A Clarion West Diary: Poetry and Eyeballs

by E. Jay O'Connell & Michael Belfiore

 Jay on Week One: Nancy Kress.

 _Structure_

 
 I couldn't sleep the night before.

 The sunrise found me bleary-eyed, printing out stories. I jammed them in my
powerbook case, making the plastic bulge obscenely. I kept reading them on the
plane, over and over. Crap. It was all crap.

 The plane bounced down after eight hours, I thanked a God I didn't believe in
that we hadn't crashed and burned, and one thirty dollar cab ride later I'd
arrived at Campion tower - my dorm for the next six weeks. I inspected my cell
on the seventh floor - a single bed swaddled in institutional gray nestled
against each wall, a built-in desk near the window, bulletin boards, some
drawers, a mirror over a vanity, a closet with no hangers.

 In the mirror my eyes looked sunken, my cheeks hollow. I'd made it.

 Orientation was in the 12th floor lounge  where a score or so other people
milled around. My adrenaline was fast fading, Everyone looked very strange,
bewildered, misguided.

 What was I doing there? What did these miserable bastards have to teach me?
Dear Christ, I didn't want to do this anymore! I was exhausted - halfway sick
of reading and writing SF already, I'd been doing too damn much of it as a
slush reader for Aboriginal SF.

 But through the long bank of windows to my right, Seattle shone in the
setting sun, lovely and new, a skyline of melted postmodern glass. Bauhaus was
dead, Seattle was alive. I felt a little better - then I saw Mt, Ranier for
the first time, poking through the milk of atmospheric haze on the horizon. A
crenelated fractal gleaming with snow. I caught my breath.

 A long-haired woman with round, wire-rimmed glasses stood beside me, eyes
wide and shining. "Beautiful. Can you believe it? It's like Mt. Fuji!"

 We grinned at each other like idiots. A crescent moon tattoo peeped at me
through the silver bracelets on her wiry arm. "I've never seen anything like
it," I said. We laughed together.

 "We're here. We made it."

 I knew everything would be all right.

 "I'm Nancy Kress. I'm your instructor this week." The woman with the official
looking clipboard smiled. "If you could all take a seat, we'll go around the
circle and introduce ourselves." Her voice had authority. She knew what she
was doing, thank God, you could tell from the way she held herself, the smile,
the assurance. Sure hands.

 "I'm Kelly," began the tattooed woman...

 Clarion began there. Going around the circle. It went on for six long, short
weeks.

 What are Clarion rules? Each story is read and marked up outside the
workshop. Critiques start to the left of the author - and go around the
circle. I'd done plenty of workshops - but never one this _big_. Twenty
people--and a Writer! And the time limit - we started at three minutes, and
went down to two, half of what I was used to.

 We used a chess timer. You were allowed to complete your sentence after the
bell went off. If you ran too much longer, we all shouted, "TIME, ASSHOLE."

 The author remained silent, took notes, tried not to cry. At the end, the
author made a statement or two, asked some specific questions. There followed
a free-for all in which everyone blurted out the clever stuff inspired by
other critiques. Eventually the instructor called a break or moved on to the
next piece. Three to six pieces were critiqued each session, which lasted four
or five hours. The instructor went last, with no timer running.

 The first day Nancy told us to speak to both the strengths and the weaknesses
of the piece before us. I groaned inwardly...it is all too easy for workshops
to turn into circle jerks.

 When it came my turn to take the ritual pounding on the second day, I bore up
under it pretty well. But...I was afraid things were still a bit...civil.
Every crit started and ended with the mantra - "but I really liked the story."

 A story came around that offended my political sensibility...I thought I
smelled polemic. The final student opinion, I lashed out.

 "I have to say, I _didn't_ like this story." I snarled. "Let me tell you
why..." I poured vitriol on this kind and gentle man, some of it on-target
critique, some of it pent-up frustration at the process. I had a thick file of
rejection letters that told me I didn't need encouragement--I needed insight.

 Afterwards I was trembling. I'd gone too far. I stammered an apology.

 "Don't apologize," Nancy said, frowning. "Never do that here. I think you're
wrong, but you're entitled to your opinion. You owe it to us to speak it."

 "Don't ever go back on yourself like that," Paul said during break. His hands
roved the counter, found a coffee mug. His sightless eyes were fixed on a
point over my right shoulder. "It renders your opinion worthless."

