Posts tagged with "residency" - Faerye Net

Final residency

2008-06-19T16:20:11+00:00

In Oregon for fewer than 6 hours, and I’ve already bought a book at Powell’s (okay, airport Powell’s, but still) and eaten Pizza Schmizza. Huzzah for home, for easy no-sales-tax math and shade, glorious shade!

Why today (now yesterday) was awesome

2007-06-29T01:21:22+00:00

Reading went okay.
No one but me noticed flaws in reading.
First semester student said I looked like Kate Winslet giving reading.
Wasn’t under the glass light fixture dome when it spontaneously dropped and shattered, covering entire floor of my dorm room with shards.

Oh yes! A good day!

One of us! One of us!

2007-06-26T22:07:13+00:00

Names in this story have been changed to protect the silly (writers are seldom innocent).

Some time last year a gifted non-fiction writer of my acquaintance, Karin, told me she did not understand fiction writers. “I couldn’t do that. How do you decide what happens?”

“You just do. You find something cool, and have it happen, I guess?”

She shook her head.

Last night, I sat at a kitchen island chatting with Elsa, a wild-eyed fictionist like myself. Elsa wiped the blue formica clean as we spoke, the action almost subconscious for a fastidious parent.

With the indiscreet clicking and clacking characteristic of dormitory doors, Karin emerged from her room. She looked stunned.

“That surprised to see me?” I said.

“Are we keeping you up, honey?” said Elsa.

“I’m writing…a story.” She half-smiled.

Elsa and I exchanged glances, then studied the transfigured face of our friend. “Fiction?”

“Yes. I never wrote any before. Never.”

“You made something up!?” one of us said, and “Good for you!” the other, all at once, as we surged forward to grab Karin’s hands.

The residencies are transformative, remarkable. They are crucibles and comfort. Imagine this change! Imagine the confirmed teller of truths — or, depending on your philosophy, seeker of them — turning to fiction. It can happen. After all, I’m a confirmed confabulator, and I just wrote this.

Small joys

2007-06-24T15:33:41+00:00

A small joy from my grad school Residency, rife with joys of all sizes: sitting in front of a notoriously enthusiastic poetry professor at a poetry reading. His good-poem exhale (you know this exists, right? Go to a poetry reading, a good one, if you don’t. Synchronized exhales when the poem ends) is louder than average, and if someone’s poem is really good, he’ll say, almost subconsciously, “Geez!” I used to fear mentioning it to him. I thought maybe he’d suppress it if he knew he did it. But I am sure now that he knows, and knows we love it, and knows that when he lets out, as he did two nights ago at one of Joe Millar’s poems, the entire name-in-vain, “Jesus Christ!” it is the best and most sincere compliment.