A Week of Writing

It's been a week since my last post, and you are probably saying, what's up? Why hasn't he been writing? Oh, I have been writing. I spent the last six days attending a workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's a great place to work on your writing. First off, the Work Center -- or "Fock" as I called it, as that's how you would pronounce F.A.W.C. (which, I suppose makes all the attendees "Fockers") -- had five or six workshops going on simultaneously -- two fiction, one poetry, one painting, and one printing -- so that meant you were surrounded by about fifty Fockers creating stuff. The faculty was incredible -- best-selling author Pam Houston, fiction writer, novelist, and journalist Matt Klam (my workshop's leader), and former United States poet laureate Maxine Kumin. My week started the day before the workshop, when Dorothy, the head Focker, called and asked if I would give Maxine a ride to the Cape(apparently her husband had a health issue). If you are wondering what a laureate in her eighties talks about, we listened to the Red Sox game and talked about writing. About what you'd expect.

My group had seven people -- mostly unpublished, but all highly skilled writers. We workshopped our pieces and did some writing. We laughed about our eighth participant, Georgia Davis who had paid in full, but never showed. We finally decided to make our assignment on the last night a piece about Georgia. We went to work there in Provincetown -- a place where everything is upside-down -- surrounded by writers, after reading night, when all the Fockers shared their work up at the podium in the Kunitz Lounge. It was amazing what people came up with. Georgia was a hot surfer, a middle-age wife living a double life. She was deathly afraid of flying, and she was listening in on our group with a bug she placed in our studio that was tuned into her Iphone.

One guy in the group didn't do any writing on Georgia, but he took it one step further. Into our class walked a short-haired woman. She looked twice at the door, seemed confused about something, then apologized for being late. Matt the teacher looked at her in disbelief; we all did. Was it Georgia? She was, until she and the guy couldn't keep straight faces anymore. She was a fake.

That's what I've been doing all week.