Week Twenty Two: "I want to like this class, I really do..."

I wrote this in boredom (clearly) during one of John Coffee's classes: either History of the Bible or History of the U.S. Constitution. I thought he was great ("The word of the day is fustigate! F-U-S-T-I-G-A-T-E. To beat with a stick."), but I had trouble focusing during the parts of his classes that were not him telling us awesome stories.

Thus:

"I want to like this class, I really do..."

Unlike Weeks Twenty and Twenty One, this was not intended to be a first line... but it could be!

Freshman-Me put it in quotation marks because he thought it had some kind of story potential, but what that might have been is beyond me now. Guess we'll just have to make something up!

Sunday, midnight, 300 words!

Spring 2001

With Fall 2000 at my back and my winter break survived, I was more than ready to throw myself back into my life at Emerson. By this point I was, I believe, majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing (this is a more employable way of saying "Creative Writing") and still had some prerequisites to chew through: 

• Fundamentals of Speech Communication
• Intro to Creative Writing: Fiction
• History of the U.S. Constitution and History of the Bible
• Minds and Machines

...but I finally got to take a fiction writing class! My workshop instructor was Alden Jones, who was in her second semester at Emerson, but clearly knew her stuff. We focused at first on short experiments like writing with all five senses and trying to craft a story with literal dialogue (complete with the "ums" and "likes" that pepper actual speech), and I felt like a fraud every single day, but persevered. Looking back, I credit this class with being the most influential to my malleable writerly brain. It was work, but the good kind.

History of the U.S. Constitution and History of the Bible were also influential, but mostly for their teacher: the Reverend John Coffee, who was an institution at Emerson College for 35 years. Many considered taking a class with him to be a prequisite for graduation, he was that popular. I'll talk more about him in future posts.

But for now, we continue on to Week Twelve...