|
Perhaps it is because my college
years are drawing to a close, but I have rarely felt this
young, this wide-eyed and terrified, with the shell of my
life cracking open to reveal the blinding and infinite world
to me. So to think back on Creative Writing is to make
myself pleasantly aged again.
I can still remember the day over six (six! the number seems
ludicrous) years ago when I helped usher in the program.
Those were the days of Scott, of David Ford, of Winesburg,
Ohio, of Chana, of Art and Film. (And of Heather, of course,
though that's implied. I won't even mention all the other
students. I did sit near Dominique and Julie, if I'm
remembering things right. Two of the greats.) All of these
seeming constants eventually left (except Heather, of
course, though, again, it's implied), some with more joy
than others, and then we switched rooms and began the
inevitable nostalgia of those first dreamy days, where
everything seemed so loose and liberated, as it always does
before the whip cracks and people get to work. Whether the
nostalgia was justified is another matter; any such
remembering always elevates the grand in favor of the
middling.
I didn't even get off the ground for a couple of years. I
wrote stories that ended ludicrously, with infantile,
labyrinthine plots and cardboard-thin characters. My knack
for poetry was notoriously M.I.A. I'd literally write the
thing out in prose and then insert the line breaks
afterwards. Here is my first line from my first homework
assignment, dated August 27, 2002: "Writer? I am no writer.
I write, but I am not a writer."
I had a ways to go.
But I also got a thrill from the allure of a crowd listening
to my work, no matter how suspect in hindsight. And since,
in the course of this remembrance, I seem to be giving
myself a hard time, I can also say that I got some good
lines in back then: "The houses were lopsided ones, sloppily
dotting the hillside." That was the very first thing I read
at a Creative Writing performance. I always liked that line.
I got better, too.
And CW allowed me to find my niche, letting me abandon the
fictional and poetic for the comfort of non-fiction. It was
at 16, in Creative Writing, that I wrote a piece about my
grandfather that I read, at 20, at his funeral. It was
Creative Writing that let me trot off to a newspaper in San
Francisco every Monday afternoon so it could soak into me.
That has made all the difference. Beyond that, Creative
Writing was high school, with all that that entails. Suffice
to say it will live on, an outsized swirl of memory that
sends me reeling through my adolescence all over again.
|
