Thursday primarily reminded me that we are nearing the end of the trip. Tess Gallagher’s reading struck me the most today, her poetry combined urbana and nature well. Mary Costello provided some insight into adapting memoir/life events into fiction stories, without totally making the main character a copy of yourself. The scriptwriting workshop was actually pretty good, we didn’t do anything creative, but we reviewed the whole concept of a story, which is always useful. The instructor made me feel better about my process; I feel like I’ve always been taught that character drives the plot and to start with the character. I often find myself as a big-picture person, looking at the plot first (which is probably best for videogame writing, since the player is the main character and will be playing as she wants to). The instructor stated that starting with plot is fine– creating a world and the story and then figuring out “what kind of character would go through this” and expand from there. So, I say the workshop was beneficial.

That night we went to Newbliss, a one-man show written and performed by the actor. He was a jazz player who struggled with alcoholism from his youth. He played many instruments throughout and used a voice overs to aid the presentation. Honestly, I felt the show could have been 30 min shorter. After 45 mins, the play lacked any real stories, it felt like exposition rather than scenes of his life. He rhymed the entire time, which I think detracted from the quality of the words he could have used, but the constraint was commendable. Some of his ukelele songs were a bit repetitive; the sax and clarinet songs were very strong, however.

We ended the night with an open mic, where many of us read our poems, I picked a few from poetry last fall, nothing that has been read or published before, however.