The Writers' Conference

The West Virginia Writers' Workshop has been going on for twenty years. Since we moved here, just five years ago,I've been meaning to go. Two years ago, I signed up for one of the four days of the conference; this year I managed get them a check in time to be a full participant.

I signed up for "non-fiction." They asked me to send ten pages to go over in our workshop, where others would make notes. I had to go back into the archives to find things to send. They got ten pages, but from four different pieces.

When I stopped working full time in 2004, at my fifty-fifth birthday, I signed up for writing classes at UCLA Extension. I would get up in the morning, take a bus from Fairfax Avenue in Park LaBrea to UCLA, then have lunch at Falafel King in Westwood, before catching the bus home.  Looking through the stuff I wrote then, I found a piece  about my life in New Orleans, written at the time of Hurricane Katrina, and  a short story I had forgotten, about a Mexican-American high school student who lived in North Hollywood with her mother, who ran a Spanish CD store, and her grandmother. I thought both of these pieces were great. I didn't use them because they were more than ten years old, and I wanted to submit something newer.

The highlight of the conference was meeting people who actually write and teach writing for a living. I try not to express my emotions; it's how I was raised. I saw people who could talk about their passion for language. If they weren't already attractive (most of them were) speaking with passion made them even more interesting.

I saw a few people I knew there, and made some new friends. There was a woman who lives in New Orleans at the conference. She is a nurse with more advanced degrees and has written award-winning articles for medical journals. I was pleased that she agreed to read my piece about the city, and she thought I captured it with my feelings about my life then, and my grief about Katrina.

One of the instructors was David Haslick, who talked about opening your heart instead of letting it break. He couldn't write well until, at age forty, he faced a trauma from his early life.

The people in our non-fiction group had fascinating stories. One woman shared her history of abusive parents and an abusive spouse, another woman visited Southeast Asia for the first time to meet her mother's family, and a young man from Africa, who learned English as a second language, wrote beautifully about life in a West African village..

I tried to figure why my writing is not as good as it was ten years ago, and why it seems flat to me now. I think part of it was the trauma of my heart attack and mother's death in 2003, which inflamed all of my emotions. I'm older now, and married. Things are calmer than they were (but stay tuned for fireworks from City Council). Writing mostly on this blog, I write something, check it for errors and post it without a lot of revising, or even thinking too much.

It occurs to me that maybe I don't think hard enough. I asked myself during the workshop what I'm hiding. Mark Brazaitis, a fellow Morgantown city councilor and writing professor, wrote a book of stories about depression, which I bought two years ago at the conference. I put it down after the first story, frightened to my core. Now I think maybe I need to face my own issues about depression. I also noted that everyone's work had interesting characters, except mine. My stuff is all about me. I know I write partly so I can have my say without being interrupted.

In 2005, I started to write stories about the unique time and place where I grew up. Some of the stories are humorous enough, but I stopped after maybe three of them, because I realized I had never mentioned my parents. That scared me.

I started a novel, several times, about my life in Miami from 1978 to 1984, a fascinating time and place, and a big part of my history. I took pieces of it to a novel class at UCLA. Only the teacher knew the story was autobiographical. A typical comment was "Your lead character is so unlikable. Does he grow over the course of the novel?" The Jewish grandmother was praised as a brilliant character study. "Pure gold," one woman said. I couldn't take it, and I was less than generous in my evaluation of the work of others.

I got some ideas from this conference about what I need to do. First, I need to spend more time sitting down and writing, even if it is just this narcissistic blog.

Then I need to really open my heart and not continue to let it break. I need to deal with depression, a family history that's only normal on the surface, and what I really think and feel, always a frightening proposition.

And craft. I could learn better ways to express myself. I need characters that have a full life apart from mine. I've said that i can't write poetry, but I have, and I could.

I got a lot from this workshop. Making friends with unexpected people, learning about poetry, about healing, about opening up and letting the words flow. I have work to do now.