 Many people agreed, not on the nasty crit - but they liked my...intent. We
weren't here to tell people what they wanted to hear. We were sharpening our
knives.

 I knew those knives would be used on me, too.

 ***

 Michael on Week Two: Lisa Goldstein

 _Teaching the Unteachable_

 

 Nancy left in a rush and clap of imploding air. On Sunday night the
twelfth-floor lounge was occupied by Korean and Saudi and Spanish ESL
students. They had a bowl of chips in one corner. I managed to grab a couple
of handsful before we were forced to pile into a small conference room off the
lounge.

 Anxiety gnawed at me, a feeling that became familiar on Sunday nights. Good
God.I have to produce a new story by Tuesday night. What if I can't? I'll be
shown up for a fraud.

 I almost didn't notice Lisa, small and unassuming, seated at one end of the
conference table. "Hi," she said, gave a little wave. "I'm Lisa Goldstein."

 "Hi!" rumbled the collective reply.

 "I can't really teach you anything," she said cheerfully. "There are no rules
in writing. Writing can't be taught."

 We spent Week Two staring at the face of that bald truth. Eileen Gunn dropped
into class one day. "That's true," she said. "But that's supposed to be a
secret--the real secret of writing, in fact. You weren't supposed to find that
out until the end of the workshop. So you'll just have to play along and
pretend you didn't hear it until Week Six."

 Lisa nodded. "Yes, and when you get out of here, don't ever take any more
writing classes or workshops. Everything you need to learn can only come out
of hard work. I saw you guys up late talking in the lounge last night. You
need to do a lot less socializing and a lot more writing."

 But I _wanted_ to socialize. I _wanted_ my hand held. I didn't want to be
reminded that writing is a lonely, terrifying process, the act of crawling
around in the catacombs of your own soul with nothing but a flashlight and a
butterfly net, hoping to find some nameless horror with too many legs and not
enough flesh covering its glistening bones, and drag it up to the light of day
where you can look it in the eye.

 Seems a lot of us felt that way. We had trouble looking each other in the eye
by the end of the week.

 ***

 Jay on Week Three: Elizabeth Hand.

 _We are Generic_

 Sunday night. Week three. Time to meet the new writer, who I was somewhat
hostile to for the simple reason that her book was slow going--the prose was
glittering and literary and hard to follow. In the seventh floor lounge, Mike
Keiper gave me advance warning. "E.Jay. She's a babe."

 She was young and attractive, thin with short brown hair and a vaguely
unwholesome intensity in her eyes. Long association with manic depressives
have made me a little distrustful of high energy in others... Then I thought,
dear God, these people were coming into a fully formed group now. We all knew
each other. They were the outsiders. It had to be a little scary.

 Liz never showed a moment's fear.

 "I read all your stories." Stunned silence at that. We'd already half worn
ourselves out reading the workshop, "and I read through your cover letters,"
she had slight southern accent "and I thought, 'wow, this is a fascinating
group of people.' Then I read your stories." She paused. Shook her head.

 "They were all pretty _generic_."

 As a group, we shuddered. We were, weren't we?

 "Whatever it is you're writing about, you have to find a way to make it your
own. I'm not saying write what you know, everybody says that. I'm saying there
has to be some way to take something inside you, that's personal, and write
about it in some way that only you could write about it. A lot of it has to do
with _style_. There aren't any new stories. It's all been done. What matters
is how you do it. Creating a unique voice."

 Back on the seventh floor, it was like the liberation of Paris. Everyone was
smiling...wandering around stunned. We were shell-shocked but ecstatic. We
were _generic_! Insight!

 Liz was so...real. The hungriest, the least established in the genre. She'd
given up a real job to live in rural Maine with her husband and be a writer.
She gave us a helluva poverty lecture. I could almost hear the pipedreams
boiling away under the heat of those eyes. But she was making it. Maybe we
could too.

 She gave us an assignment - to write about an awful job we'd had, bring out
the nastiness, the suppressed rage.

 I picked a truly vile Burger King humiliation experience, one that had
everyone squirming. Liz was right. By and large, our vignettes were better
than our fiction. Rob had a fantastic piece about his work in a
slaughterhouse, and his gradually mounting unease, of draining the blood from
fetal calves. Perfect, still-born creatures whose blood had some strange
research value. Pale and smiling dead things.

 We had to get more of our souls into our fiction. More of our essence.

 We would.

 ***

 Jay on Week 4: Michael Swanwick.

