.

In the summer time

Taught my first class of the summer today and I think it went quite well. I was especially pleased with the class discussion. I gave the kids two short pieces to read (a story and a nonfiction essay) and then we had discussion; they had awesome, insightful, interesting things to say, and on the first day of class! It was great.

I gave them an in-class writing assignment, and one of the prompts they could choose was "remember back to a time when your heart was broken. If you had a chance to take revenge, would you?" Out of 21 students, 13 used this prompt, and only one person- one - said she'd take revenge. The other 12 mostly said things like "god/life/fate will take revenge for me," or "I'm getting my revenge, actually, by being happy now and being the better person" (which totally doesn't count as revenge!).

I wonder if they're being honest. Is it true that most people wouldn't take revenge? Is it strange that I'm surprised by this? What compels them all, when they are allowed to write either nonfiction or fiction (where, in theory, they are especially free to write anything they want), to take the moral high road?

I asked one of them to consider writing her essay from the "bad" point of view, because her piece was mercilessly good. She even calls herself a goodie-too-shoes (sic) at the end. As a result, the essay reads like a string of truisms. I recommended she have the "good" and "bad" self fight it out in essay form, just to see what she could come up with (I'm a big fan of playing around with writing, experimenting, and reshaping to see what happens).

Because, okay, I want to be a good person. I work at it. Hurting someone would devastate me. But. Excising demons (to be trite here for a momentito) through fiction? Oh my yes. When else in life does one get that kind of freedom? What makes my kids afraid to explore this impulse? Or do they really not have it?

I guess what I'm getting at here is that I think most of them have to be insincere about this. Or they want to impress me with their goodness. Or maybe we all construct ideas of ourselves that we use as shorthand to answer questions like this. For example, I think of myself as this kind of a person, so no, I'd never enjoy this or that or whatever. I see myself as a good person, so no, I'd never try to get revenge on anyone. But the thing is, there are so many little choices we make every day that are absolutely devastating to other people. The simple choice of whether to go to this restaurant or that one, or whether to buy our clothes from the mall or the thrift store, or etc etc; all these choices matter. These choices have far flung effects that we will never be able to see or really fully comprehend.

I can hear, for example, like all day long (who would be willing to say this to me all day? Ha.) that the lifestyle I'm living is an unsustainable one that causes suffering and torment around the world. Do I see that suffering? Does it feel like it is of me? No.

It's just an issue of ethics, really, to me. That these kids, right? That they can't conceive of getting revenge, or at least they say they can't conceive of it, but at the same time they are a part of this too-large-for-words killing machine and that would probably never factor into the decisions they make, the person they see themselves as, or anything else, really.

So what is my point? I don't think I have one. I don't know why I'm comparing Creative Writing essays and short stories to worldwide suffering and globalization. But I am. In an obscure way, this question reminds me of the hypocrisy of living in the US. I.E. "I'm a good person! I would never hurt anyone! But I don't want jails/mental institutions/trash dumps/etc in my neighborhood. And I don't want to have to give anything up in order to get more $ and more $ and more $."

Whoa. Okay. Thanks for hanging in there with me. It was a really good class. And I'm impressed with their work for the most part. I think this semester is going to be fun.

Paper Skin Glass Bones

I'm coming to you live from my week off in-between semesters. Ah, the joys of being a teacher.

I'm happy to report that one of my short stories is going to be published in an online journal. Check it out: http://www.paperskinglassbones.com/index.html

I'll be in their June launch issue.

Also, I'm going to the National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Competition in Short Story Writing next week. Scary! Here is a link to the competition: http://www.arts-nsal.org/competition.html

If you'll recall, I won first place for my local chapter. This is all just too exciting/nerve wracking.

So, a week off from teaching, but not really. We're doing grade norming in the English Department, so I have to read and grade a set of creative writing papers. I also have to get lessons prepared for the coming weeks so I'm not scrambling. It's going to be a challenge to fit an entire semester's worth of creative writing stuff into six weeks.

And then Interpretation of Fiction for the second half of the semester! Like a crazy person, I've decided that we are going to read a novel (in a week and a half!). My kids are going to have to really buckle down, but I figure that as long as I alert them to this fact, we'll all be okay.

Right?