Belated Clarion Trip Report

June 28th 2005 at 3:50 pm

So after arriving at the sorority house (Kappa Kappa Gamma yay!) I hung around a bit, met a few clarion students, talked to Charles Coleman Finlay about what he had planned as a schedule for us the next day, and talked most of the people I encountered into going to dinner at the Caribbean place in Lansing I mentioned a few posts back.

At dinner I went last in line and explained what various menu items were. It looked like people sampled (and enjoyed) fried plantain, jerk chicken, and meat patties. I chatted with the daughter of the owner of the small diner. She was running the place at the time. She told me she had never actually been to the Caribbean but that her father was from Haiti (I didn’t realize Haiti had all this cuisine in common).

After dinner I couldn’t find anyone around the sorority so I watched some cable TV (I don’t have cable, so I’m always curious when I visit others to see what’s on) in one of the common areas. I didn’t find anything interesting on other than an E-Hollywood special about ‘Saved By the Bell’ that featured what the actors had gone on to do and how they were trying to break stereotyping. Eventually people wandered into the room, so I killed the TV and lively discussion started. Several Clarion students had all sorts of questions for me, one of them even sparked an idea for an extended entry or column that I might write. I stayed up chatting with everyone until about 2am or so.

The next morning we all critiqued two stories and then retired to the relatively cool basement to hide from the heat. After lunch Charlie and I talked about how we first got published, how we approached writing, and talked about what we shared in common with that experience, and what was totally different. Paul Melko, Charlie and I did this last year for the writers workshop at Context and it seemed to have went well. I hope the students at Clarion got something out of it.

I also passed around my folder with hundreds of printed rejections in it, and we talked about how many I still get (sniff :-). I hung around after that session to finish reading and critiquing an extra story for someone (I only had 2 stories to crit that morning, I’m used to 4-5).

Charlie and I had dinner with Jim Hines and talked about second books, agents, family, and other such things. And after dinner I found out that many of the clarion students I found gathered around a table had never heard of ‘The Eye of Argon,’ so I promptly loaded it up on my laptop and made everyone read it out loud until they laughed, then pass the laptop along (I’m truly sorry all involved! It’s a bad habit) to the next willing subject.

I stayed up until 3am talking to whoever was out, got up early Saturday to leave, and found a wonderful surprise from everyone: a nice card and a pound of awesome Starbucks coffee.

They seem like a hard working group. I hope to see many of their names in print soon.

Filed in Journal. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.