Friday, June 25th, 1999

Our first week at Clarion, everyone ran on two to three hours of sleep, and now it has caught up with us. More and more people skip breakfast and stumble in to class at the last possible moment, dark circles under their eyes. Fewer and fewer people are making their story deadlines. Even this evening (a Friday night), people's doors have notes like "Dead: Reanimate at your own risk" pinned to them.

Has anyone else out there noticed the similarities between the Clarion Workshop and classic cult brainwashing? Both feature charismatic leaders, group indoctrination techniques, sleep deprivation, and bad food. Both require a huge commitment of time and finances. Both send their smiling graduates out into the world to recruit others. Think about it.

To be fair, though, I should also talk about all the progress that I have seen this week. Everyone has made quantum leaps forward. In my critiques of other people's stories, I notice that I write "Wow" more often, and it's not because I've gone soft, either. Many of my fellow students are using the workshop as an opportunity to take risks and experiment with their writing. Sometimes the experiment fails, but that's how we learn.

Michaela Sensei

Our last official class with Michaela Roessner was, um, different. Michaela is a fourth-degree black belt in Aikido, and spent the last part of the class giving a hands-on Aikido demonstration. I got to be one of her main demonstration models since I studied Aikido for years (until I divorced my instructor.) I'd forgotten how much fun Aikido was. Everyone enjoyed the lesson, in part because it was so good to be moving in class for once. We all spend way too much time sitting while we are here. We sit in class, we sit when we write, we sit when we work on our critiques of other people's stuff. Sometimes you just have to do something else.

Michaela even drew analogies between Aikido and the writing process for us. Basically, in both Aikido and writing, you learn that the obvious and most comfortable path is frequently the wrong one. Take chances, Michaela said. Stretch and grow.

Hmm