 _"The story has fireworks. It needs more Sodomy."_

 Swanwick was a little scary. Curly dark hair, thick glasses over piercing
eyes, and one dangly earring. It was his first Clarion. He told us he was
prepared to work like hell, and he was. An unstoppable font of anecdotes,
opinions, and twisted humor, Swanwick gave us as much insight into his process
as was possible to give.

 Most of it in the form of line-edits.

 He line-edited everyone's stories, page by page. And read those edits to the
class, sometimes running hours past the usual 2 o'clock quitting time. Always
giving concrete advice about how he would improve the story. In the end, I was
able to distill it down to something I thought of as the Swanwick
Prescription. Three words.

 Do the work.

 "A bunch of your stories have scenes with salesmen in them." He grimaced.
"But it sounds like you've never spoken to salesmen. Christ. Go to a car
dealership. Listen to these people. Figure out what it is about them that
really makes them sound like salesmen. Study them." Things like, "Sure. You
might end up having to read a book or two for a few sentences, a few crunchy
details. So?"

 And, "Get nastier." When a character's thoughts showed even a hint of
whitewash, he cut to the dark core of human nature, always. Get meaner.

 "This character who's stalking this woman. Sure, it's his job, but he kinda
likes it, doesn't he?" His suggestion? "Go to a big Hotel. Follow a woman.
Don't let her see you, don't upset anybody for God's sake. But see what it
feels like to do that."

 "Readers are like baby ducks. They imprint on the first person they see in a
story. They tend to like him. He can get away with a lot."

 His teaching style drove some people nuts. By the end of the week, we were
wiped out.

 His public reading at the Elliott Bay Bookstore was masterful, brilliant, a
story he'd sold to Omni that made me drool. To write like that, one day...

 Listening to the story, seeing his prescription in action, I knew that the
story hadn't been easy for him--Swanwick admitted that he rewrote extensively,
that he wrote slowly. "I'd be embarrassed to show you my first draft stuff,"
he said. He described a process that involved writing, typing, retyping,
redrafting stories, building them slowly.

 Some people came out of interviews with him looking disturbed. I went into
mine with some trepidation. Always with Swanwick there was this little thrill
of fear, that he could say something that would destroy someone. It never
happened. But the possibility was both exciting and exhausting. We talked for
a long time, longer than our allotted half- hour. In the end he looked me in
the eye, and told me to stick with it. That one day I'd write the kind of
science fiction he liked to read. "You're trying to make crap into art," he
said. "An important thing."

 ***

 Michael on Week Five: Beth Meacham and Tappan King

 _Stand and Deliver_

 I had no worries on the beautiful sunny day I arrived at Greg and Astride
Bear's house outside of Seattle for the Week Five opening party. I had two
whole days to write my next story, and it was already plotted.

 I headed for the hors d'oeuvres table. Wonderful. Just the right ratio of
delicacies to processed snack foods.

 A tall guy with a mustache and a polo shirt watched me with a bemused
expression.

 "Are you Greg?" I said around a mouthful of food.

 He nodded.

 I wiped my hand on my pants, extended it. "Pleased to met you." I introduced
myself. "You taught at last year's Clarion, didn't you?"

 He grasped my hand warmly. "That's right."

 "Well, let me tell you, the help of people like you means a lot to people
like me."

 "I'm just returning the favor. Asimov and the rest helped me when I was
starting out. That's been the tradition from he beginning - each generation
helping the next."

 I beamed, pumped his hand.

 In the Bears' back yard was a lake. I went out and stood on the dock, looked
out over lily pads and sunsparkles. Terry Brooks stood on the shore feeding a
flock of Canadian geese. I took a deep breath of clean air. I was a science
fiction writer, by God. Here I was hanging out with the Names. Isaac Asimov
himself had probably stood on this very pier. Life was good. I watched Ray,
Kelly and Andy's heads bobbing in the middle of the lake.

 Carol followed me out a short time later. "Did you see the fridge?"

 "I around to the hors d'oeuvres table. Good stuff?"

 "Not really. It's our assignment from Beth and Tappan."

 I checked. A handwritten note stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet said:

 "Next week's assignment: Write a synopsis of a novel. This can be a novel
you've already written or one plotted just for this assignment. You will be
critiqued on presentation and salability."

 The room reeled. The deviled eggs and Cheetos churned in my stomach. Two days
before my stuff was due, and I hadn't even finished my story. And now I had to
conjure a novel synopsis out of thin air. I didn't even have an _idea_ for a
novel.

