theferrett @ 4:20am: Extraordinary Time: A Snapshot Of, Perhaps, Too Much Sharing
The night air is cool and swarming with Japanese beetles. I'm pacing underneath the buzzing glare of the sodium arc lamps, a thick sheaf of papers in my hand, scanning them hard for the second reading of the night. Every story gets read once for pleasure, twice for critique, maybe three times for analysis. And this one has such moments of pure joy that I'm scrubbing the tears away from my eyes.
The door clicks. Kathleen comes down the stairs from her apartment, all long legs and fashionable clothing and sweeps of beautiful red hair. She's heading back to the common room, where she'll sit with seven other students in silence, flipping pages as she studies and dissects
her three stories for the night.
We nod amiably to each other, an easy friendship that doesn't need any words. And as she passes by me, the glint of her sparkly red shoes reflects diamonds in the moonlight.
"Click your heels three times," I smirk.
She stops.
"I don't want to go home," she says. "This is better."
I think about it.
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
It feels like a little betrayal to say it. But three days.
Three fucking days and we already have this artificial construct that brings us together, circling the wheel of our
ka, eighteen students devoted to fiction and love and life. We want to be writers. And here, we
are writers. There's no day job, no worry about the rent, nobody who isn't a writer to distract us.
We breathe in words and exhale analysis. Our minds are being broken, our stories flayed out, our fundamental assumptions about who we are as creators is being carefully shattered so that we can reassemble them into something stronger. More us.
This is our voice. It's in these bits here somewhere. And if we can clear away this underbrush that chokes us, we're going to shout so loud that nobody in the universe can stop us.
I love my classmates. It is a visceral love. A fierce love.
They give me such beautiful gifts.
The thing about Clarion is that our relationship started the moment the acceptions were announced. We scanned each other's blogs, friended each other on Facebook, chatted on AIM, asked dumb questions on our customized mailing list. I remember hunting for photos, going,
who will this person be when he's not just words on a screen? Is his face kind? What does this smile in this snapshot tell me about him? Before we even got here, we'd split from one ill-formed Clarion mass into eighteen personalities - some more clearly defined than others. But we'd begun to get a sense of our differing dreams.
And now I'm here. When I got off the plane, I could pick them out, one by one. I never missed a name, because everyone was
someone to me. And I knew that Emily was sweet and considerate, and Dana was a colossal comics nerd, and Monica had cool dresses, and Steffi was the runner.
But come on, man. They're not here to make me happy. I'm here with my chainsaw in my keyboard, ready to rip shit to shreds. I know I've got some talent, at least. To be a writer is the purest form of ego - you're looking at the billions of words that other people have poured onto pages everywhere and then standing on a chair to scream, "I'M FUCKING BETTER THAN THAT!"
Honestly. You think you have something to say about the human condition that Shakespeare didn't get around to already? You're going up against every man who ever wrote a word, and with you're still squeezing yourself into the authorial crowd at the bar and going, "Yeah, whatever, you guys have had your say.... But listen to
me."
So yeah. I have an ego. Have to. Otherwise, I'd never say anything. And when I get to Clarion, I've got my ideas soaked in Sterno and ready to set them on fire, and I'm hungry to be the best in the class, and I'm geared to show them how goddamned
good I am.
And they're all nice people. I'm enjoying myself with them so much, throwing myself into those conversations about movies and crazy stories that I'm finding myself drawn to seventeen different people
simultaneously. Their personalities come into close focus as I talk to them, and I discover that E.J. has the best deadpan delivery in the world, and Gra-with-an-accent has a rangy, easygoing charm that I adore, and shit, even as I write this now I'm like,
man, I don't mean to leave you off the list, but you know how it is. This narrative will suffer if I list everyone.
Thing is, I know them as people. Writers? I can't say until they submit their story for the day. Every morning, three or four of them sends something out to us. That's when they all show me why
they're here - yeah, Keffy's got a way of turning sarcasm into high art, but she wasn't brought here because of her conversational abilities.
And goddamn, I've been in critiques where there are weak sisters where you wonder why the fuck they're here. But no. Every person here. Each person.
Every last one has a story that's fucking knocking my socks off.
Oh, the stories aren't perfect. I'm punching holes in all of them with my critiques along with the rest of us, pointing out bobbled endings, highlighting unclear narratives, wishing for less murky characterizations because I wnated to see more. But all of them have some core that's purest goodness, some area where my eyes pass over their words and my sclera flare bright green with envy.
Jesus Fucking Christ, I wish I'd written that, I think. And suddenly, Sarah, the girl who sends me bizarre links flourishes into Sarah, the girl who wrote that pristine intro to that Baba Yaga story, and my heart swells with pride because I'm in the room with her and that must mean that hey, I'm right here with them. I have my own strengths, and so do they, and we're all mixing our talents in one big cauldron to boil it down and distill the most beauteous moment of our voices.
It's why I stay up until one o'clock in the morning to scribble on your manuscripts, why I speak so loudly in class, why I wake up at 5:30 in the morning after three hours of sleep because my mind is so buzzing with ideas it hauls me out of bed.
These are my comrades. My team. My life. Day four, and already my world is filled with so many beautiful gifts that my heart aches with the strain of holding it all in. Day four feels like three weeks have already passed, and then Kelly Link is reading us a story that's light-years better even than that, and the gift of her art reminds us of how far we have to go - and of the trust that she's placing in us by taking a week out to come show us how to do it, to take that amazing award-winning brain that produced such perfect prose and trying her best to shape us.
And it is an us. My life for you, my friends. My art for you. My beauty in your hands.
Make me whole.
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I keep waking up muzzy and sleepy. Dizzy. I constantly feel like nothing is real and I feel doped up and out of it. I never used to feel this way before the Tramal. I've had enough of it. I'm considering just stopping and going cold turkey for a couple of days. I'd feel sick but it'd be over quickly. Dunno if I can be bothered slowly lowering the amount by halving the powder in the fucking little pills.
tired
dorky
pleased
blah
pissed off
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sad
loved
cold