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Playing
Wife
Scott Westerfeld is
the final week tutor at Clarion
South, an intensive six-week writing workshop for sf and fantasy
writers. And I'm the tutor's wife. This involves getting up at the
same ungodly hour he does to make him breakfast, while he goes over
his notes and scribbles on the stories that will be critiqued that
morning. I kiss him goodbye as he grabs his bag and heads out the
door. "Have a good day at work, sweetheart," I say.
"Sweetheart" is not a word that normally passes my lips.
To me Scott is Scott not darling, sweetie, sugar, possum, love or
anything else. Clearly, this playing wife thing is destroying my
brain. I'll start wearing gingham and aprons and long for a house
with a white picket fence. I've been making him lunch and dinner
as well as breakfast and doing all the washing up, cleaning, tidying
and laundry. It's just exhausting.
Or it would be if I was a bit more conshie about the whole thing.
Fortunately I'm not. I let the dishes sit. And my version of tidying
is more of a gather and dump process. I haven't gone near the mop
or vacuum cleaner or dusted or anything that requires true exertion.
I'm a pretty crap wife, really.
One night instead of rushing back to cook dinner for knackered husband
I sit around and drink beer with the students, gossiping and swatting
blood-bloated mozzies, before belatedly dashing back to the flat
and taking over the dinner-making proceedings from the exhausted
and ravenously hungry husband. "Is that beer on your breath?"
he asks, suspiciously. "I was near people who were drinking
beer," I answer honestly. Scott is turning into a husband.
Neither of us quite realised how much work a Clarion workshop involves.
Scott presides over the crit room from 9AM to 1PM where he and the
17 students dissect the day's stories and he dispenses pearlers
about writing that involve the following phrases: "first shoe",
"Brechtian law of dialogue", "information assymetery",
and "sweating commas". The students diligently write down
everything he says. I worry this will go to his head.
Sometime between 1:10 and 1:30PM he comes home for lunch. We eat,
briefly converse, then in the few minutes left before he begins
the one-on-one sessions with students that will occupy the rest
of the day (usually three or four one-hour session), he plunges
into reading and re-reading more of their stories.
He returns for dinner. We eat and exchange possibly as many as fifty
words, before he starts reading the next day's stories: all 20,000
words of them. Long before he's finished I go to bed, read, pass
out.
While he's away critiquing and being wise, I've been rewriting the
Magic or Madness sequel,
working on the Daughters
of Earth anthology or slacking off. Slacking off is best.
I had a lovely lunch with Kim
Wilkins where we talked writing, babies, academia and frocks
and I managed to douse myself with a glass of champagne, which the
kind restaurant replaced without charge. I'd had only one sip before
it filled my lap.
Mostly I went into the city to visit my mate, Ron Serdiuk, at his
wonderful sf, fantasy and crime bookshop, Pulp Fiction. We gossiped
and I watched him sell four, five, six or more books to customers
who come in just looking for the one. Ron's passionate and knowledgeable
about those genres and it shows. He pays attention to what his customers
do and don't like and recommends accordingly. Very dangerous indeed.
Yes, I bought books too. Louise Welsh's latest (Ron got me hooked
by loaning me The Cutting Room) and Devil in the White
City.
I also helped out the young man from Mallorca with very little English
who came in looking for Spanish-language books. I'm pretty sure
I translated Ron's directions to a shop that sells such books reasonably
accurately. Though I do tend to get left and right mixed up. Still,
we gave him a map, and I got to talk Spanish. By the time I got
home I was exhausted. I took one look at Scott and revised my assessment
of my fatigue to mildly peaked.
Yesterday I helped out Grace Dugan, Clarion South's co-founder,
with printing out the stories for the following day. There were
four of them ranging in length from nine pages to thirty-seven.
Just under 20,000 words. The author of the shortest manuscript neglected
to add page numbers so I numbered the 153 pages by hand. The printer
freaked out several times and started printing a line of garbage
at the top of otherwise blank pages and would not stop until we'd
done everything we could think of to fix it several times. At which
point the stapler started buggerising around with us. Two hours
later we had 72 copies of the stories to distribute to students
and tutor. It gave me a tiny glimpse of the hard work that makes
this workshop run. The conveners: Robert Dobson, Kate Eltham (the
other co-founder), Heather Gent and Robert Hoge look every bit as
tired as the students.
