Hidden Gems

I'm doing a reading on the radio station KFJC tomorrow morning. I was thinking that I'd do a piece from my last novel, but as I was looking through the contents of my thumb drive, I found a short story that I really loved that I'd written last year. It wasn't edited at all (the word "shit" appeared about fifty times) and when I read it, it came out to about 45 minutes.

Oh, did I mention that I hadn't put on an ending?

The nice thing is that I had a deadline. I have to get this polished and ready for prime time by tonight because the reading papens at 7:20 a.m. PST tomorrow morning. I'm always impressed at the depths of laser-like focus I'm able to muster when faced with a looming deadline, and I was able to write the ending (a different, and I think better, ending than I had originally imagined) and cut a great deal from it in a couple of hours last night. Tonight I do some more editing and then decide on the soundtrack.

The best thing is that after this intensive few hours of work, this story will be ready for prime time. It goes on my list of stories ready to be put out there in the world.

I love when that happens.

The Weather is Here. Wish You Were Beautiful

I'm here at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars writer's conference, and it's been an enlightening few days. For those of you able to make it out to this conference in 2009, I would highly recommend it. The staff and faculty are all accessible, and the variety of subjects presented is phenomenal.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference, and I showed up bright and early at 9-ish to register. I hung out for a while, then attended the keynote addresses from Bernard Cooper and Jeff Biggers. The irony is that Tuesday night my mother had been telling me about going to a restaurant entirely staffed by fabulous drag queens in Greenwich Village with a man who was, at the time, head of Literacy Volunteers of Coconino County. That guy was Jeff Biggers.

I've rubbed elbows with authors and shmoozed at least one agent, and I got to have a conversation with Orson Scott Card, who is the happiest, sweetest guy you could ever hope to meet. He was as nice as Rick Moody, who was not only one of the nightly speakers, but also on the faculty. He gave a great class on story structure, which he entirely based on grammar and sentence structure, and he told me I'm a genius. So I automatically like him.

But it's not just the classes presented that have been enlightening. The interactions between classes have been just as intersting, and are coming thick and fast. In particular, the "small group intensive," a session where your work is being critiqued by a group of 3-4 of your peers, has been...a treat. This is the first time in my adult life that I've sat through a class that has been reduced to a shouting match between the presenter and one of the students.

The class was a playwriting class, and all the participants were to have had their entries in five weeks before the start of the class. I submitted the first 30 pages of my play, one of the other women (we were all women in this class) submitted a single-spaced 44 pages of her play, and the other two submitted far, far less. One submitted 12 pages of a poorly-written play (she later told us that it was three scenes from a larger work)and another submitted 17 pages of character sketch for a novel.

The instructor's idea was to tackle the shorter pieces in the first session and spend the other two sessions taking on the longer pieces. But, as the man said, the best-laid plans blah blah blah blah. The man who said that was white. As the woman who completely derailed our sessions would have pointed out. Her 17-page play was three scenes of dialog about a slave woman who was 1) thinking of escaping, 2) about to escape and then 3) had escaped (no, the escape was never shown), but she kept insisting that there were depths to it that we just didn't get. Because she hadn't written them.

Every time the instructor asked a question, she would give him a coquettish look and a non-answer. It didn't help that she had the voice of Butterfly McQueen, which, when she laughed turned into Zoe the muppet. It's hard to take seriously the insistence that someone is a serious scholar when they talk like a muppet and act even less mature.

"You don't give any descriptions. Who is this person?"

[Eyelash bat] "Who do you think it is?"

"You don't give a time or place. When and where does this play take place?"

[Sideways glance] "When do you think it is?"

By the end of the class, we had talked about nothing but her play and she kept going on about how it was full of taboos that were risky and hard to write about, although none of it was in the material we were given, so it was hard to credit her with it. By the end of the class, the instructor was literally shouting at her, telling her that she was being unhelpful and unprofessional. It was uncomfortable for the rest of us, and I found out later that all three of the rest of us resented the hell out of her for dragging the entire process on. This woman kept insisting that the rest of us had no appreciation of the history of slavery in America, of the nuances of African-American culture since then, the fallout, both economic and social of slavery and what it means, particularly to Southern, African-American women. She was taking a huge risk, she said, in just writing this down. Although she had written, effectively, nothing.

On the second day, we did the second short piece, since we hadn't gotten to it on the first. Unfortunately, it was called "Never Cross a Southern Mama," and the muppet woman said "Whose mama? Yours? I was interested in the title, but it was just a bunch of white women, so I stopped reading." Yeah. That's a helpful attitude in a workshop. Without mentioning any of the content of the woman's piece, she proceeded to hijack all further discussion into an indictment of modern society and its ignorance of black history, and once again degraded into a shouting match.

By the time the instructor called for a break halfway through, she started telling us that she "didn't feel safe" offering criticism. When I told her that we were showing respect for her point of view, but she wasn't showing us the same courtesy she cut me off in mid-sentence. I made the mistake of calling her "hon," and she told me "Don't talk to me like I'm a child," and got up and walked out.

The minute the door closed behind her, everyone uttered a sigh of relief.

The amazing thing was the she came back about 15 minutes later and sat there in the room with a book in her hand, making notes on 3x5 cards. I was at least grateful that she'd shut up.

Later that day, I tracked down the coordinator of the conference and told him about the horrible disruption she'd been, and he told me that I was the third person to come to him. The second was the woman who'd written the Southern mama story. The FIRST, was the muppet woman. She'd accused the instructor of being both sexist AND racist, and told the coordinator that she'd felt threatened. What he told me was that she had a reputation around the university as an amateur, as immature and not really ready for workshopping. He felt bad for those of us who had suffered her in our midst, and that he would do "something" to make it up to me.

I suggested that next year, he give the instructors permission to throw out participants who act inappropriately (the instructor said that if he'd been allowed, he certainly would have thrown her out) and publish some code of behavior for small-group participants. He agreed that both of those were worthy suggestions.

We'll see what happens next year.

What about my play? Well, I was given some solid suggestions that I shall spend the next few weeks implementing.