"I'm having problems with the characterization of Ferrett," I said. "Why would someone described as 'a life-long oversleeper,' someone who 'spent his days struggling against the tide of sleep dragging him back under' suddenly start waking up at 5:45 a.m. every morning just because he's at some workshop? He's operating on four hours of rest every night; I see him more as the sort of person who'd need an alarm at this point. I just didn't buy it."

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Tags: sesame street, video
Current Mood: cheerful

I have a dream (well several, this is just one of them).
I want there to be a non-profit organisation that rolls together costco, land developers, employment agencies, credit unions, charter schools and more.

So, first you have this non-profit that exists to promote higher quality of life and Day Care. lack of day care can really hold people back you know. First it starts up a non-profit day-care group and aggresively solicits donations. it acquires some run-down homes and makes them more livable and rents them out with preference to members.

Then it acquires some small commercial ventures: convenience stores, dry cleaners, diners while continuing to acquire housing. eventually moving into apartment buildings on the residential side and charter schools on the education/day care side. If it got big enough it could move into manufacturing and utilities.

The whole idea is that the non-profit acquires housing and business that the residents of the housing can support and then take the profits and reinvest in the essential services that regular society doesn't just provide: day-care, better schools, employment counseling, adult education, ETC. Sort of a rebranded opt-in socialism that can exist in a free-market capitalist state (like ours!).

But day-care is the and housing are the first steps. With nice grass-green signs with white writing.

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.

It are my birthday.

Man, I don't think anyone's going to have the energy to do anything cool, but it's fuckin' awesome here at Clarion. Loves to my folks at home. Loves to my new folks here.

Love all 'round, in fact.

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Tags: life

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Well, I got to bed at 1:30 last night and am up at 5:45. So thus far, my main descriptor would be, "Lots of time spent critiquing, no sleep." Theoretically we will all have time to socialize and romp and play our reindeer games together at some point, but the socialization - though there is a lot of it - is all occurring in the context of either walking to our classes or reading stories.

Good critiques are a gift. We're taking our time, really trying to get under the skin of the stories we've been given, because our classmates are heroic and deserve it. In this sense, it is like boot camp, because I'm already feeling like everyone here has my back. We're here to make each other into better writers, dammit, and we beat out a lot of other people to get here; none of us are slouches, and each new batch of submissions shows again that all the people here have the chops to make it work. So let's do this shit. Let's make it count.

This is extraordinary time.

At the same time, my roommate E.J. woke up yesterday and said, "Does it feel like Thursday to you?" And by God, after thirty-six hours it felt like a week had passed. I'm trying hard to remember that there are thirty-nine days left, because this has been a very intense time.

On the other hand, we can occasionally take brief breaks to stage dramatic readings of the funniest interview ever read. Man, I want this book.