The first class in the creative fiction workshop begins in a dungeon of a room in Loeb and we’re immediately told we’re switching over to a new room in Paterson. You get the feeling Rick, our workshop instructor, wants to deconstruct this shuffling of rooms. He starts in with us comparing the Loeb hole as something we would dig out of if we were Counts of Monte Cristo. We’d use toothbrushes and combs, cell phones, iPod shuffles and anything else available to escape and get to the “Arts’ Tower.” Cripes, the class hasn’t even started and he’s getting literary on us. Rick makes a joke about cell phone-toting students, and one of them walks in, as if on cue. She’s one of us. We laugh, we appreciate irony.
I’m immediately liking this Rick guy – I can write that, knowing he will read my blog, remember I wrote it, feel obliged to up my grade. He’s a surfer, and obviously cooler than his departmental colleagues because he wears one of those white shirts without a collar. He swears a couple of times too. We like that. He’s a surfer. We discover later when we get to Paterson that he’s brought his actual surfboard. I toss a little joke out about there being no surf in Ottawa, and didn’t Rick realize that, ha ha. The surfer is very quick; he insists he’s changing the Ottawa culture and soon we’ll be surfers too. I think this is the surfer equivalent of “if you build it, they will come.”
We’re outside, en route to Paterson, and we have three or four writing exercises to do before he lets us inside. The temperature’s starting to cool down. It’s May and in Ottawa you don’t plant seeds until after the Victoria Day weekend. It’s not a superstition – sometimes it actually snows. The expression “Ten months of winter, two months of poor sledding,” probably comes from here. I’m exaggerating, but this is not surf country.
The writing exercises are good prods, but getting back into the flow of school as a summer student after the turmoil of getting registered, is not so easy.
I’m starting to remember my earlier experiences with exams and blanking out right at the beginning, when you turn the thing over on your desk. Then you spend precious exam time writing a convincing plea – right in the exam notebook – asking the prof to have mercy. When you’re over 40 or 50, they seem to think you’re not faking it. You probably did study, you probably do blank out. They feel pity, they pass you.
So sitting here outside in the amphitheatre between Loeb and Paterson, I’m wondering if I will blank out and get writer’s block, but I don’t. By the third exercise the words start to flow faster, I’m getting the hang of it. Others seem to too, they’re all scribbling down something.
Later, Rick takes us down by the river, which sounds sexual. (The walk chews up at least ten percent of class time, so I’m calculating whether I should ask to deduct stroll time from my tuition . . .) The juices are really flowing now. We’re getting ecstatic with these summertime inspirations, stimulated by the rushing Rideau waters. Rick delves into the details about how we will notice the changing height of the river weeds as the summer goes on, how we’ll see rocks by August, not rapids. We’re beginning to think this guy lives in metaphor. We see the O-train bridge and he sees the height of waves he surfed in Australia. Wow, this guy is on fire!
Back in the classroom, we go through introductions and then read chunks of the stuff we’ve been scratching down outside. We learn that creative writing is a mix of the real, the imagination and the memory. Half a dozen of us are older that the others and we have more memory to work from, but a couple of the young’ns seem to have us down cold with their imaginings. Realities: probably a tie.
Best part though of our first class, so far, aside from a couple of pretty crisp and witty writing efforts by some in the room (surprising, even a little bit worrying, this early in the game), is when Rick’s surf board slides down the blackboard and falls over with a crash, narrowly missing the back of his head. He turns the board over to check out the fin thing, and it looks intact. This guy really is a surfer. Summer looks like it’ll be a safari, no question.