writing

there's a writers' group in my neighbourhood! the woman who is in charge has a couple published novels. dark humour s&m type stuff. she replied to my email right away and has added me to their mailing list and even though she used the word gentle in the description of the group i'm still going to go.

an aside: when i was in therapy dr. mary (i never called her this to her face, only in my head, in fact i never called her anything i would just begin talking about things totally unrelated to the issues i was having) would always tell me to be gentle with myself and i always thought this sounded like a load of hooey. i am already much too gentle with myself, i let myself slack off all the time. people have been gentle with me far too much over the course of my life, and i am pretty sure it is part of the reason why i never tried harder. constantly being rewarded for just doing enough is no way to motivate. wait except my dad was miserable. he could make me feel like shit for getting a regular a instead of an a+. once, when i was at college he left the most miserable guilt trip on my answering machine because of a poor spanish grade, so maybe this shoots my whole theory to hell?

the writing group though, i'm looking forward to it. a couple people are published and a few are not, i think that will be a good balance. they meet on saturday evenings but i'm okay with that. especially if the chemistry of the group works for me.

finding a good chemistry with other writers is tricky. i was very lucky when i was at wayne state to have a good group of friends who, like me, were sort of jerks. our manner of critique was 100% honest and true and you could absolutely trust what they were saying to you. if craig told me my story was a debacle then he was telling me that for my own good and it would be smart of me to listen. we all listened to each other. we weren't competitive because we were all very different writers. ted wrote his boozy beat inspired buddy tales, dave wrote his postmodern point driven pieces involving time travel and prometheus, craig wrote about his brutal military inspred tales, jessica wrote her wonky florida inspired stories filled with coccaine and antelopes and i wrote my first person narratives about coming of age among other things (except of course, for the debacle about the iron man triathalon, best not to think of it now). we all complemented each other perfectly.

of course, i lost touch with all of them. occasionally i hear from ted, usually when he's drunk. craig and i emailed a little bit when i found his info back in 2003 but he was in an MFA program and i was moving away so there wasn't a lot of time. dave and jessica i haven't heard from since 1999 and no amount of googling has brought them back to me.

i've tried to find that same balance but it never quite works out, i imagine it's because there's no alcoholic professor forcing us together anymore. graduation sent us off into different worlds.

i miss them all like crazy though, i miss the nights we closed down three bars and only barely stumbled home. i miss laying on the english dept floor peering under our professor's door to see if he really is in there like his office hours say (he had a sofa and was known to nap) and then finally saying fuck it and going to the bar to find him with another student ready to buy us a beer for our troubles.

so i will go next saturday and i will meet these people and i will do my best to remember that they will be different and that's okay. maybe at this point in my life i need something different.