Clarion Week Two

Now I'll teach you to levitate!
Clarion's planned Week 2 instructor, Gardner Dozois (pronounced DOZE-WAH if you ever want to name-drop), wasn't able to make it due to personal reasons.

Instead, Michael Swanwick, spec-fic writer extraordinaire, led the classes.

On the Sunday night, he told us he was going to work as hard as was humanly possible for us. He said that if we worked as hard as he did--for the whole six weeks--we would be dead.

At the time I scoffed.

Now I'm inclined to believe him. To kick-off his work he read everything we had written during Week 1, plus our submission stories. This amounts to around sixty-six stories. And he didn't just read them. He line-edited every single one. And then he thought about the story between the lines. He razed passages, re-ordered sequences, figured out identities of characters, and reached deep into the guts of the story to find its beating, though often sickly, heart. And then he gave literary CPR. He even came up with new titles if he could find them--like a man with a divining rod. (He suggested "Hiroshima Sunflowers" for one of mine, which is a vast improvement over "Uncle Zack and the Day the Bomb Dropped").

In the critiquing circle he listened to our two minute windows like a yogic master. Bare-footed, and sat cross-legged on his chair, he seemed to be digesting our words in a different plane of existence, barely reacting to the jokes and stabbings and puns that shuttled back and forth the room. When his time came to speak he would talk like that story--or the one behind it--was the most important thing in the world. He'd gesticulate wildly, jump up to diagram character relationships, and veer off on wild tangents for minutes at a time. His analyses were always novel and thorough.

BK: You think Sean's taking his Spiderman research too far?
On the Friday we had six stories to crit. We started at eight and finished around two. After the crits Michael's schedule involved seeing all the writers who'd been on the sacrifiicial plinth that day. We each had fifty minutes with him. This meant he wouldn't free up his day to around eight or nine. Then he had to read the next day's stories. If I was of more morally dubious character, I'd have suspected pharmaceutical assitance.

My meeting came on the Thursday. Michael's apartment--a small child's stone's throw from the critique hall--looked liked a student's dorm. Styrofoam coffee cups, plastic food packages, and bundles of foolscap manuscript folders lay scattered around his chair. I sat on the sofa and Michael pulled out my stories. We talked, or rather, he talked and I occasionally made small interjections, about the details of the story and anything that sparked off those details. It was a very rich discussion and I'm glad he marked the scripts with most of his ideas, because I can't recall half of it now.

Friday afternoon a large slice of the class visited the cyclotron across the block. Liquid nitrogen was spilled, bubble track chambers fawned over, big rooms full of screens oooed at, and underaged physicists stared at. Somebody's going to hand in a atom smasher story I'm sure....

Friday night a few of us went to Harper's, a frat-pack bar in downtown East Lansing. Shveta, Felice, Vince, Robert, Brad, Sarah, Alex and myself, drank beer, played pool and busted moves on the dancefloor. Steve B made a brief appearance, but decided the music was outgunning his voice to an unacceptable extent.

Bad food, room avoidance, and episodes of Firefly also happened.

Quotes of the week:

Michael Swanwick - "No erectile tissue in Asimov's." (Forcing Chris to re-think his five page alien sex scene).

Robert Levy - "The characters dance around the protagonist's cock like it's a fucking maypole." (Frank criticism on Casey's classy hooker story).

Writers Discover Bars