UW Summer High School Institute

In 1985, I was a high school sophomore, and I was honored to be invited to the very first Summer High School Institute at the University of Wyoming.  I can’t express how wonderful it was.

First of all, I was an emotional wreck.  I had just broken up with my first boyfriend, and, you know, my childhood. At HSI we had small group where we would get together and talk about our emotional lives. It was the first therapy I had in my life, and it probably saved me.

And the amazing classes I took.  It’s three weeks long, and as part of it you take college courses.  I was introduced to N. Scott Momaday and Chinua Achebe and got to experience Numerical Imaginings. And I got FREE BOOKS (which I still have)! 

And my fellow instituters were and still are amazing.  Pete Simpson Jr, Al Simpson’s nephew, was in that class. They all were so smart and amazing.  I haven’t kept in touch with them, but now I wish I would have. This year, we're celebrating the 30th anniversary of HSI.

And now, they invited me back to teach a writers workshop, which I did yesterday.  It was so great! The kids are whip smart and so much fun.  Their creativity oozes out of them, let me tell you! They have bright futures ahead of them.

There were two classes, and I planned three exercises for each but was only able to accomplish two in the hour we had.  First, I took the first couple sentences of some famous books and then they added sentences and passed them to their left and added to other stories. So much fun! Then they interviewed each other and wrote each others’ Life Story on a Postcard, a la Michael Kimball.  The third exercise was going to be writing their own life story in third person as a fairy tale, but we didn’t get to that.

All I can say is: You people who are cynical about the younger generations, you shouldn't be.  This happens every time I work with young people. I realize how amazing and hopeful and positive they are. They were all avid readers and great writers and motivated and wicked smart.

Our future is so bright, I gotta wear shades!

Curling Flower Spaces

A writing exercise today, I think. I’m going to take the first line of a novel and then add onto it. The first line of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I think.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. Shcock! Shcock! Smell of heat into my head but then dirt smell, too, next to my nose. My body against the cool browness where the dogs like to lay. Then I can see the yellow blur as it touches the gray line and pancakes. Not for long but I can see it. Like the pancakes Baba makes me for breakfast and puts on butter that slides off and melts and then she pours the brown syrup that pushes the butter around. But butter is real and this pancake is not real. So yellow it hurts my eyes. There are dancers’ feet on the gray that move back and forth and stop like teepees. The curling flower spaces chop off the dancers’ feet as they follow the yellow pancake. It’s like this: The yellow pancake against the gray line and then it disappears as the dancing feet on one side move and shift and set onto the ground and the Shcock! and then the pancake again against the gray and the other dancing feet moving and setting and Shcock! It is so pretty the movement and the sound and the movement and the sound. But now something is wrong. The too-yellow pancake is gone and two of the dancing feet get bigger and squeak. They are angry shoes. They are coming.

What I’m Reading Today: Not much. Had some fabulous company.

Dreadfully Nervous I Had Been and Am

Today, a writing exercise, I think. I’m going to point to two words in the dictionary and write something. The words: vigil – n. keeping awake during the time usually given to sleep, esp. to keep watch or pray; saccade – n. a brief rapid movement of the eye between fixed points, as in reading, derived from the Old French sachier meaning to shake.

Strange that my vigil should come to this, this nonclimax. I say nonclimax because un refers to something done while non is in opposition, though it may or may not have occurred. It did not occur and thus was not undone, therefore a nonclimax as opposed to an unclimax.

Her face before me with its brief saccades of thought and then its fixed glance to the left, indicating in the psychology of mendacity that it is a made up thing, as opposed to a remembered thing, that comes from her mouth. What she says is this: “I do not oppose our union.” That it is a thing of the imagination, rather than of memory, tells me that she has not yet pondered it, considered and decided, it is a new thing, a new thought, therefore there is a chance at happiness yet.

But my expectation was for her flat denial or her jubilant affirmation. That she had not yet thought this thought, the thought that had vexed and fixated me for months, that I was far from her mind in our long months of separation, should indicate her indifference to me.

Yet! Yet she says that she does not oppose it. Perhaps there is hope yet.

What I’m Reading Today: I finished William Kittredge’s The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge. I feel a kindred spirit, and we cover a lot of the same ground. How modern ranch life affects people and relationships. The Western legacy of violence. How the West is a character in its own right. His language can really soar with exquisite poetry, and when he nails a line, he really nails it. At the end of “Do You Hear Your Mother Talking?” there is a line something like “Like two parents listening for the talk and laughter of their children in the next room, just as the children listen back.” (I don’t do it justice but I don’t have my copy of the story here.) However, there’s something fuzzy about his writing. He consistently talks about what is not there, what is absent, even down to the sentence level ~ the antecedents to his pronouns are most often unclear. Also, he can be imprecise in his language, which feels very poetic but communication is not made. A very strong effect ~ when it works, as in “The Van Gogh Field” it is out of the ballpark, but when it doesn’t, it leaves me going, “Huh?”

PS The beginning of next week I'll be hanging out over at Cool Person Kristi Peterson Schoonover's blog and talking about why we write. Make sure to check it out!

Just Working Those Glutes

Today’s writing exercise: A very short story with all five senses.

Something smells bad, and it’s not in my dream. I don’t open my eyes. Instead, I pull the nubby quilt over my head, but the wreak is so strong the fabric won’t block it out. It’s then I realize that it wasn’t the smell that woke me but the panicked barking of our terrier, but now there’s nothing. I hear my mom moving around. Still on my back, I toss the covers off and roll from my mattress. When I open my bedroom door, the smell hits me so strongly that I gag and bitter bile rises into the back of my mouth. I cover my nose with the crook of my elbow and force myself to swallow. “Tiff,” my mom yells at me from the main part of the house, “don’t freak out. Stay in your room.” Her voice is deep with exasperation. “What?” I yell through my arm and step into the hall. I heard her, but I want to know what’s going on. “Stay in your room!” she says. Then, “You left the patio door open, and a skunk’s been eating the dog food. Terror waited till it got inside to confront it.” That’s the first night we sleep in the car.

What I’m Reading Today: Nothing, unfortunately. Sometimes, you just have to clean the house.