Thu, 19 May 2005

wordsick
This was ‘98. The first time I met someone I didn’t know who had read something I’d written on the internet was at a bar in Iowa City, the one by where I used to live, the one right across the street from John’s Grocery. I bumped into a girl I knew from undergrad workshop who was now in proper grad workshop and got caught up in her wake for a few hours, not wanting to drive back to Waterloo. At the bar we met some friends of hers, and one of them was a classmate from one of the dozen classes I stopped attending during one of my fits. She told me she had read something I’d written after doing a websearch for undergrad writer’s workshop and pulled up my submission piece. She told me I should be less gimmicky. This is the same thing Dan Foss told me the last time I saw him, so I knew she was right, but I kinda blew it off because I didn’t really want to talk about it; I was very self-conscious around these people who saw themselves as the next wave of American fiction while I still basically thought of what I did as a goof. She woulsn’t let this point go, she stared right at me and told me if I could drop all this self-referential post-Oulipo flash and filigree and got to the very bones of the human condition that I had it in me to say something meaningful, something satifsying. That was the word — satisfying. I was trying not to drink very much, but that attempt was starting to fail, and I told myself to keep my mouth closed and not run off at the mouth, so I didn’t really address her point, and eventually she stopped talking to me.
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #