Establishment

I hereby give up my designation as one of the few writers I know without a blog. I maintain my status as one of the few mothers I know without a cell phone. All I'm going to do here is practice writing, rant, and link to my friends' good work. Oh, and brag about my kids.

I just finished up two writing classes I taught through the local Adult Education. What a blast! Some of the students want to continue in January. I'm hooked. We all learned a lot, and in one case, it saved a story I was writing. I had two ideas juggling around in the back of my head, one was that the story lacked something important and the other that I had to prepare a reasonably comprehensible discussion on plot. And the heavens opened up and God shined a light on my ignorance: "Your story has NO PLOT."

In my classification of stories, a "Holy Shit!" story (so named because it renders superlatives meaningless) ranks behind 1. "God" and 2. "I wish I hadn't read this story because you've shown me I'll never ever write this well and I'm going to bed for a week starting now." One of my students wrote an HS. So do I have much to teach that person? Not really, but I can encourage, challenge, point someone in a direction. And there's value in that.

Next Tuesday Theresa Boyar and I are going to lead our little kids and their schoolmates in a poetry exercise. It's National Library Week! Theresa has done this before and as such, represents 100% of the qualified members of our team. I'll be the enthusiastic incompetent.