Megan after a crummy workshop... (and a Tycho story)

Sitting in the McGill library right now, looking across their campus which is all decked out with Christmas lights—quite pretty, but makes me ache for Western, with the lights on the massive trees in front of UC. I can see the giant cross way up on the mountain though, which, I have to say, is a one-up on Western.

I got punched up in my writing workshop today. Not badly, and not that I didn’t deserve it—I handed in a lazy piece, an unpolished piece, a piece that some editor of whichever lit mag I sent it to is folding into airplanes, with his yellow fingers and a grisly laugh. I want to reach across time and space and pluck it back, file it away, move on. It’s funny how quickly a work you thought was decent, was passable, was worthwhile can fall several rungs on the ladder without you even noticing. I didn’t even want this piece to get workshopped by the time today came around. I just wasn’t in the mood, and I knew what would happen. I’m putting together a new work right now that is surprising me, that I want to shake in the air and say “No, guys! Forget that one! THIS is me!” Too late this time, though. Workshops are a tough business! Harder than any academic class I’ve had, by farrrrr. Imagine having a child, loving him, raising him the best you can—teaching him how to talk, how to behave, how to make decisions, how to brush his hair—and then on his eighth birthday you plunk him down in front of a committee of your peers who poke and prod him and peer down his throat and in his ears and ask him to perform all kinds of acrobatics while they tap their pencils on their pursed lips and take furious notes. In the end, you’re given a summary: nose too big, armpits smelly, can’t dance the tango, poor judge of character, hair not blonde/curly/shiny enough, too friendly, too naive, too much of a charmer, too timid. Afterwards you wobble out of there and wonder what you’ll do with this failure of a kid. Try to throw the engines in reverse and undo eight years of work? Give him away to a childless couple? Let him wander off on his own to see what the rest of the world thinks of him? Throw him away??

For my India class, I’m writing an essay on a novel whose eight-year-old protagonist is assured by her mother that her future husband will search the world with a candle until he finds her. Well – I’ll search the world with my word processor until I find my breakthrough story! And in the meantime, Brutopia calls, where I can sit with the other writers and rehash today's workshop. I hope Tycho is not worried that I'm not home yet...

...speaking of Tycho, he was making hella noise in the kitchen this morning while I was just waking up, crashing chairs around and chirping and just causing a general caffufle, and finally I went out to invesitage and discovered that he had a sticky note stuck to his foot that no amount of kicking and flailing could get off! Poor little dude! Poor little dude's paws!