MFA Adventures- Day 1

            Day One was fabulous!  Because of my fear of being late, (allegrophobia is the fad non-clinically-approved word for it) I was an hour and a half early for the first lecture today.  Yep.  I typed out hour-and-a-half to make sure the full weight of it was obvious.  That’s twice the length of the first lecture that I’d prepared to attend.  This being unthinkably early got me a seat in the second row though.  Late-comers sat on the floor, leaned against walls, and ended up having to write on white-boards for the presenter because they were in his way.  Ha!  Allegrophobia for personal gain, for the win.

            As part of the requirements for graduation, students in their final term give a fifty-minute lecture about a topic that usually goes hand-in-hand with their final manuscript/thesis.  This morning’s topic was how to write convincing and vulnerable humiliating scenes in creative non-fiction.  I was most excited about this lecture over anything in the residency guide, for obvious reasons.  I can’t kill my own spiders, spend more time talking to my dogs than most humans, and I can’t navigate myself out of a paper bag.  Humiliating, yes.  Humorous, usually.

            The next senior lecture was terrifying.  The only person brave enough to participate was another student in his final term (Heliotropes, they’re called.  Each class is named after a tree.)  Here’s the title of the second lecture I attended:  Fabular Histories: Metahistorical Romance's Challenge to Historiology and Expansion of Historical Fiction.  He joked that he was competing for the lecture with the longest title.  If that were a real thing, he’d have won.  He explained (for most of the time) the technicalities of what it takes to create historical fiction and the difference between historical fiction and a “period piece”.  Turns out, historical fiction is only created if the main character’s entire being is effected by the events of the time.  A period piece occurs when the person is living a life and just happens to be living in the dark ages or something.  A discussion broke out in the last fifteen minutes about how much fiction can be put into historical fiction and the conversation went from issues with ghosts to religious visions to dragons, an amazing progression, I must admit.

            I met my “Buddy”, a fellow creative non-fictioner for lunch and flowed from orientation to orientation to workshop orientation in the afternoon.  YC really prepared me for this experience more than I could have ever imagined.  Although I haven’t developed as many workshop pet peeves as the seasoned veterans of the AULA workshops, but I kept up with the vocabulary and the direction that I hoped I could take my work.  Needless to say, I felt like a rockstar.  We’ll see how I feel when we actually start workshopping. 

            They fed us all three meals between classes today, which is pretty cool and pretty rare.  Lasagna dinner for all students and student readings concluded the night.  The student readings were incredible.  It’s amazing how many different styles of writing I’ve come to love.  There were some really great readers tonight, and batting clean-up, Jervey Tervalon, a brilliant fiction writer, and semi-new faculty member, who draws inspiration from the cities of New Orleans and Los Angeles.  I love this place.

            What I still don’t love- driving.  As soon as I get confident and start imagining myself already in my apartment, typing away, I’m crossing a bridge and being blinded by the lights of downtown Culver City or Marina del Rey.  My Garmin and I are not friends right now.