To recover from the printing ordeal I went swimming with Grace and
Lily Chrywenstrom (one of this year's students). It was rather gorgeous,
despite the crushing disappointment of a short-course pool. I expect
such mingy pools in the USA, but in Australia! The horror. The day
was balmy and humid and lovely, the water warm strewn with leaves
from the surrounding gum trees. We swam, laughed, floated, sank
and gossiped, while I tested my new boardies, rashie and fins, and
swam fast as Thorpie (or almost). We agreed that swimming is good,
so is writing, and that hard work is best avoided. The last one
may just have been me.
Grace led us to the path through the bush that connects the two
Griffith Uni campuses, Nathan (where the workshop is held) and Mount
Gravatt (where the swimming pool is), and we walked back past gums
and paperbarks and grass trees and other plants that Grace knew
the names for but I've now forgotten. We saw butterflies, bush turkeys,
heard many different birds calling to one another, but saw only
crows which we dubbed singed rainbow lorikeets (you had to be there).
The walk was even lovelier than the swim.
Earlier in the week I spent forty minutes stalking a goanna, just
shy of two metres long from head to tip of tail. It took a while
to find just the right stalking distance; every time I got too close
it froze, clearly hoping I would stop seeing it and go away. Only
at ten metres did it believe I was gone. I watched the goanna being
divebombed by birds when it ventured too close to their nests, and
at last reaching its goal: a garbage bin. It climbed in and out
of the bin always having some part of its body peeking out, tail,
hind legs, or head, snout and eyes. A strange clicking hissing sound
came from inside as if the goanna were torturing a cicada.
The goanna waddled rather than walked, its stocky limbs moving in
a circular motion that made it resemble one of Tolkien's grumpy
dwarves. When it was startled by a group of US exchange students
it ran half way up a tree, where it froze in its you-can't-see-me
pose. The Americans were transfixed, unable to believe the size
of it. I told them it was still a baby and would grow much much
bigger. Who knows? It may even be true.
When Ellen
Klages, another—despite her many acclaimed stories, recent
first novel sale (to Sharyn November at Penguin USA) and growing
reputation—Clarion student, stumbled across a goanna, it reared
up on its hind legs and hissed at her. Surely it can't have been
the same one. It was strange seeing Ellen here in Australia. I've
known her for years, but only in North America, and only at conventions.
This is the first time we've hung out together when her accent has
been the odd one out. It's most peculiar. She's as exhausted and
worn out as all the other students, who've not only been reading
and critting the 20 thousand words of stories every day for the
last six weeks, but have been writing a sizeable number of them
too. I've never seen her happier.
It's just after midnight, the beginning of Friday, the last day
of Clarion South 2005. Scott's reading the last and longest story
for tomorrow. He's not a fast reader. It'll be at least an hour
before he crawls into bed. The bags under his eyes are meeting up
with the stubble on his cheeks. It's not a good look.
He
arrived knackered, worn done by a long hard year of writing way
too many books, all of them written to his ridiculously high standards.
I'm still not sure how he managed it. The Clarion South experience
hasn't exactly been a rest cure, yet he's loving it here. He uses
the word "rejuvenated" frequently, even though he's so
tired he stumbles over that many syllables. He's full of praise
for the smarts, sharpness, energy, creativity, and dedication of
his students: Mark Barnes, Nike Bourke, Nathan Burrage, Alison Chan,
Lily
Chrywenstrom, Suzanne
Church, Shane Jiraiya
Cummings, Rjurik Davidson, Evan Dean, Ellen
Klages, Tessa
Kum, Deborah McDonnell,
Anne Mok, Emma Munro, Trevor Stafford, Susan
Wardle, and Kenrick Yoshida. He says he's learned as much about
writing as they have, has been forced to put into words ideas about
the craft that had floated about in his backbrain but never surfaced
before. He's sad it's almost over.
On Monday we go to Heron Island with Ron and Sarah. Six days without
computers: no writing, no internet, no critiquing, just tennis,
snorkelling and mango daiquiris. I'll stop playing wife and we'll
be back to being Scott and Justine again. We can't wait, but neither
one of us would have missed this week for the world.
I crawl into bed now. Scott keeps scribbling in red.
Written Brisbane, 11 February 2005; posted Sydney, 21 February 2005
©
2005 Justine Larbalestier
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