Interruption

Hey!

I'm back! Who still checks this? No one, I believe, except those late night fucked up Googlers.  Perfect.  You are my people! You know I mean it when I add an EXCLAMATION POINT!! TWO! AND CAPS!

I used to go to this writing group in My Town.  It was led by this FAREAK! name R* ...He was a Graduate of the Iowa Program, which is prestigious.  He wore it like a strap-on.  In my opinion, he was an average writer, but a really good teacher.  I learned more from him in a few weeks than I've learned from anyone else combined. 

I both liked and was repelled by R*.  He was a small guy with such a tension of nervous energy that you almost vibrated standing next to it.  He was alternately negative and positve.  He was both Dick and Twat.  He would say the most outrageous things in class, right next to the most well-thought out and precise critiques of Hemingway or Carver....tell us that if we weren't depressed, really deep down can't get out of bed struggling with the will to live then we weren't capable of Art....we needed to quit our jobs and be really poor for awhile, make us better writers. More TRUE to our CRAFT. (I've done that poor thing and it SUCKS, I thanked him.  "You are rich pretending to be poor!" he sneered, "Driving your shitty little Mazda when you have a pool!" He was a little fucker, alright.

His wife was a really sweet girl, really, ten years younger and pretty with an edge.  R* and I went out for beers fairly regularly for awhile and she'd show up. R* and I talked books and when D* (her name was D*) showed up she'd try to join in. She was intelligent, educated, etc.  He hated it when she talked. It was clear. He'd scowl and accuse her of interrupting him.  She started hanging out with this really affected 'artist' who was in a polyamorous relationship.  She showed up for beers with him once and it was pretty clear to me they were fucking.  R* didn't think so.  Their gaze was constantly on one another and it was just such a physically present fact.  R* thought D* just needed more friends.  Poly boy used to work for the circus, he laughed, when he was interesting. Now he worked for a builder.  "He reads shit."

Reading anything that wasn't literary fiction was a serious crime.  D*, by the way, was a poetess. She has a Masters in it. If you can imagine. I cannot. Why not get a PhD in Pretty?  It seems too narrow a road winding through Disneyland or something.

Anyway, I noticed D* has a profile on a book site I frequent infrequently.  She is going by her maiden name.  She is single.  R* is still teaching small groups of middle class wannabes, only now in Hippieville, Oregon.  And alone.  He adored D when she wasn't interrupting him. Maybe now he'll publish.

Comments

[Carrie H]

That's the beauty of an RSS feed, it lets me know when you update so I don't have to obsessively click on your website in the YEAR or whatever its been since you last posted.

R* sounds like a fucker. If he was TRUE to his CRAFT he'd work with vagrants on skid row, teaching them to write, giving them a useful skill. After all, they're suffering. Surely they have something to write about.

BTW, I tried to access eating my husband's soul and see you've eaten it. The blog. I don't suppose you could vomit up some of those archives? I wouldn't mind re-reading those adventures.

[katy]

Hey Carrie H! Thanks. I have reposted some of Husband's Soul on zeke.typepad.com/iaemhs.

R* did go into prisons and teach. He was many things, good and bad, but he wasn't a hypocrite. I keep hoping he moves back to Boise. He was a good teacher. That is rare.