I’m sitting in office hours and waiting for a last appointment I’ve made with a student. And monday nights are the loneliest of all the office hours. And being the final week of classes I have a few more class periods–one more fiction workshop–and then I get to be a writer and student again. I guess that is an exaggeration since I am always investigating story and narratives. That’s my job. But on holiday break I can carry the books around that I want to carry around. I can make annotations in the books i want to annotate. I can begin to think of my writing as the center of my thoughts rather than my students.
And a few minutes ago I pulled a book from my shelf–a book I haven’t cracked in quite a while. Something I wrote about a few days ago–Bringing the Devil to His Knees–the Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. And I am finding annotations and notes I made years and years ago. A past self as Tracy Daugherty pushed on creative writing students at Oregon State. So I am relishing in the time I can go back to this book–specifically the essays on omniscient narration and the weighted story. Hoping I can apply some of these ideas to my own abandoned manuscripts.