 I walked unsteadily back out to the dock. Sat on the end. Kelly drew herself
dripping out of the water and joined me in staring at the opposite shore.

 "Beautiful, isn't it?" she said.

 "Yeah. Gorgeous. You seen the fridge?"

 "Sure. So?"

 "_So?_ So, the editors drop into town two days before their week begins and
announce that they want to see novel synopses, and I'm supposed to take that
lightly?"

 "Well, of course not." She cocked her head at me. "You know, if your synopsis
is good enough, Beth might actually buy the book. That's what happened to Amy
Thompson at her Clarion."

 "Oh, that's great. That's just dandy. So I'm supposed to write a synopsis she
might actually buy, in two days?"

 "Not if you already have one. I'm going to hand in the synopsis my agent's
already been shopping around." She laughed and jumped off the pier. Some
perverse side of me hoped she'd drown.

 Late that evening, I shuffled down the hall to my room, the moment of truth
upon me. A real writer, I knew, could pull the whole damn novel out of his ass
in two days, and still manage to cough up a short story.

 I stared at the wall for an hour and went to bed.

 At about seven the next morning, bleary-eyed, I began my short story. At
about 10, Jay popped his head in my door. "How's it coming?"

 I glowered at him. "It sucks," I told him, "every word a glistening turd.
It's all those editors' faults. If they hadn't given us that ridiculous
assignment..."

 "Don't blame _them_ for your failings. This is between you and the page."

 "You're right. It's all my fault that I suck."

 Jay grinned. "That's the spirit."

 Beth Meacham and Tappan King formally introduced themselves at the official
introduction to Week Five meeting on the twelfth floor. They seemed like good
people, sincere and straightforward. But I wasn't in the mood to like them. I
sat back, folded my arms.

 "The novel synopsis is the single-most effective selling tool you have as a
fiction writer," Beth said. "You _must_ be able to present your work to a
publisher in a concise and effective form."

 Yeah, yeah, I thought, and now you'll see what we're really made of. Well,
I'll show you a novel synopsis, by God.

 Ten o'clock that night, the short story finished, I collapsed on my bed. One
down, one to go.

 Melissa had actually managed to get a synopsis done for critiquing on Monday.
The only one, and after a moment of silence in appreciation of the fact that
she was our Guinea pig, we opened up on her.

 She took what followed with grace and style, and at the end of a brutal hour
and a half replied simply, "Thank you very much." Tappan paper-clipped the
pages of Melissa's manuscript together, and said, "Does everyone understand
why this is not a selling document?"

 That night I paced my room. My novel synopsis was due the next day and I
still had no ideas.

 I sat at my desk and stared at the wall. Maybe I should just go to bed, I
thought. This turning in a manuscript no matter what was just a bunch of macho
bullshit anyway. I turned out the light and lay down.

 But sleep wouldn't come. I stared at the ceiling and thought about what it
would be like to not turn in a manuscript when it was due. "Ah," they'd say,
"when push came to shove, ol' Belfiore just couldn't produce. Guess he didn't
have what it takes after all. Too bad."

 Maybe I should just turn in 3,000 words of typing in synopsis format. After
all, whether the work was good or bad was almost beside the point, as long as
you laid yourself on the table for vivisection. No one could look down on you
for that.

 Goddamn it! I leapt out of bed, pacing in the glow from downtown Seattle. Why
should I be made to suffer just because I didn't have a ready-made synopsis up
my sleeve? I had to come up with something! Had to!

 My blood pounded, adrenaline surged, I clawed at my face, and - it bloomed in
my mind, filling the dark spaces with brilliant greens and golds, sat waiting.
There for the plucking. An idea.

 In my computer was the complete text of a play I'd written four years ago. I
could gut it, take the basic structure, and inject the innards of the story I
couldn't finish last week because it lacked a framework. Add a few flourishes,
a dinosaur or two, and viola. Instant novel synopsis.

 Not quite. My little construct of smoke and mirrors wasn't finished until
dawn.

 To my amazement, it turned out to be "a selling document."

 After class Syne clapped me on the back. "Good stuff, Belfiore, way to go!"

 "I had some old fragments lying around and I just strung them together. No
big deal." I grinned, breathing easily again. Relaxed.

 I didn't have to worry about my next story until Friday.

