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Writing Classes
7/18/04

written in a Prague pub

In high school I defaulted to running track when it
became evident that I was not co-ordinated enough
to compete in other sports.

And in college, I made a similarly deflective move by declaring
myself a fiction writing major.

I was attracted to the elastic grading methodology, the absence of
examinations testing knowledge of absolute truths, and I was in good
company.

The short stories written by my peers lacked imagination and life
experience.

Expecting elaborate, murderous, adulterous, and tragic plots, I was
disappointed to find my peers writing what they euphematically termed
"memoirs."

Memoirs, it seemed, were nothing more than excerpts from the diaries of
boring lives, and I decided to use this as a theme in a story.

The story was about a jazz musician who performed best hungover,
and as his career brought him to larger venues before music critics
and increasingly large audiences, his need for hangovers also grew,
until finally he was so immensely popular and in such dire need
of near-death alcohol poisoning that he was wheeled out onto stage where,
in a degenerate state of lucidity and oftentimes covered in his own excretions,
he wooed adoring fans with his sense of beauty.

"Alcoholism is not funny" was a comment that revealed my professor's
lack of thematic instinct. Concerned with the quality of the writing and not the reading, we continued on, like my track team, migrant failures
avoiding participation, perpetually side-stepping until we found ourselves,
pen in hand, asked to account for where we had been.

 

Copyright © 2004 Craig Hordlow