My friend Patrick, who went to Clarion with me in 2013, is the president of the Alpha Young Writer’s Workshop, which is a ten-day intensive workshop for teens to learn the craft of speculative fiction. Every year I listen to him talk about the stress and joy of the workshop, the work and the rewards. This year, he asked me if I’d be willing to be on-site staff.
I was delighted. Yeah, I’d be spending ten vacation days to do hard work in exchange for room and board, but … a chance to relive a tiny bit of my Clarion days? ALWAYS.
Alpha brings together 20 teen writers, 10 professional staffers, and 4 guest authors every year on the campus of University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, PA. I thought of this as “a suburb of Pittsburgh” and expected it to take about as long as it takes to get to Pittsburgh to get there. ER… not so much. Greensburgh is an hour east of Pittsburgh, so about as much a suburb of that city as Ashtabula is a suburb of Cleveland. 😛 (Only now imagine there are long mountain tunnels with nonsensical stopped traffic before them between Cleveland and Ashtabula.)
I’m saying it was a long drive. Initially, I had planned to drive myself, and the family would rely on the old VW Bug for transportation while I was gone, but the Buggie had yet another system failure – the windshield wipers. Last time this happened I was able to re-attached the wipers to their turning mechanism, this time, no love. Not wanting to be without transportation in an emergency that could occur during rain, Brian opted to drive me to Alpha and return alone to Cleveland with the car.
I had not discovered/informed him we were going farther than Pittsburgh itself. Oops. Love you, Brian!
As we drove, and it did indeed rain part of the way, I had to be air traffic control for the arriving Alpha kids. No, someone driving in to arrive at 5pm when the kiddos started arriving at 9am was not an ideal choice for “emergency contact about being picked up at the airport” but Alpha got hit with 3 staff cancellations right before the workshop start date. (One had a family emergency, two tested positive for covid.)
Brian had to operate my cell phone, taking dictation for text messages back and forth with other staffers who were able to pick kids up and the kids themselves. An hour outside of Pittsburgh, it became clear that two children were stranded at the airport and couldn’t be picked up for many hours … so I made the decision to stop on our way and get them.
That went pretty smoothly, and I felt protective of those two particular kids – Patrick and Unna – for the rest of the week, though their luggage barely fit in my trunk!
I was exhausted by the time we got to Robertshaw Hall on the Greensburg campus of U. of Pitt. My friend Patrick was presiding over a check-in desk covered in Covid tests, and other staff and students were milling around. I got a key and a room number, swabbed my nose, and went up to set down my luggage.
It was a nice little dorm room, with two single beds, too little desks, two closets, and a sink with large mirror. A door connected to a bathroom with one toilet and one shower, shared with the room next-door. My suitemate, Chris, and I quickly agreed on the protocol for bathroom-use-signaling and shower-timing. My husband helped me stack the two hard foam rubber mattresses together on one bed to be (hopefully) softer, hugged me and bid me farewell.
There followed a ten-day adventure it would take far more than one blog post to summarize. I barely slept, going to bed between midnight and 1am most nights and getting up like clockwork at 6am anxious to tweak a powerpoint or write a few words before the kids woke up for breakfast.
Accomplishments: I revised and presented 4 powerpoints during the workshop, (What Is Genre, Plot, Medieval European Armor, The Art of Finishing), all of which I think were well-received. The only one that got negative comments was the first; the complaint was “I already know what science fiction and fantasy and horror are!” — memo to me: add in more explaining WHY genre and why I’m pointing out seemingly obvious stuff. (It’s to get them thinking about whether a story is necessarily part of a genre, and how to exist in conversation with the genre.)
I also wrote a grand total of 11,000 words on Galactic Hellcats 2: Hellcats in Love! A lot of this was from making sure I was writing during the kids’ “Writing Studio” sessions when they were supposed to write, and also only allowing myself to use writing as a distraction from workshop duties.
I averaged over 10,000 steps a day for the first time since the pandemic started, mostly chasing after children left behind at the dorm or lecture hall, or rushing from dorm to lecture hall and back … I did have that silly habit of going back to my room during Writing Studio to write, while most others just stayed near the lecture building.
I lost somewhere around ten pounds. (I haven’t been keeping regular track of my weight, but I feel confident in this estimate.)
I did not: do very much Duolingo, or read very much for pleasure. I did one lesson a day of Duo to keep my streak, and I started to read “Dawn of Everything” primarily when feeling insomniac, but didn’t get very far into it.
I did: get extremely emotionally invested in 20 teenagers and grow closer to the 3 staffers I already knew and attached to the 3 I didn’t. Favorite moments were being approached as a knowledge-area expert, or just chilling with Lara as we watched the kids play tag… also I really enjoyed taking occasional quiet walks by myself to admire the little local stream and the 1920s-Tudor “President’s Mansion”.
The University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg, at first feels like a brand-new institution. Lots of 1990s-to-2000s era architecture, everything is brick-covered-concrete. But there’s that Tudor mansion and one bench in a garden that says it was dedicated to a gardener who worked from the 1920s to 1980. All I can figure is sometime around 1990 they started tearing down and replacing all the buildings, eventually succeeding in nearly erasing the campus history. WEIRD, and mildly disturbing. I wonder what the place used to look like, and what eldritch horrors needed such thorough banishment in rural PA?
The hardest part of the workshop was the last three days, when the stories had all been turned in and had to be read and critiqued. Critique is HARD, especially when you know you are critiquing a Tender Child With Extreme Promise Who Will Really Remember This. I barely got my stories read in time for the actual critique session, and fussed back and forth about every mark I made.
The stories were AMAZING. Every kid in my group wrote a story with a strong plot that showed a better understanding of story structure than I had when I was at Clarion in 2013 (at the tender age of 40!) There were three in particular that struck me as something I would pass up to the editor for second round right now, though they could use a few tweaks.
UGH. DAMN. KIDS SO GOOD. You’d think it would be disheartening, seeing the fast-approaching competition, but it was rather uplifting. Their stories were queer and passionate and hopeful, dark and thoughtful and earnest. The future of spec fic is going to be amazing.
