Saturday, March 22, 2008

Crones gone wild?


Spring break--no bikinis, no beer bongs, no wet t-shirts. Just two weeks AT HOME. The first thing that strikes me is how really dirty a "clean" house can be. The guys go on a cleaning jag for my arrival, but there are still places around the kitchen sink I can't touch without gloves, bless their pea-pickin' little hearts. Two days after my arrival, 19-year-old son spontaneously says, "It's so good to have you home." (Pause) "There's always stuff to eat." Yes, I missed you too, boy.

It is so quiet in Humboldt County. A long afternoon walk and the small ambient sounds of the neighborhood--a lawn mower, a couple of kids at the park, a car or two driving past--all seem so inconsequential and easy to ignore. At Stanford I'm under the flight path of both the Oakland and the San Francisco airports. I'm between two major freeways and a block from a major surface street. There is a rail line about a mile away that runs almost 24 hours a day. And there are just a LOT of people.

Gearing up for the last quarter of my first year at the Farm. I have gorged my scribbler's heart on creative writing classes this year, so will be hating myself next year when it's all about fulfilling the other part of getting an English degree: ye olde literature, etc. Three of the four classes I want for the spring quarter are "throw your hat in the ring and cross your fingers." I have submitted a manuscript for advanced fiction writing, and a nifty class called the novel salon--wherein one reads a novel a week and class meets at 6-ish for dinner, cocktails and discussion. Please. Break my spirit.

I did write a couple of fun short stories this quarter: one is called "Maybe We Danced," about a former hippie in an old-folks home; the other is basically memoir, recalling my days in a Jesus Freak commune in the early 1970s. I'm hard at work on my novel, though "hard at work" means faithfully producing at least 2 pages per day. I'd like to up my output to a minimum of 1000 words, so I'm pushing myself. Not having to turn in those pages for close inspection every week is allowing my imagination to supersede the internal critic/editor.

One note about creative writing workshops: if 99% of your readers are under the age of 21, they may not read things the way you intended them. One of my young classmates thought I must be referring to neighbors when my character said, "After dinner, Mama and Daddy watch the news with Huntley and Brinkley." Another, reading about a homeless man who carried a jack handle in his shopping cart, corrected my manuscript by writing "handle of Jack." I had to ask around to learn that this is term for a bottle of booze, particularly Jack Daniels. Which would make sense for the homeless guy, when you think about it. Oh, the generation gap. :)