by Paul Zerby
“There is an old style of teaching where the teacher has gold bricks of knowledge, reaches back,” said Father Jogues, reaching back over his shoulder, “and hands them out to the students,” miming distribution. “We believe in the pizza style, where each of us puts an ingredient on the pizza, and the facilitator,” he looked at me, “is the crust.” We were beginning the second of a four-session workshop called “Writing Fiction from Life” I’d been engaged to teach the Storyweavers, a group of seniors who had been meeting weekly over the past year to work on their writing, on their own, thank you. Father Jogues looked at me and waited.
I’d thought the first session had gone so well. Before we met I’d asked that each member bring to class an idea of what he or she wanted from the workshop and a page about a childhood memory. Ann, Jogues, Jim, Dave, Marion, Marjorie, and Virginia had introduced themselves and described what they did, or didn’t, want from the workshop. Jogues read a moving Memorial Day essay, and Ann read her timely one on patriotism. Ann also brought a childhood memory of riding the Ferris wheel. Dave shared an ironic story of triumph over an alphabet stew of military bureaucrats. Jim wrote about a principal returning a young Hmong girl to her home after the first day of school, likening the principal to the Wizard of Oz and the student to Dorothy. I’d talked about choosing a subject; beginning a story; conflict, crisis, and resolution; the arc of a story. I’d assigned either finding the kernel of a story in what they had written or starting another story, and reading Colum McCann’s “Everything in This Country Must” for our second session.
I looked back at Father Jogues and said I could do pizza. I handed Ann a news item from the past week about a young girl falling to her death from a Ferris wheel. I gave feedback on the previous week’s work and writing tips. Ann read her memory, expanded to a story, of a 12–inch snowfall (“The flakes fell 12″ apart”) on the Fourth of July, while she and her brothers waited to take the Ferris wheel. Things were going well again. I asked for reactions to McCann’s story. Dave commented on the budding sexuality of the Irish teenage girl, well supported by the text, and Jogues mentioned “the Troubles” underlying the story. Marjorie said the story was “okay” but she didn’t much care to write fiction. Honest, but a bummer. Marion burst out with “I know that girl from my hometown,” and related an incident that had haunted her for years. I said if she wrote it, she would have a fine story.
She did. Our third session she brought in “Shan,” to great applause—not only a good story as it was, but with the potential of being even more. I remarked on differences between real life and stories, the freedom to infuse experience with imagination, and some hazards in writing from life. Ann brought in a reworked story, this time weaving together memory, imagination, and news. When Jogues read from a work in progress, and skipped a paragraph because it bothered him, I suggested that paragraph might be the heart of his story and talked about how hard it is to write what most concerns us. We went over devices, borrowed from Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, for focusing stories, such as time frame, central metaphor, a journey, or a big event. We didn’t even get to the two Grace Paley stories for that week, but I added, a little apprehensively, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” for the next.
The final week we again ran past the hour. The group didn’t enjoy Hemingway’s story and agreed with the father in Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” who complains that the writer-narrator “left everything out.” I talked about how Hemingway’s lean and powerful dialogue moved his story, touched briefly on revising, and distributed handouts about critiquing in workshops. The Storyweavers brought the workshop to an exhilarating conclusion. Dave had submitted a piece for publication, been rejected, but earned kudos for submitting it. Jogues had published his piece online. Jim gave us more of his seemingly effortless work. Marion, who “looked at her hometown in a whole new way,” had written a story about another girl there. And Marjorie had relented to write a charming story about a little girl waiting to see if she had been selected for the choir (she was).
By the end of our too few and too brief sessions, they had all written some fiction and developed skills that should help them whatever they choose to write.
And yeah, I enjoyed being a pizza guy in the Storyweavers’ community.
Paul’s novel The Grass was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize established by Barbara Kingsolver for first novels raising issues of social justice. He is currently at work on another novel.
