Tuesday, June 15, 1999

I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss the Clarion herding instinct, which means that you can go nowhere without at least ten other people tagging along with you. Every restaurant trip is a group event. Every time I open my door in the evening, at least five people materialize within my room to chat. (Okay, so they did not beam in, but it sure seemed that way.) We are all far from home and surrounded by charming, intelligent people that we'd like to know better. The bonds that you form with your fellow students are part of what makes this workshop worthwhile.

Sometimes, though, even an extrovert like myself gets overwhelmed with the desire to flee the group. Unless you hole yourself up in your room all the time, it is hard to find the solitude that writers often need to recharge their batteries. While I need less of this than my fellow students, I am finding that I'm closing my door more and more often just to have a little quiet time to myself.

Don't get me wrong. I love interacting with my fellow students, and I am not becoming a hermit out here. I am amazed at how quickly this group has bonded together. Part of what helped this along is that we all met on the chatty Clarion mailing list weeks before we arrived. By the time we met in person, we already knew everyone's names and something of what brought them to Clarion. Many of my fellow students claim to be painfully shy, but found that conversation came easily in the group. It helped that we had a chance to become friends before we met.

Pregnancy Update

I think that just about everyone has asked me in a concerned voice, "So, Hilary, how are you doing? Everything okay?" To calm everyone down, I just want you to know that so far Clarion and pregnancy have been going together fine. I cannot keep the insane hours that everyone else does, and I'm a lot more careful about what I eat, but other than that I'm just like any other Clarion student here. I write, I socialize, I get stressed and then I calm down again. In an effort to sleep better and to keep my health up, I started an exercise program with another student, Lisa Feld. We have a twenty minute walk to the swimming pool, swim a few laps, and walk back. The whole thing takes an hour, but it is a really good workout. Being pregnant at Clarion even has some unforeseen advantages, like being one of the few students to get one of the prized A/C units out here.

So, to sum up: I am fine. I do miss my husband, though.

Cool Stuff I'm Learning

James Morrow's lectures have been great. Many of the things he has said in the last few days have resonated for me. On Monday, he discussed how theme can inform a story and tie all its disparate elements together. If you keep your theme firmly in mind when you write, decisions about what elements go into your story become simple. This has been an epiphany for me, because I realize in retrospect that all my successful fiction had clear, easily identifiable themes, and all my non-successful fiction did not.

Today in our critiquing session we got our first memorable Clarion quote, courtesy Dave Kirtley, and I just have to share it: "Emotionless killer cyborgs are people too." That one is going on the group t-shirt this year.

Hmm