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My story & I'm stickin to it...
A novelist walks into a poetry workshop. How did that happen, and how could anything possibly go wrong? Right?
Remember November 2016? Some of us here in the US were OK--> ecstatic. A lot of us, however, were not. Include me in the nots. A lot of us were some combination of furious, terrified, revolted, incredulous ... Include me here too.
At that point in my life, while I was relatively recently retired from teaching, I was still editing Tattoo Highway, an online journal of prose, poetry and art, and still felt connected to the writing world, I had not written anything other than the occasional amusing email detailing the antics of my dogs and my cat, and the travel adventures my wife and I were still having. I had a dead-in-the-water fourth novel. Make that two dead in the water: numbers 4 and 5, no longer even gleams in my eye. Maybe it's possible to have too much fun bouncing around the world with the love of your life, I told myself. Maybe that's OK, I told myself. And maybe it is.
But somehow it wasn't. My "other brother," who lived in the downstairs apartment, was an artist. What on earth are we going to do? I asked him as we were basting the Thanksgiving turkey a few weeks after the election. I'm a painter, he said. I've been painting. Come on over to the studio and see.
I came, and I saw, and I thought. Painters paint. Was I even still a writer? What was the sell-by for a misplaced passion?
I don't remember who told me about the Round Robin, which is an online series of paired-partner timed "writes" (in Robin-speak) to a daily prompt, run by the Writing Salons. Why not? I asked myself, and in January, 2017, Isigned up. Every evening I set a timer for 15 minutes, sat down at my computer and ranted onto the screen. It was ugly, sometime irrational stuff, but it helped clear my head and made me easier to live with, I'm sure. And after a few weeks I noticed that some of those ugly irrational rants looked something like poems.Weird, I thought. I'd never written poetry in my life. I'm a story teller, it's in my DNA, and the stories I tell tend to be book length, not short fiction. But here these new things were, and they kept coming. It so happened that the Writing Salon in Berkeley had a poetry workshop coming up in March, taught by some guy named Brian Tierney (Google him--he's amazing!), and that, as they say, was that.
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