pres.umptuo.us

The free coffee in the morning was way overrated.

Here’s my daily schedule first: Morning coffee from 8:30 to 10:30. The Elevenses Series, presentations on a variety of topics of interest to writers, at 11:00. Workshop session from 2:00 to 5:00. Prairie Lights readings at 8:00.

Any time before, after, or between those is free time. Heck, anything other than the workshop is free time, all other activities are optional.

I made my way onto campus today feeling kind of scared and alone. I really had no notion of where anything was and I didn’t have my info packet with all the schedules. Luckily the weather was much better today; nice enough to walk around town without having to run into an air-conditioned area every few minutes.

By following some people off the shuttle I found the coffee room where I was supposed to “take the opportunity to get to know other participants by joining us for coffee each weekday morning.” What I found was a tiny little room with three long tables in it and about 10 people scattered around doing their assignments and writing. I don’t even drink coffee; I figured I’d just go there to be social.

I filled up a cup about 1/4 of the way with coffee, threw in my sugar and cream and decided to head over to my workshop classroom in the hopes that my free t-shirt and info packet would still be there. Shucked my coffee after a few sips, packet and shirt nowhere to be found, went looking for the lost and found and finally had the organizers tell me they’d bring me a new packet, which they didn’t and so I shall inquire again in the morning.

The Elevenses presentation today was quite good. Marc Neison spoke on the writing process and began by having the audience participate in a free write as he played a tape of soft Arabian music. I get a feeling I did mine wrong since it’s just random thoughts in my head and not so much a story, but oh well.

He gave great advice on “Carving out a space to work”, finding solutions to the problems we all see plaguing our progress, and to just find what works for us. Then he played an interview tape with someone who’s name I forget who said to, “Stop in mid-sentence and mid-stream” so that when you sit back down to write again, it’s very easy to start and starting is the hardest part.

Lunch in the city after in some Irish pub, and then on to my workshop at 2.

Our assignment the night before was to read Alice Adam’s Barcelona, which was rather boring. We discussed in class about where we found the unexpected situations or “dramatic gestures”. Then we read Fred Chappell’s Children of Strikers but stopped about 3/4 of the way through, and were then asked to continue writing the rest of the story.

Since nobody’s gonna go out and read it, let me just say that by 3/4 of the way through, there is almost nothing to work with. It felt really open ended, and yes the characters were already fairly well established in terms of their personality and the setting had a lot of little clues and details laid out, but there were just so many directions to take the story.

The exercise was really good to forcing me to write and use my creativity. What I finally wrote felt just rather blah to me and sounded like all the other crap I tend to write, so after hearing what my classmates’ wrote it really made me want to write better stuff next time. I think we all had those same thoughts in our head though, and that’s definitely a good thing when we want to do better.

I’ll post up what I wrote later just cause I said I would and cause I could really care less about how good it is or not. It was a 30 minute exercise and everyone just scribbled out what they could.

After the workshop today was a wine and cheese event at the Modern Art Musem on campus. Being neither a fan of wine nor cheese, I stayed only for a little while chatting with my classmates before heading into downtown for real food, where I had stir-fried Udon which sucked big time.

There’s other details which I’m too lazy and tired to get into now, but that’s the gist of what I did today and most likely what will happen for the rest of the week. I’ll probably restrain from writing out all my little details since you know them now, and just write about any cool or fun news.

Oh yes, I ran into New Zealand girl again today. That’s how small this town is. The meeting went like this:

Walking along the Pedestrian Mall (Ped-Mall), see her sitting outside a bar and grill with a group of people.

“Hey, it’s New Zealand girl!” (She didn’t hear me say this. I don’t think.) Make awkward eye contact, raise hand to wave. “How’s your trip going?”

(In awesome New Zealand accent) “Good! You?”

“Going alright.” Continue walking away.

Yeah, she loves it here in Iowa City. I can tell.

Flickr photo set of Iowa Summer Writing Festival updated today.