Had my first creative writing class today. It was the class I was most looking forward to. It’s held in this great old building with rickety stairs and wood floors and small, terrifyingly intimate classrooms. There are 15 in the class, all of them prodigious and blessed with that easy American confidence. I discovered today that half of the course will involve writing fiction; half will involve writing poetry.
Thing is – I don’t really like poetry. I’ve never really written it, except for those ill-advised teenage scribblings that everyone does – basically rants with the odd rhyming couplet. I think poems are usually a lot more interesting for the writer than for the reader, unless you’re Wilfred Owen or TS Eliot or Derek Mahon – and I’m not.
We have to write five poems and two short stories for the course, and they’re going to be workshopped in the class. In other words, ripped to shreds by all those prodigious people. I don’t mind that happening if I’m proud of what I’ve written and enjoyed writing it. But I don’t think my poems will be anything other than lame. I dunno. Maybe I’ll get over it; maybe I’ll drop the class, do something else.
The last three nights have been fun. It’s hard finding nighttime activities for under-21s. The was a free outdoor film festival in Copley, held on the grass under that tall shiny building I posted below. Tuesday was Raising Arizona, Wednesday The Princess Bride, and last night Napolean Dynamite. I think Knocked Up is showing somewhere on campus tomorrow. Just thirteen more days before they let me into pubs, huzzah!
