I walked to work this morning, since Fridays are the days Leah stays home with Ava, and those two are usually still dressing and getting breakfast by the time I have to head out the door.
For all its bluster and low, gray clouds, the morning was warmer than one might expect for the middle of January in Iowa. The students are still off on winter break, so there’s not much traffic on the roads. The university lifers straggle in a couple minutes late to their jobs at the college of business or the administrative offices on the pentacrest. They’ll read e-mail for a couple hours before taking an early lunch to run errands downtown and maybe even have a beer with their burger at Micky’s or The Airliner.
My route this morning took me past the Dey House, which is home to The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. They’re putting a fancy addition on the old residence to upgrade the program’s external physical image. I like the design. It’s particularly cool when viewed from the river walk at the bottom of the bluff on which Dey House sits. That view will be gone once the leaves come on in the summer; in fact the addition will be all but invisible unless it’s viewed from the parking lot to the south of the building.
As I started down the stairs that run to the bottom of the bluff, I noticed a flailing bunch of white pages stuck under a small hedge. “WORKSHOP” was written in robotic caps across the top of the first page.
Now, you have to be a pretty uninterested beast to be able to walk past a bunch of classwork from Writers’ Workshop students and not at least take a quick look at it. I’m an interested beast. I grabbed up the papers, brushed a little dried mud from them, and continued on to work.
It turns out the instructor for this undergrad creative writing class was a teaching assistant named Luke Sykora. You can see a sample of his poetry here. The three pieces comprising my soiled packet all read more like nonfiction to me, which is a genre close to my heart. They were pretty good short works, coming from freshmen. Still, I doubt any of them would end up actually gaining entry to the Workshop.
The whole episode reminded me of two things. The first was my own workshop experience in the nonfiction program, which from week to week turned from exhilarating to maddening to tremendously intimidating. It was a fantastic time. I see from the program’s Web site that a couple of people I studied with there have gone on to publish books. I should check them out.
I was also reminded of how much I love finding writing. Private notes are especially great. Shopping lists. Post Its with even one or two words on them. These little mental emissions scattered over the ground on wet, muddy pages and clumped up in the branches of bushes. Forgotten or lost by their authors, the words become tantalizing pieces of evidence of these different lives going back and forth and crisscrossing without notice.
In the nonfiction program we always took great care with the workshop pieces. Now and then a professor would admonish us to make sure we didn’t leave anyone else’s writing sitting around unattended; our stuff often dealt with very personal material that we’d never share with anyone outside the classroom. It strikes me as one of the most important differences between the fiction and nonfiction endeavors. Not to say fiction is inherently disposable. But these nonfiction essays often seemed more like confessions. We’d write things to see if we were brave or crazy enough to put on the page thoughts and ideas that we weren’t sure we could ever utter in even our softest whispering voice. So we held on to each other’s writing and guarded it like it was our own, not because we knew secrets, but because we’d become invested in each other’s lives.
So I wonder who dropped these pages I found this morning. Was it one of the three students whose work is included? Was it the grad TA? I could picture him emptying out a box of papers at the end of the semester in the dumpster near the Dey House parking lot and being surprised by a sudden breeze that picked up some papers and tossed them away toward the bluff. Chase them down or let them go? I mean, it’s only fiction….