imagoldfish

Swimming is awesome, and so are rebellious Mennonites. Creative writing is ok, but not as great as a two week seminar on the theoretical quandaries raised on autobiography would have been. Smuggling coffee out of dining halls is glorious, as are ridiculously long treks to buy cigarettes when the sun is shining and there's a nice breeze out.

Actually, I don't mind that this seminar has turned into creative writing/fat camp all that much. I'm bummed that it's not the awesome academic adventure I thought it would be, but I have high hopes for the seminar in Dublin, so it'll balance out. And it is kind of interesting to spend two weeks looking at the creation side of autobiography - I really should have gleaned the tenor of the program from the description of it as examining "the habits of the first person voice" - rather than just picking it apart. I never really spent much time just appreciating the way some of these authors use language. And I'd never tried to write something like it myself. So our short exercise of writing our first memory turned out to be surprisingly difficult for me, but quite interesting - I turned up a rather fascinating artifact from my childhood that I'd completely forgotten about, and then found the process of trying to fine-tune the writing to really capture it surprisingly pleasurable.

So things ain't all bad, not at all.