This semester I’ve doubled up on studies in my MFA Writing program at the New School. I was able to do this because over our midwinter break I read sixteen novels for my seminar class in order to free up this time for French studies and a course at NYU in copy editing, a requirement for my Certificate in Copy Editing that I’d hoped would get me employment in publishing, though I’m beginning to realize that my age will exclude me from this special club because I’m not worthy of entering any of these companies as an INTERN because of my advanced age, and one can only GET these jobs working as an INTERN first for them. As well, these companies know offering unpaid lackey work to an elder who has worked for years in offices, worked as a reader, and worked running her own company IS DOWNRIGHT EMBARRASSING.

Well, I can always go back to playing backup in COUNTRY COVER BANDS since even TEMP AGENCIES NO LONGER SEND OUT PEOPLE MY AGE! YES, back in those GOLDEN days of temping I was sent out to publishing companies, you name it, I was offered job galore for years...to support...other career goals!  Gee, it’s GOOD TO KNOW I CAN FALL BACK ON SOMETHING!

HEE HAW!

RETURNING TO THE WRITING: After reading those sixteen novels, I found out the Marquis de Sade’s Justine would NOT be part of our curricula this semester in our seminar class on INFLUENCE. I admit I WAS INFLUENCED despite myself by de Sade, and then by Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater  (also NOT part of our curricula after all) that contains an extremely despicable protagonist, and I discovered this when I completed my first short story for my workshop class in which inappropriate sexual doings crept into the prose. To fight against this INFLUENCE I blew the world up by the end of this creative fancy.

Of course, my classmates argued for and against this concept, though none touched upon the heinous sexual acts UNWITTINGLY WRITTEN into the piece as the INFLUENCE that pushed me to that final act of violence. None attached significance to the WRITER STRESS from the concept that those vile words flowed from my pen...er...I mean my fingers typing on my Macbook. And that perhaps having CREATED this world with such despicableness, I then had to ERADICATE it with the  hyperbole of BLOWING UP THE ENTIRE WORLD to conclude my short story.

I entered this program to learn more about writing. To better my novels. To revise greatness into my ramblings. Before entering the program, I was writing what I realize now were Young Adult novels. The school decided for me (due to the cost of a double major). It was the children’s writing program or the fiction program and into fiction I was sent. In two semesters, I have gone from writing about gentle contemplations of budding flowers and puppy-dog eyes to heinous rapes, brains exploding, and the world blowing up!

But in moving in this direction, am I losing my core, my soul, my being?

Or is this the journey as one becomes a better liar...I mean fiction writer?

“I think, therefore I am,” declaimed Descartes...or is it as Anne Carson amended to entitle one of her seminal works (of course in an ancient tongue): “I hate and love, therefore I am.” Perhaps it is: “I write, therefore I am,” or “I am, therefore I write.” All I know is there’s been a change, and it frightens me to know that in writing I expurgate the darker side, and in so doing PUNISH MY CHARACTERS for these excesses. I SUBJECT THEM TO HORRORS. I BLOW THEM UP!

Where will my writer’s journey take me next?