Catch up

The last time I blogged was on Sunday, and now it's Wednesday. I say this not because you can't tell on your own, but just so you know what I think has happened, so if actually something else happened entirely, you won't be confused.

Fatigue is finally catching up with me. I had discovered this great working pattern of going to bed at midnight or 12:30, getting up at 5:30 or six and ten taking a two hour nap around 3 in the afternoon. Yesterday I broke the pattern and instead of sleeping in the afternoon, I went to the sauna with my roomies. So in addition to getting no sleep, I got dehydrated. I went to bed at 9:40 last night and still couldn't wake up until almost seven. No more missing naps!!

I think I am the only one in my apartment who has actually cooked anything. And not one of us has used the microwave. We just eat cheese and yogurt, nuts and fruit and peanut butter, bread and butter, and, of course, chocolate. I haven't eaten a speck of wheat, in spite of the big table of desserts available everyday at lunch.

Talk about school, will you??? Is that what you are thinking?

OK.

I don't think I have talked about Claire Davis' craft talk entitled Sex: How Far Do We Go and Will You Still Respect Me After the Story. This took place on Sunday, which makes me realize that the last time I blogged was just past midnight on Saturday.

I went to the sex talk expecting it to be nuts and bolts, limits and suggestions. Well, it was and it wasn't. It was multimedia. Ms. Davis used slides of art to exemplify various types of sex in writing. She compared the cover of a romance novel to the Gustav Klimt's The Kiss. And then she read to us, first examples of bad romance novel sex and then amazing examples of sex in literature. Bad sex, she pointed out, is there for its own sake, to titillate. It does not move the story along, which should be the primary purpose of anything you put in a story or book. It does not really show character development. It is superficial, about body parts.

Good sex is the opposite. She read examples from a number of sources. Some of them made me want to read the books. Not because they were sexy, but because it was so obvious that the writer could write. And that Claire Davis' knows how to give a great craft talk. I mean she started out with the story of walking her dogs and coming across this little pick up truck with a six foot inflatable penis in the back. I knew I wasn't going to sleep through it.

My roommate, Linda, was taking notes and at some point I looked over at her and she was sitting on her hands. There was a moment when I thought I was going to have to leave the room because a passage that Ms. Davis was reading was so disturbing. And yet there was not one graphic bit of physical description in it. There was just enough that the reader knew what was going on. The rest was internal. This was a rape scene. I need to find out what book it was in. She also read from Lolita and now I think I have to read Lolita.

After this craft talk, we went to workshop. It was our first workshop with John Rember and Linda's memoir chapter was being workshopped along with Gary's memoir chapter about PTSD. Linda has written about something that happened in her childhood that led her on a long journey. I think we were both expecting the kind of workshop that we had the day before with Valerie and Craig, but John Rember actually conducted the workshop like a class, calling on random people to see what answers they could provide. It was exciting, but also confusing. I think because a lot of us are beginners at studying writing, we don't always have a clue about all the terms and concepts. He started talking about using third person technique in the first person, and he also talked about using different 'I's'. I had no idea what he was talking about, but it sounded interesting. Later, Linda and I caught him at lunch and asked him a hundred questions.

When we workshopped the other piece, John at some point told Gary that he needed to think about me when he was writing. This is because I had said I couldn't focus on the piece from the front end and so after reading the first page, skipped to the end and read it from there. Gary said he didn't care about me since I wasn't his intended audience. Linda thought this would upset me. "I don't care about Adrianna!" I thought it was kind of funny being talked about in the abstract like that. Anyway, it felt almost like an acting class where you go deep into some feelings in order to change the intensity of the work.

After lunch we went to a talk called, Publishers and Publishing: What you need to know, by Christopher Howell, an editor of numerous literary magazines. I took copious notes. It's the only time I have really taken pages of notes.

After a nap and a long break, I went with my roommates to hear Valerie Miner and Peter Sears give readings. Probably owing to my severe fatigue that night, I remember not that much about the reading, except talking to Valerie afterwards. I also remember that she read in a fairly normal speaking voice, which I thought was a good thing. Oh, and I remember that Mr. Sears' voice reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield's. This should prove how tired I really was.

On Monday, the morning craft talk was Pattiann Rogers, a poet, talking about the creative in creative writing. She talked about poetic topics that have been done to death, including the roadkill poem and the poem about a visit to a dying loved one's hospital room. This has become the punchline to a lot of jokes, other writers saying when they stand up that they were going to read a roadkill poem, but thank goodness Pattiann had warned them not to. Ms. Rogers used a number of paintings of the Annunciation to show how artists can do the same subject in the same way over and over. She talked about different perspectives and read some work that used them.

Then it was time for workshop. My piece was workshopped. I had submitted the devil chapter of my book, which had had a lot of work done on it already. I was hoping for more. Mostly I got positive feedback. Everyone seemed to like it including Valerie and Craig, who used parts of it as examples when he talked about scene. On my comments sheet, he wrote that he wanted to read more and said it was a good sign. WE did two other fiction pieces that day, John's and Ryan's. I was really pleased with the comments I got and I realized I need to do something about the blindfold. People keep be confused about it. I need to make it more clear that the blindfold is not there, that he has led her to believe it's there. Also, people seem to think that the Lord of Mendes could be a giant, which I had not intended. The tips I got from Valerie and Craig involved more interstitial action and Craig suggested that I comb the manuscript for words that alluded to sight and blindness which were ironic in case I had not intended the irony.

Just to skip ahead a bit, yesterday we got our faculty assignments for the semester. I was paired with Pete Fromm. I am not unhappy about that. He asked me when I saw him at the reading if it was OK and I told him that I had put him on my advisor preference sheet. He said they don't see those. He's really nice. On Monday night all the students and faculty had a pizza dinner get together and he came over to our table and introduced himself to the four of us. I think all of us except Abby have a little crush on him because he's outspoken and funny and he laughs a lot and teases the other faculty members, espccially the ones he is most friendly with. Abby likes him fine, but says he reminds her of her dad, and EW! How could we have crushes on him?

I have read a bit of one of his books, and liked it (exept for the baseball part, which was far too much like actual baseball for me to like it.)

Finding out my faculty assignment made me so nervous that I didn't feel like sleeping when I came back to the room. Instead Debbie and I sat in the living room and talked about girl stuff. Thus I missed my nap.

Anyway, I finished my micro-fiction the day before yesterday and today we are going to read them all in class. I love Linda's, a little non-fiction piece. It is hilarious and riveting. After hearing it, I didn't feel as good about mine, but then I read mine to them and realized that it isn't that bad. It feels like a poem almost, which is what one of the Johns from our class told me yesterday at lunch--that he felt like he was writing a poem.

OK. Need to stop now. Apparently my dad made the comment, "How can anyone write so much?" when checking out my blog. So if I write any more, he will just shake his head at me. :)