Somewhere in Franklin County
A Conversation With The New Writers
Somewhere in Franklin County, among the kudzu and hayfields and ghosts of the old moonshiners that crowd ‘round the road on foggy nights, my car turned 120,000 miles.
It wasn’t a foggy night, quite to the contrary. The August sun baked the valley and thickened the air, an unseen hand mixing cornstarch into the nitrogen and oxygen.
Not so long ago, they turned two rivers into a lake, and then Progress turned a field into a strip mall, now next to a lake where there used to be nothing. The heat rose off the unexpected asphalt that serves the tourists at Smith Mountain Lake, but everyone is friendly. I turned into the grocery store.
Midway through one of those brief, heartening conversations with a stranger, I told the man in the parking lot that I had been talking with kids at a summer camp about writing.
These kids, man! They crowded into the little room in the church turned summer camp, flinging, springing, lounging on comfy chairs that lined the walls–a perfect writer’s retreat.
We talked about finding your voice as a writer. And about the coffee table, and what it actually is, gathering around it, suddenly fascinated by this ordinary piece of furniture. Max looked up through it. Christie suggested we keep him there, and put soundproof curtains on it. Maybe we got the point about the Objective (table, metal, glass), and Subjective (what memories it’ll hold for us).
And maybe not. But then again, who cares? If Reality is more captivating than Abstraction, God bless it.
We tried to write what Scrooge would be like. “None of us will ever be as good as Dickens” I said.
“Says YOU” retorted three or four of ‘em, the disagreement hitting me like spitballs. I agreed, and stood corrected.
“Good point. Let’s try hard, then. Lemme read you what he wrote.”
Rising and pacing…
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a
squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old
sinner!”
Betsy scrunched her face. “I don’t know what any of those words mean.”
“Sure you do! Forget the grindstone. Squeezing. Wrenching. Grasping. Scraping, Clutching!
Oh…sorry, didn’t mean to crumple your paper. Got carried away.”
We talked editing, and how easy it is to crumple anything that’s a miscue. “Easy as that.” A rip, and a tear, and a ball of paper.
“Throw it at my head, man” Max implored.
“No.”
“Come on. I have good hand-eye coordination.”
“No.” But I watched him, telling the room about how grown folk might not be fast, but we’re sly and sneaky. When he wasn’t looking, I threw it at his head. I missed. He didn’t see it.
“Throw it at my head, man.”
“HE JUST DID” four of ‘em yelled.
Ashley finished her writing prompt a few minutes later (writing something in a posh voice).
She read the pretend piece aloud, neutral:
“Dear parents, I love being a princess, but you should buy me a $2,000 purse because I’m amazing.”
Max, without thinking, answered from across the room in his pretend princess voice. Because I’m uhh-maah-zing.
“THERE! Did you see that?” I yelled. Ashley looked up, alarmed. The giant must have stepped on a nail.
“You took something from your head, put it on paper, and your reader got your point. He got it! They don’t always, but how cool is that? He could be reading it in fifty years. He got your point. He knows what your character is supposed to sound like.”
Somewhere in Franklin County, there’s a new batch of writers.
Watch out, Charlie.
