Day 9
COMMENCEMENT
From Meg: Have a regular date with your desk. Doggedness separates a successful writer from an unsuccessful one.
From class speaker Jina Simmons
- This is not how the story ends…This is the part where anything can happen... We are not the same people we were when we started.
- We are each others tribe.
- And we have, despite some reluctance, let each other in.
- Delicious challenge.
- This is not where the story ends; it is where it begins.
"Benevolent bullying", Cornelius Eady about Meg getting him to be the speaker today.
- The commencement speaker is the cork between the event and the party.
- You have not made a bad decision. Just a weird one.
- Exotic ambitions
- Who do you think you are…this program answers that.
- Either changes your mind or realized you were writ right all the time.
- Nothing will stop it.
- You will cheer on your friend’s success…
- Time and luck won’t bend
- You will miss this place.
- You will live your life. Opportunities will come and go. You will write. You will want time and sometimes more than money.
- Make the words dance make the reader laugh then hurt.
- Hold on to this moment and put it in your pocket and rub it like a lucky charm.
***
A week later, I sit typing this last section, trying to find the perfect way to end my blogging of the residency as the first GA for Solstice. But all I can think of is John Gardner's fictive dream concept: That the writer's job is to create and sustain a dream state for the reader so that they will read all the way to the end, and then wake up to reality. That's what this residency felt like for me. The fictive dream state. Then, the end. Wake up and reality, when I first came home, "by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead.” -John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist.
1 comment:
Those of us reading these entries have participated in a bit of a dream state, as well. The John Gardiner quote is at once apt and a tad strong. The key phrase is "by comparison" because empty space inevitably follows the end of something so wonderful. Heeding the "lucky charm" advice of speaker Cornelius, I plan to savor, however vicariously, my reading of your marvelous experience.
I'm not concerned about the empty space becoming colder and more tedious than we can bear; as speaker Jina said, this is where your story begins. I'm anxious and excited to read the next chapter. Well done, you!
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