My Word

I recently started back at university for the first time in, er, 22 years (which means that some of my new classmates were not born when I last studied as a ‘mature student’ at Canterbury in 1993).

There’s a lot I could say about University, it’s a place I both love and hate. I love the seeking of knowledge and discovery, I hate(d) the teeth-grinding torture of being a young male around so many clever and fascinating woman.

Of course, now that I’m in my ‘wise old grey-beard’ years the latter offers little distraction, it’s all about the knowledge and I’m excited as a young buck.

I’m doing a workshop in creative non-fiction, something that has developed out of this blog, started as a pathway back to my first (and eternal) love, fiction. I applied for the course on a whim, needing to be amongst the fertile minds of other writers, seeking challenges and deadlines beyond the eternally flaky self-imposed ones writers give themselves.

Real writers, writering in Iowa

I had little idea quite what creative non-fiction is/was… but hoped it was like what I have been writing here (memoir, opinion, essays etc) over the last 18 months.

I must have got it part-way right as I am now in the third week of a limited intake course at the IIML at Victoria University with 11 colleagues, inching our way through a field of writing described as ‘non-fiction which is not necessarily true but not consciously untrue’.

They’re a great bunch and like all writing courses I have ever attended, they tend to be older and overwhelmingly female. We sit in a circle in a room with a wonderfully distracting view of Wellington city and the harbour below. Trees surround us and tuis flit back and forth throwing shadows on blinds half-pulled to stop us roasting in the autumn sun.

Not my class(mates) but the actual classroom (and view)

Given my age (and chequered run at University) I was pretty nervous the first couple of weeks. I sweated constantly and found my voice was too quiet and fractured whenever I forced myself to add comment to the discussion. Also, given the fact that I have deliberately avoided studying English since leaving school in the mid-‘80s I struggle to follow the terms being used in analysis. That said, I am no novice, having read and written forever.

Reading out my first two exercises was torture, I was so unsure I waited to the end getting more and more worked-up in anticipation, resolving to read earlier next time to get the bloody thing over with.

I needn’t have worried; my efforts have gone down well. The tutor and my colleagues laugh at the right bits and say nice things afterwards.

Of course, it is early days, we still have our folio pieces to present (up to 10, 000 words…eek!) Once we are comfortable with each other the workshop feedback may start to resemble the torturous mix of evisceration and defensiveness portrayed so well in Girls when Hannah went to the Iowa Fiction Workshop earlier this season.

Where this will lead, I am unsure.

I will continue to write non-fiction (I have a big family story to explore for my folio which is full of mystery, and I do not know if it will work). At the same time I am reading fiction with greater gusto (which contains the greater truth, fiction or non-fiction?? There lies an external and irresolvable discussion I am keen to explore).

What I do know is that three weeks into this course I am already a much better (and faster) writer than when I started.

At least, that’s what I think today.