On classes for grownups and personal essays
The final Travel Writing Boot Camp with James Sturtz met last night. Of our founding 8 (all women), just two besides me showed. Since Cordelia just listens, that left just mine and Jennifers personal pieces for three hour's review. Loosely spaced around an enormous blank conference table, at one end of the just-painted lecture room, we were all (I think) awkwardly aware of three things:
1.
This is embarrassing for James. A skeleton crew for his final class which, in the penultimate one of the week before, we'd discussed as a party. I'd considered bringing wine.
2.
This must happen in continuing ed classes the world over, but it was stark last evening. We're all adults here, he just happens to be the one doing the thing we're interested in and have come to learn. But he lives like us, and inhabits the same New York, in probably a very same manner, as us. We're full-fledged adults and, if we get good enough, we may one day compete with the teacher for a feature.
3.
I know no more about you people than the fragments pieced from the stories you've presented.
Jennifer – proud, self-obsessed and apparently bi-sexual (a new thread woven prominently in her recent works) across the table, who chose the seat closest to the teacher the first class and never gave it up. Jennifer of long grey hair, aggressive lipstick and bathroom breaks - writes long-winded pieces with unnecessary dialog. She's an editor at The Week (this fascinates R), and has written about the Dia, a historic site in Brooklyn, her disdain for the crowds of Prague (a whore's town) and that she can't know a country till she's “kissed an inhabitant.”
Cordelia, hoping to get fired from a high position at The Flower Market, traveled lots but hasn't written since the very first class. A sharp and insightful critic of both character and writing though.
And the stories of the women missing – for another post (I wish we'd been able to keep each person's work).
Somewhere in downtown Manhattan last night, two novice writers bared battered souls via pieces much more about inner worlds of lost loves and identity than the outer world of travel. My own was a wandering thing I'd written for Barbara, "Birthplace Bombay". It was meant to launch a book project that sits and waits for me, but I tried presenting it as a stand-alone essay. Which didn't work at all but I thought reactions would be, if not rapturous, at least positive about the writing itself. James said it "read like a prose poem" - which I thought was okay really and will try not to think of as criticism.
So now I have a mess to work with. Personal essays are as long as an inner journey and after last night's intensive battering – of laying bare not only my writing but also my soul – I'm ready to sit out psycho-babble and other's opinions for a while.
I will pitch blameless little pieces about wine tours of Bulgaria, nightspots in Sofia, lobster shacks on Mt Desert...
C
1.
This is embarrassing for James. A skeleton crew for his final class which, in the penultimate one of the week before, we'd discussed as a party. I'd considered bringing wine.
2.
This must happen in continuing ed classes the world over, but it was stark last evening. We're all adults here, he just happens to be the one doing the thing we're interested in and have come to learn. But he lives like us, and inhabits the same New York, in probably a very same manner, as us. We're full-fledged adults and, if we get good enough, we may one day compete with the teacher for a feature.
3.
I know no more about you people than the fragments pieced from the stories you've presented.
Jennifer – proud, self-obsessed and apparently bi-sexual (a new thread woven prominently in her recent works) across the table, who chose the seat closest to the teacher the first class and never gave it up. Jennifer of long grey hair, aggressive lipstick and bathroom breaks - writes long-winded pieces with unnecessary dialog. She's an editor at The Week (this fascinates R), and has written about the Dia, a historic site in Brooklyn, her disdain for the crowds of Prague (a whore's town) and that she can't know a country till she's “kissed an inhabitant.”
Cordelia, hoping to get fired from a high position at The Flower Market, traveled lots but hasn't written since the very first class. A sharp and insightful critic of both character and writing though.
And the stories of the women missing – for another post (I wish we'd been able to keep each person's work).
Somewhere in downtown Manhattan last night, two novice writers bared battered souls via pieces much more about inner worlds of lost loves and identity than the outer world of travel. My own was a wandering thing I'd written for Barbara, "Birthplace Bombay". It was meant to launch a book project that sits and waits for me, but I tried presenting it as a stand-alone essay. Which didn't work at all but I thought reactions would be, if not rapturous, at least positive about the writing itself. James said it "read like a prose poem" - which I thought was okay really and will try not to think of as criticism.
So now I have a mess to work with. Personal essays are as long as an inner journey and after last night's intensive battering – of laying bare not only my writing but also my soul – I'm ready to sit out psycho-babble and other's opinions for a while.
I will pitch blameless little pieces about wine tours of Bulgaria, nightspots in Sofia, lobster shacks on Mt Desert...
C
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