First Day Of Skool

Dudes. I'm at the Banff Centre for the Arts. At a writing residency. And the first person I talked to last night at the obligatory Opening Awkward Social was a guy who takes himself way too seriously and has a New York agent. Of course, he's in my memoir group. Of course, his memoir is about people dying in the former Yugoslavia.

He's either going to be my nemesis or my side kick.

That's how these things usually go. The people that drive me the craziest on the first day usually end up being my best friends. I'm already planning to interrogate him about how he got The New York Agent. And what this Agent is doing for him.

Met some other lovely people. Including Kathleen from Maine, Lester from Edmonton, Connie and Bill from Toronto. They aren't a couple. They're just both from Toronto. I'm one of the youngest people there. Besides Jason, the poet from Winnipeg, who dressed like a Capital-A Artist and got WAY too drunk at the Awkward Social. So drunk he couldn't operate a corkscrew anymore. If he ever could. He was that young that he might not even know how to effectively open a bottle of wine.

I helped him. Does that make me an enabler?

Part of the package of stuff we received for this course was photocopies of everyone's writing samples from when we applied back in May. Based on a quick scan through the other memoir pieces, I can safely say mine is the only story that will involve laughing. Of any kind.

I forgot this about memoir. I forgot about the possibility of pieces about breakups and not being able to have children and sexual abuse and being gay in the war zone of former Yugoslavia. Which is what all of them seem to be about.

So. My piece will either get way, way, way funnier in compensation. Or I will spend this entire week crying about the injustices of the world.

To be honest, I'm just the teensiest bit worried I will be facing a week of therapy writing. The kind of work that should have stayed in the journal or the shrink's office. I wonder if there are psychologists on staff at the Banff Centre.

Regardless, I've decided that if other people's stories are going to be about the extremes of human experience, I will use it as an invitation to push my work further. Like way further.

Here is what I know for sure:
1. I am a performer.
2. I am unafraid to use myself and my life as the butt of my own jokes.
3. They let us do readings every night.
4. Watch. Out.