Unreal to Real workshop - Day 3

Warning, the events depicted are a carefully detailed re-enactment of actual events by artiste du stick-figure, Jen Hewett. They are NOT the actual events.

I must admit that I walked towards the third and final day of our workshop with a bit of a strut in my step. The hardest parts were surely out of the way and I would probably spend most of the time simply pining for margaritas while everyone was writing their final drafts.

It’s never quite so simple though, is it?

Students started arriving at different points between 15 minutes early and 15 minutes late, each one saying hello and simply requesting if they could continue writing. I told them they could work on the rough draft, but not to start the final one.

Unfortunately we lost one student this time. The mirror-handed wonder whose skills I gaped at last time was mysteriously missing, an absence hard not to notice considering she usually sat directly in front of me. Though my first concern was that the mysterious Monkey mentioned in last week’s post had something to do with this, I cast the thought aside quickly. Any girl with skills like hers could easily fend off some barely literate simian. Instead, my guess is that she’s finally realized her gifts and is either now employed as a code writer for Cracker Jack, or a bilingual Yiddish-English writer, maximizing on her abilities to simultaneously write in both languages. Either way, the show must go on.

I asked the class to clear their desks of everything but their rough drafts - the first salvo in a battle against the paperwork hordes - and had them pass their draft to the student to their left. We then handed out review forms we had fashioned that week and set them to the task of reading that student’s draft and filling out the review form which was a series of questions for them to answer as specifically as possible about what worked and what didn’t work in the piece they read. Not one to consider myself above the scrutiny of a middle schooler, I gave one of the late kids my story about the nine kitty deaths to review. Unfortunately I was too busy bouncing between questions to review any stories myself but Keri and Angie were there to pick up the slack.

One of the younger students had some trouble reading the handwriting and understanding some of the vocabulary of the story he was supposed to review. Quiet but curious, he asked me to read the story to him. I quickly realized that my own handwriting’s atrocious legibility to all but myself – and even that is suspect sometimes – is a wonderfully useful skill for deciphering others choppy script.

The class was rolling comfortably. The kids reviewed the work with a fair amount of detail despite their clear frustration with not being able to continue their own writing yet. They had no trouble asking questions and since we all knew each other’s names without really thinking about it, it was all very…well, comfortable. Busy, but easy. I’ll just have to make sure to build in time to review their work directly for future workshops.

After a half hour of reviewing, we swapped the drafts back to the original owners with the completed review forms and set the students to work on a fresh and final draft for the next 50 minutes. Despite groans of time’s encroachment, we had planned to stop them all about twenty minutes before the end of the workshop. This was to make sure we could make enough copies of all the stories so each student could have them all as a takeaway, to hand out workshop evaluation forms for them to fill out, and to gather any last-minute parental consent forms.

Do you see where this is going? Paperwork wars, baby!! I was shocked at how quickly the seas of paperwork could swell and splash over the deck of the quaint little ship I was navigating. Sure, there were hints of a storm coming in the beginning of the class when we handed out more worksheets, but by the end when the students finished at different times – some after twenty minutes, others waiting until the final stroke of 7:30 – there were stacks of syllabuses, worksheets, review forms, evaluation forms, consent forms, rough drafts, final drafts, and a dozen photocopies of each of the dozen stories coming and going so fast I was dizzy enough not to notice that the parents had already come to start shuffling their kids away for the evening. We were collating and slinging take-aways so fast that I almost missed the muffled murmurs of “thank you” that were popping around me like little firecrackers. We even got some of the kids to help form an assembly line, just like a little sweatshop. I felt so…international! Not really. I was too wrapped up bailing paperwork by the bucketload to fully appreciate the wonderful sentimentality of the goodbyes, but I knew there was a moment there to be appreciated which is almost as good.

Judging by both the evaluations and conversations with the students the most common criticism was that they wished they had more time. And that, my friends, is faaaaaaaaantastic.

In celebration of a job well done Angie and I went for margaritas at Velvet Cantina with our assistant Keri and Joel who runs the program at 826 and whose birthday is today. Joel was extremely pleased and encouraging with the whole workshop and invited us to get back on the schedule for another, which we will most certainly do.

So, lessons learned for the day? That’s easy:

1. Once they’re interested in what they’re writing, talk is cheap. The kids just want to write so don’t get in their way. That’s what we’re here for anyway, no?

2. Beware the paperwork! Once you hear the first faint fibers chafing each other take action to thwart their replication. Or make sure you have a good assistant, which, luckily, we did.

3. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Uh…yeah, very original, I know. This is regarding the students themselves. I was surprised to find that my expectations of both the writing styles and competencies of the students and the enjoyment they got out of the workshop did not always match the outcome. Some kids turned out to be much more enthusiastic than their grim and scowling mugs would have first indicated. No wonder my dad jibed me for always looking dour despite being a happy kid. Some kids also turned out to be much more inventive and skilled at writing than I would have first assumed. Inevitably, the opposite was also true. But that’s what we’re here for anyway, no? Wait, I said that already…

The Stories

At this point you may be wondering how the actual stories turned out. As I said, I haven’t read them all yet, but I have read enough to have a favorite moment. To end this trilogy of drama on a note of inspiration I will share it with you, however you will have to wait for the upcoming OLOGY to taste the full cornucopia of the class’ labors.

The following is a line from the first paragraph of the story written by a girl who claimed in the first class that the reason her paper was empty was because she was writing with invisible ink that only she could read. Regarding a Loch Ness type beast that had sunken a ship she wrote:

“Since then, Sequoia-tall tales had sprouted like poplar trees in very good soil.”

Far be it for me to oppose the use of invisible ink anymore. Huzzah and kudos to you. I would give you five thumbs up if I had five thumbs.

Next Steps

There isn’t a full workshop opening at 826 until January, but in the meantime we will probably sit in or host some one-nighters. For the moment though I’ll be typing up all these stories to post in an upcoming OLOGY issue, and most likely working with Joel to publish a small compilation chapbook for the kids to have and for 826 to sell through the pirate supply store.

Thanks again to Joel and 826 for giving us a shot at our first workshop, to Keri for being the anchor to this purposefully obnoxious metaphor of a ship (I was watching The Office last night to unwind), to our illustrators Jen Hewett and Tim Collins, and of course to Angie for making me seem like I knew what I was doing.