Back to School

Tonight was my first night class. I think I mentioned earlier that I'm taking a five week workshop called "The Writing Life" with Christina Decarie at Mount A . . . and now I'm psyched! It's a small group, only seven, all women.

Tonight we got an overview of the course and did some general sorts of exercises to get more comfortable with one another. The format is we'll have discussions and exercises on the Tuesday evening for three hours and then workshop on Thursday evening for three hours. We each have to prepare 3 pages (single-spaced) of our work to receive feedback on. I've decided to go full out bold and brave and use excerpts from my novel in progress in order to help me reconnect to the project and finish this baby. (If you remember I had set a goal earlier this year to have it ready to enter for the Richards Prize this year. Deadline looms in the fall.)

We did some cool exercises this evening. The first one that got us writing was to write about the first time you ever wrote something creative, telling it like a story, not like a journal entry. Here's what I wrote:

In the first grade the teacher tossed her Easter drawing into the trash. She coloured outside the lines and the teacher didn't want parents to think it was her fault the child had no artistic ability. The teacher wanted the classroom to be pretty. She wanted to feel proud of it when the parents came for Parent Teacher Day.

By the third grade she had received nearly a dozen report cards that labelled her handwriting as unacceptable.

After four years of being bullied by her classmates for being overweight and shy, after four years of always getting picked last for sports, after four years of feeling like an outcast, Kellie really wanted to find something she could do well.

She stared down the blank paper until it looked away and conceded to her will. She manipulated the words. She dared to dream of a world where children were nice and everyone played together, nobody got picked last. She wrote about a boy and his first winter carnival. She disappeared into the page and pretended to be that boy.

Much later she sat in her classroom with her eyes closed, concentrating on the voice coming from the intercom, will the principal to call out her name. And then her eyes slid open and she tried to pretend to be surprised when he did.

Not much of a story, but hey it's hard to produce real quality on demand like that. Continuing with our childhood memories of writing she asked us what writing felt like then, does it still feel that way and if not, then why. My answer was a little bit different from a lot of people . . . ass-backward really. As a child and then a teen I didn't really think about writing, it was natural, it was just something I did. It didn't seem to evoke any emotion from me that I can recall. I leaned toward it because it was easy, it was something I could do. That's why I studied journalism after high school . . . I mean what else was I going to do? Become a scientist? But I didn't know what journalism was really, I didn't understand the kind of writing. And after having all my creative urges beat down and suppressed for years in journalism, I became very disenfranchised with the whole act of writing. I had yet to realise that you could write creatively in Canada and maybe even make a living doing it. I thought that was the stuff of America or the United Kingdom. So, I didn't start doing creative writing until about five years ago. Before 2000 I had never written a short story (other than high school assignments). So now the act of writing creatively is very exciting for me. It's the most amazing adrenaline rush and it's very addictive. It brings me great pleasure . . . most people had that since the beginning . . . and some have lost it along the way. But nobody who started writing as young as I did never had it until they were well into adulthood. Once again I am an enigma.

Mood: Creative
Drinking: Tea
Listening To: Van Halen, Jamie's Crying
Hair: Changing colour . . . must be the water