Writer's Workshop

"Learning is a lifelong process" is the kind of blah blah you usually find on pamphlets for continuing education but that I conceptually agree with. Which is why around this time last year I was downtown at the SAE Conference considering the Effects of Seatbelt Placement on Occupant Injury in Rollover Events, and this weekend I decided to attend a creative writing workshop at the nearby township's library. I have always wondered if writing might be something that I'd like to do, I might as well take this opportunity to explore that. I wore a black T-shirt and my glasses, creating an effect that I thought would go with the intellectual, creative types that I associate with writing. The ladies from the Friends of the Library greeted me at the door, and I found a seat at a table and surveyed the crowd. They looked mostly like friends of the ladies from Friends of the Library. The instructor was more of the sandals-frizzyhair-flowered skirt variety but that's ok I can do that look too. Then a woman from my neighborhood, Karen, came in. I said "Oh I didn't know you were taking this!" And she said "oh, no they are" indicating her 12 year old home-schooled daughter and her friend. I am slightly suspicious of Karen for signing her kids up for any available inexpensive activity that counts as school. "But you have fun!" So Mikayla and Emily joined me at my table. The class covered the subjects of poetry, and avoiding plagiarism, and writers block. All of which have not yet occurred to someone who considers a broken laundry machine knob acceptable writing material. We did an exercise where I got to write about my feelings for a petosky rock (it was like a window into my heart) Emily wrote about how a shell reminded her of a dragon's breath, and Mikayla drew a picture of a bunny. I think that me writing that great American novel is still a ways away, because writing a blog to be read by the dozen people who are really just checking in to find out if I've lost my mind yet is probably very different than writing to please an editor or the paying public. But I'm learning, and it's a lifelong process you know.