Single Malt Poetry

I drove up to Dayton for a couple days last week to attend a writer’s workshop.  John Scalzi had mentioned on his blog that he’d be talking about writing fiction and since I like both his novels and his book on writing, I figured it would be worth the drive up just to hear that in person.   And it was.

The workshop was fairly short; just one afternoon with a choice of attending two of four possible repeating sessions (five if you count the session the keynote guy from the night before gave, but I didn’t even catch what the topic of that one was) in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, or screenwriting.   I picked poetry for my first session and Scalzi’s fiction talk as my second session.

I don’t have a lot to say about the poetry session other than it wasn’t what I expected based both on the testimonials from past participants and on my own experience at events like this.  Instead of a prepared talk on publishing or revising or any other topic related to the writing, and just as importantly, the publishing, of poetry, the speaker mostly had the folks who attended the session do a few short writing exercises, after which we read what we wrote and he commented on it.  Such exercises have value, and I even managed to crank out a handful of worthwhile lines during the process, but I can write anytime.  What I was looking for was for the speaker to share some of what had to be a wealth of knowledge about writing and publishing poetry.

The fiction session led by John Scalzi, however, was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be.  He gave a prepared talk that I think was well-targeted towards the majority of the folks who attend workshops like this, i.e fairly new non-published writers.  His talk ranged from what fiction is and why people write it to the skills he believes are necessary to write it well and get it published.  Having read his book on writing, I don’t think I heard him say anything that I hadn’t already read either in his book or on his blog, but I didn’t expect to.  I did appreciate his answers to the questions people asked and from what I could tell, so did they.  I don’t want to sound too much like a fanboy, but basically it was cool to see that the guy I’ve grown to think of as a smart, funny, author on the web is, in fact, also a smart, funny author in person.

That sounds silly, and it isn’t like I haven’t met and interacted with other folks of some or even considerable fame.  In the last academic year, for instance, the poets Yusef Komunyakaa and Vivian Shipley gave readings and talks at UT and I met and spoke quite a bit with both of them.  I remember thinking when I shook Yusef’s hand, “wow, I’ve never shaken the hand of someone who won the Pulitzer before.”  I felt the same way when I talked for a good long while with Vivian at a reception in her honor, especially since we were drinking bourbon.

Somehow, though, it was a little different meeting Scalzi.  I think it might have something to do with the fact that, while all of my poetry-writing and some of my poetry-reading friends would be excited at the thought of meeting Yusef Komunyakaa, most of the people I know outside of that circle would never have any reason to ever encounter him or his work, nor would I think of recommending they read him.  Scalzi, on the other hand, writes Sci-Fi, and most of my friends outside the creative writing program are geeks, and I’ve recommended him to some of them already.

So was it cool in a fanboy way to meet John Scalzi?  Heck yeah.  It was especially cool to share his bag of gummy worms and other candy at the reception after his session.  Gummy worms beat bourbon any day, if you ask me.

The next time someone says to me, “Have you checked to see what the weather will be like in (the place I’m going for a couple days),” my response will be, “Why no, I haven’t. I’ll do that right now.” Unfortunately that won’t do me any good on this trip. My little weather program (Meteorologist) says it is 36 degrees outside but I don’t believe it. I saw people with coats and gloves walking around when I parked in the garage a block away from my hotel and it sure felt colder than 36. Oh well, I’ll have a nice brisk walk in my windbreaker tomorrow morning when I head over to the writer’s workshop.

Speaking of which, you may ask yourself, why is Mike in Dayton, Ohio? Well, I drove up here from Knoxville to attend a writer’s workshop tomorrow. Why did I drive five hours (ok, a little over four, but don’t tell the state troopers in Kentucky and Ohio that) for a writer’s workshop? A couple reasons, actually. I felt like getting away from everything for a couple of days and John Scalzi is the instructor for the fiction session. I read and loved his sci-fi novel Old Man’s War and I just finished his book on writing, You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing. I’ll have more to say about both books in later posts, but in a nutshell I found Coffee Shop to be one of the most practical books on writing (or rather, on being a writer) that I’ve ever read. I also like Scalzi’s blog (you should see it linked over there to the right) so I figured why not drive up to hear him speak?

Just wish I’d brought a coat…