I found a note among the pages of my clipboard today, which I vaguely remember jotting down as an idea for a story, kind of like a symbolic string around my finger:
Remember this moment, Findlay!... I think you might know the type of girl I have in mind for this, though she may not be recognizable from this little tiny description... kind of loud, the one who always asks too many (misdirected) questions in class, the one who you
know the professor complains about to his/her colleagues... if writing is the best revenge, I've got a list of "types" who will pop up in various ways!
She's the kind of girl who would should BLESS YOU! across the crowded lecture hall (both for sneezes and discreet coughs), dig for a clot of tissue in her purse, lob it over the ducking heads even as the professor touches his notes with a fingertip, hoping to keep his place, his composure.
I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, especially stories by Annie Proulx, and their texture and near-perfection make me salivate as I draw my knees under me in the big comfy chair and read on. Check out this first sentence of one particular story (
The Half-Skinned Steer from
Close Range) and just TRY to tell me that it's not brilliant, the kind of writing where the writing itself disappears and leaves only the most potent, heart-breaking image:
In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.
Reading this kind of work just makes me want to write and write and write until I get it... which is a relief, because if I didn't feel like that then I'd be screwed for the next two years! I didn't end up posting that piece I wrote based on Pierre Berton's cat because it's kind of formulaic, in a bland sort of way (though I still love it and will give it out by request!) but I did just finish a creative response paper for my 20th C. class, the instructions were "write whatever you want in 500 words!" ... last time we had that assignment I wrote a parody of Max Beerbohm's
Zuleika Dobson, in which I had thousands of UWO first-year students fall madly in love with Jordan and throw themselves in the Thames to escape their tortuous desire... it worked out well, lots of inky smiley-faces in the margin. This time I did something a little different, I wrote an extra bit for Virginia Woolf's novel
Between the Acts, tried my best to emulate her style and create that sort of touch-and-go feeling she does so astoundingly well, giving you only
barely enough detail to live off of so you're always hunting through the pages for more, half-starving and loving it. This exercise was fun to do because two years ago when I was in Garber's writing workshop one assignment had us choose an author we love and copy their style... I did Woolf, and re-wrote the first few pages of
Mrs. Dalloway in a UWO context... I love trying to write like her, because I know I will never quite do it (who could???) but I can really feel the lessons that teaches! Anyway, this will make for a ridiculously long post but I thought I'd put this up here because I happen to like what I did and it's MY BLOG so I can do whatever I want, yes?
So this is my
Between the Acts additional chapter... it's supposed to be kind of making fun of the whole society in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way... so, just briefly... this novel is about a pageant that's taking place in some hoity-toity British person's backyard one summer just before WWII, and during each "interval" between the acts the audience members go up to the barn to have tea and cake and talk about what they've seen... Woolf is really big on what it means to be part of a crowd, to lose the "I" and become an "us," and she's also big on screwed-up marriages (take that, Blackmore and Noon! I will resist your elitist judgements, you dirty lovers of scifi!), and in this case the marriage in question happens to be between Giles and Isa... they haven't had sex in quite a while and they are basically strangers to each other, isolated in their respective upper-middle-class bubbles, and Isa is fond of looked at Giles and thinking to herself in an amazed/disgusted sort of way: "He is the father of my children!"... and I think Giles is hilarious, I think Woolf meant him to be a complete imbecile, inferior to Isa in all ways except that he is a man and thus OBVIOUSLY superior. That's all you need to know... you should read the book, it's fantastic, as per the Woolf tradition of fantastic-ness... if you do, you will pick up on other references, like what the chuff-chuff-chuff is, and why George is known to his grandfather as a crybaby!
ps - is it okay to post writing on my blog? Or just annoying? Maybe "annoying" isn't the word.. but, you know... if I found someone else's blog with this many words, I probably wouldn't read it... so I am doing an informal poll! Yes? No? Maybe?
pps - I hope Pero never sees this, because I think I completely butchered my presentation of Woolf, but I'm trying to write it in a nutshell, so there!
ppps - interesting fact about
Between the Acts: Woolf committed suicide a few days after finishing the first draft! Who knows how it would have turned out if she had been alive to revise it. Her husband has a note at the beginning of the text saying that he believed the manuscript wouldn't have changed much between the first draft and the final printing version, but you never know!
Between the Acts:The Unpublished Chapter, in which the nurse loses George(thanks to notes from V. Woolf and M. Findlay)The pageant was at an interval and hands were already reaching out to brush flies from the cake tray when a ripple of alarm passed through the barn—one might see from the rafters, with the swallows, an urgent pushing, Mrs. Swithin’s elbow knocked where she stood by the tea; the group by the cake table staggering apart; Colonel Mayhew losing sight of Mrs. Mayhew for a moment when a brown head rushed between them.
This pushing for the door was the nurse, and everyone knew in the same moment: George was missing.
The crowd took up the search from where they stood in the barn, their words nosing though the air, sniffing, watching as the nurse spun about in alarm: “A day-dreamer…Did you know she came from London only last week? And already charged with the boy… Belongs in the kitchen… He’s queer, that boy… Never got on with my William, though only ten months the junior…Likely asleep under a tree, they don’t feed those children properly, always wanting sleep…”
Giles stood in the center of the room, caressing his teacup. There was, he guessed, a problem, and in his mind he saw the dimpled surface of the lily pond, and below it the pink face of a boy, his hair waving gently in the imprecise murk—Giles stopped when his father's fierce hand clamped his shoulder. “Your boy,” said Bartholomew, “is a cry-baby. They’ll hear him from his crying.”
Isa appeared before them, her face flushed, her hands tearing a program into tiny pieces that spiraled to the floor with the dust and the voices.
“Our son is missing,” she said. Then, her eyes traveling downwards: “There’s blood on your shoe.”The little boy, as it happened, was not missing at all. He knew exactly where he was: in the bushes, beside the stage, pausing on his hands and knees and holding his breath to better hear the strange, raspy voice that invited him forward, the trees themselves whispering: chuff-chuff-chuff…
George had temporarily forgotten his nurse. He had forgotten his grandfather, and the Afghan hound, and the blob of foam on the hound’s nostrils: he had, in truth, suddenly forgotten everything that had been occupying his mind until that very moment. He remembered only the sound when there was no sound, and he saw the bushes in front of him, and the movement behind them, and he smiled without realizing it and crawled forward on his knees.
And suddenly, just as he was reaching out to part the beckoning leaves, George was seized round the middle by two rough hands and the ground was gone from under his feet and the bushes swung away from him. He was transported through the air and spun around. The empty seats streamed past him, his legs dangling, his feet knocking hard against the chair backs.
George opened his mouth to the wind and howled.
From the barn came all the bodies, all the arms held out stiff in front, all the fingers wagging, and from Albert the Idiot’s grip traveled George, catapulting, somersaulting, until the many arms closed around him and he heard his Grandfather’s voice, and his mother’s, and a thousand other voices: “There he is! Crying again… Oh, he is found…Albert, Albert, thank you, have some tea… Have some cake… Oh, the poor darling…”
Then the music played. The crowd pressed forward. George was found; the audience took their seats. “Such excitement,” they whispered. “Such drama. We will never be done by midnight!”
I kind of want to post my original Woolf pastiche, because I think it's better, and makes more sense to the random reader... also I named my protagonist Bronwyn, likely for unconsious reasons... but I need some validation first because I could really get carried away here and annoy you all to hell... do you want to read it?
