Creative Nonfiction Workshop

“All right, I’ll tell you. The reason is…, okay, I’ll make a confession - an intimate detail, if you will.” Lee Gutkind, the workshop instructor, gestured towards the phrase on the whiteboard.

My eyes are on him, as are those of the other 30 or so people gathered in the small university lecture hall. I don’t breathe, I don’t blink. What “intimate detail” could have anything to do with me, with this moment?

“You see,” he scans the audience, ruling the moment as he would prove to rule the day. Then his eyes are back to mine only long enough to say, “I thought you were a guy.”

I blink. I gulp. Nothing has prepared me for this. I’ve never been mistaken for a boy. Not even in the fourth grade when I, along with every other boy and girl, cut our hair to look like Davey Jones of the Monkeys.

Nor in the seventh grade when I insisted on wearing a bowl cut just like the girl on the Butterick pattern. My mother begged me not to “smash my bangs down like that”, and was always coming at me with her hair pick. “You need height; your face is too round.” In truth, instead of looking like the female half of The Captain and Tenille, I looked like Moe from the Three Stooges.

But if anyone thought I was a boy, I never knew about it.

That same year, with that horrible hair I’d convinced myself was stylish, our P.E. class was paired with the 8th grade boys for square-dancing. Gary, a cool 8th grader, was paired with me. He looked me over, turned to his friend, and sneered, “Oh, I got a pretty one.”

At 12 years old, thick-waisted with toothpick legs, and bangs that wouldn’t stay flat because my hair was so thick and wavy, I took the boy’s scorn, managing not to cry, enduring the do-si-dos and alleman lefts until class was over, school out, and I could run home, throw myself on the bed and cry “until you can’t cry anymore, honey”. My mother understood the times.

Except for that hour-long hell, some mishaps with hair dye that made me look like Elvis one time and an eggplant another, and a few weeks of postpartum frumpiness, I’ve enjoyed looking pretty good all my life. “I thought you were a man,” stumped me.

Thirty-eight years after that gym class, I don’t take it. I strike back. “I paid $45 for this hairstyle just yesterday, and you thought I was a guy!” I laugh, the class laughs. I assume people are looking at me, assigning a femininity rating, as puzzled as I at his statement.

We have all come here to hear his statements. We’ve traveled from Alabama, Arkansas, even New Orleans and Florida to Oxford, MS to hear his statements. He, who has published books, has credentials, can be Googled and not come up wanting, has passed muster.

We, with pen and notebook in hand will hang on every word, watch every gesture, wonder, “How many ex-wives are there? Does he blow dry his hair? What’s with the earring? He couldn’t have ever been fat.” (One of his books is titled, "Forever Fat".) We are waiting, and he will deliver because we all want to be, but he is, a Writer.

Arriving early, scanning the room, I had asked a gray-haired, bearded man if I could sit next to him, gambling that he’d be interesting.

“Can I bring you another muffin?” I point to his empty wrapper, but this confuses him. He starts to hand me the wrapper, puts it back down, recovers, “Oh, yes. I believe I will.”

Dressed in a well-worn t-shirt, shorts, leather shoes and socks, it’s not hard to see him as the wanderer he had been. A Korean vet, a half-hearted student at UCLA and Berkeley, some wives, teaching jobs in Korea and Japan, he even joined a commune in New Hampshire. “It failed.”

“I’ve been working on my memoir for 40 years. At first I was going to call it, “The End of Tenderness”, but I’ve changed the title to, “Grotesque”, he would say later over lunch, to which we read him the riot act as they say.

The workshop instructor is a symphony conductor; all is balanced. He scribbles, questions, jokes, makes things flow. “It’s all about scene and story, scene and story.” He’s a live model of what’s he’s teaching us about creative non-fiction.

He keeps the class in check, no Bogarting allowed. A crusty codger, a cross between Colonel Sanders and Mark Twain, a retired Mississippi lawyer no doubt, tries to stir things up with, “Whoever’s really even met a true atheist?” The instructor handles him firmly without rancor. This is his show, after all, and he knows we’re here to learn to write.

If he had just said, “had thought you were a guy”, I would have understood. Terry, spelled with a “y” is a boy’s name, I had reminded my parents from the time I could read.

“It was your name,” he said. “We always have more women than men. I was recounting,” he said in defense of why he looked away just as I began my introduction.

Ultimately, everyone had a turn to speak. The pretty young woman from Alabama who had confided to me, “It’s my first workshop, too. I didn’t know what to wear. I brought two outfits just in case,” wants to write about her mother who had lived in a convent for 15 years.

Some people have completed books. One has a business card that says, “Freelance Writer”, and others have their own websites. A striking woman with a can-do attitude and hairstyle to match announces, “I’ve written a memoir on getting control of your finances that will blow Dave Ramsey out of the water.” I bet she will. There are college students with years of text before them, a retired teacher researching a book on a local “character”, and a woman who tells all with the title of her memoir, “Groaning up Baptist”.

Rapt listeners and notetakers all, we’re each making an investment, exchanging time and money in the hope that the man before us will give us something. Because whether we should call ourselves “writers” or not, that is what we want to do. We have stories to tell. Or time to kill. Or maybe we just like the look and feel of putting words on paper.

Our story may be dramatic or common. Our ability to tell it may range from poor to great. Some people, like Flannery O’Conner, write because they write well. Most, it seems, don’t write well, but do it anyway, like those people you try to avoid who never stop talking, saying,

“Well, I got up this morning, and when I touched the floor with my bare foot I realized it was a bit cold, so I put on some nice warm socks and then thought, ‘What will I have for breakfast?’ and I couldn’t decide between a boiled egg or scrambled – Joe likes scrambled – but I like mine boiled you know – just short of 9 minutes – no more.” They drag out their speech, claiming the conversational territory, leaving no breach for escape.

Perhaps after years of workshops, the instructor was on his guard for these boring types. It’s his job to deliver, both to the workshop connoisseurs and those, like me, who thought long and hard about spending the $175. Maybe that’s why he stopped looking at me seconds into my introduction, and started scanning the audience, making sure no one was zoning out.

Why I blurted out, Why aren’t you looking at me?! Am I already boring? I still don’t know. Nervous? Yes. Wanting to stand out? Possibly. What I do know is that my outburst speaks to what all would-be writers want – really, what everyone wants. “Hey! Over here. Listen to me. Don’t look away.”

And, of course, the point of the workshop was, and will always be, “Here’s how to keep them from looking away.” Thanks, Lee. It was worth it.