 ***

 Michael on Week Six: Joe and Gay Haldeman

 _Poetry and Eyeballs_

 Joe's reputation as a Vietnam War novelist had me imagining him pointing a
loaded .45 at the first person who flinched under his gaze. "You there! Give
me 200 words on future war! Pronto!"

 Instead, Joe turned out to be quite friendly, quick to laugh, approachable.
He and his wife Gay taught in tandem, a good combination, since she handles
the business end of Joe's career. As well as being Joe's manager, secretary,
and bookkeeper, "Her job is to make sure I have that couple of hours of peace
and quiet each day I need to work."

 At our first meeting in the twelfth floor lounge, Joe took off his
wide-brimmed Stetson, and put two envelopes filled with little slips of paper
in it. In one envelope, each slip had a science fiction idea on it, in the
other, a poetic form. The hat went around the circle, and we were to draw a
slip from each envelope. I got "Shakespearian sonnet" and "future war."

 "The idea is not to write good poetry, but to stay within the bounds of the
form and subject. See what you can do inside the cage. On Thursday night,
we'll have a poetry reading. I'll bring the jug of wine."

 The days passed quickly. I worked on my last story at a leisurely pace. I got
a good night's sleep for the first time since arriving, and I felt like I was
on some bizarre new drug that made me steadier on my feet and sharper of mind.

 Often after class, Joe and Gay and whoever was interested went out for lunch.
When we went to a nearby Thai place, I and my fellows tried not to look too
obvious about jockeying for a seat next to Joe. He told us war stories while
we waited for our meal. When the plates were cleared, he swirled his glass of
wine, and said, "You know, there really are a lot of similarities between
basic training and Clarion. There's the back-breaking labor and the sleep
deprivation, for instance. If you can survive this, you can probably get
through anything. This is the most stress you'll ever experience for the rest
of your writing career."

 I walked with Gay back to the dorm. "Michael Swanwick told me a story about
Joe," I said to her. "Joe was in a workshop right after he got back from the
war, and he turned in a story about a guy in a war who slips on human
eyeballs. The other workshop members trashed it. Said it was totally
unbelievable that anyone could slip on eyeballs. 'But,' said Joe, 'it really
happened. I slipped on eyeballs in Vietnam.' 'Doesn't matter,' said the
workshop. 'Just because it really happened, doesn't mean it's believable in a
piece of fiction.' That's a good story, and it illustrates an important point.
But the question is, did Joe _really_ slip on eyeballs?"

 Jay laughed. "No, no he really didn't."

 "What? There were no eyeballs?"

 "Oh, there were eyeballs, all right. But Joe didn't slip on them. What the
workshop objected to was the idea that eyeballs could pop out of their
sockets."

 On thursday night, we cobbled together some leftovers and Ellen made a
seafood stew, and we had dinner in the twelfth floor lounge. Our last time
gathered there. Pamela read a poem about the end of Clarion, and there
followed a moment of somber quiet, until Mike Keiper launched into his
limericks.

 "There once was a Cyborg named Ejay..."

 On Friday after class, we had a little graduation ceremony. Dave Myers, one
of the two administrators, handed each of us secret decoder rings, and Joe
shook our hands. Leslie Howle, the other administrator, handed us diplomas
that stated we'd "Learned the True Secret of Writing." Gay sprinkled us with
tiny glittering stars and planets.

 The dorm cleared out fast. Pedro was the last to leave, and as we went by his
room on the way to the elevator with suitcases and boxes, he waved and smiled
sadly.

 And it was over.

 ***

 Six weeks doesn't fit into 4,000 words. Did we mention the delicious group
dinners? The beauty of Seattle, the taste of hot latte and ranier cherries?
People crying in despair? People howling with the joy of creation? Dancing in
moonlit fountains at midnight? Melissa crowned a Writer of the Future - for a
story we'd halfway trashed the second day of class? Dancing till we were
soaked with the sweat of pure Seattle grunge? The eerie monotone of Paul
Allen's computer, as he smoked his pipe beside Phalen, the twenty first
Clarionite, his seeing-eye dog? The two car accidents and illness and
resentments and anger that we wouldn't ever discuss - outside the family? Bill
Gibson calling O.S Card a Mormon bastard at Amy Thompson's? Or shouldn't we
talk about that?

 Clarion, all in all, wisdom and friendship mixed half and half with the
furnace blast of raw ego and the pain of creation. Bootcamp. Mindphuck. The
Scarecrow's diploma.

 Clarion. Sleepless in Seattle.

 Basically, it worked for us.

 ***