Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, the day James Joyce's Ulysses is said to have taken place in Dublin, 1908.  Even though that's his great novel, no one talked (but me) about it, even the 27 writers at the residency.  That's odd.

I missed yesterday.  It was warm and I got molto tired.  It was a very good day, starting with an amazing craft lecture from Michael Meyer, who used a large screen and a digital projector of some kind that worked from his Mac.  When the technology failed him for a second or two, he giggled and said, "I'm a language arts teacher for K-12, and when this happens an 8-year old always says 'Let me fix it!  I can fix it!"  and they do."  He gave a fabulous talk about starting with "place" in travel writing, then expanded it to just about any kind of prose writing.  It's like he offered an analytic skeleton key to the audience.  We already have the tool kit to work with--character, scene, setting (place), etc., but we haven't recognized that that's what to start with.  "Always start with place" was his mantra, and he used the big screen to demonstrate the truth of what he said in a dozen different authors, most of them well known.  Then finally, he didn't quite have time to show us all of what he wanted to, the special demonstration from Steinbeck's East of Eden, but he had the relevant words already underlined in a handout he gave us.  It was fabulous.  He was funny and smart and spoke FAST.

Then the workshop was good, too.  There were a couple of poems I just didn't get, and now I do, so I learned.  People in the workshop were generally pleased about most of my poem but offered two serious changes.

The afternoon craft lecture was a little frail, a woman talking about Haibun, a combination prose-haiku form.  The notion of the form was clear, but, though I was awake and alert, I didn't think she had a lot to offer.

The Director of the program sat down beside me before the afternoon talk to check in and see if I was okay--looking after the old guy, I guess.  Her assistant, a young woman, had been behaving as if I were totally frail.  I'm not, am I?

The other two guys in my suite bought me dinner at Stecchino's last night, fettucini Alfredo, but it wasn't as good as my wife makes.

There was a reading by 3 of the 27 writers at the residency, and after that a reading by the students at 9 PM.  I was tired and I came back to the dorm, a good thing I did.  I slept wonderfully well last night.  Today is Fathers Day, and I celebrate my wife and my two children.  They support me more in my new adventure than anyone could believe.  More later.