Getting in the last word is not the concern of any writer. Getting their first words out to the public is more of a challenge.
A lot of first words will be uttered next week by the freshest voices in the local writing world.
Going to school is a great way to learn any merchantable skill, but many freshly credentialled professional will report slow starts in their careers due to lack of experience. At the College of New Caledonia, the students in two second-year cohorts - Creative Writing 205 (Poetry) and 206 (Fiction) - always get a little bit of practical application to go along with their book-learning knowledge. Each of those classes is expected to actually publicly present their work as a final assignment.
On April 14 the fiction students get their chance.
"I do this every semester," said instructor Graham Pearce. He has his poetry students produce chapbooks (self-published mini-books) of their work. He has his fiction students produce a manuscript.
"The culmination is a public reading by the students to a couple of hundred we call them hostages," Pearce said. "The reason I do this extra step is, it's one thing to produce a manuscript. It's another to send it out into the world where its available to more than just your loved ones, where it has a life of its own that goes beyond the writer. It's great for the writers to experience that. It's an emotional thing and a practical thing."
It gives the students a chance to feel the spectrum of sensations that flow from selling their written wares to the public, presenting their words out loud to an audience, and feeling the tactile book - their book - in their hands. It also, though, takes them through the process of putting those words onto paper and packaging that paper into the vessel that will carry their stories out to the world.
For many writers, the process ends at the final period, but Pearce wanted them to follow the craft on to the next step, publishing, and the next step, public presentation.
"It is the key to leading writers to publish themselves," he said.
"It's an experience that goes beyond confidence or know-how, it is a legitimately emotional journey to carry the writing process to that place, after you've poured yourself into the words you've written. It's a world, now, where technology allows for self-publishing as a viable option, and it's knowledge that helps you understand a publisher's needs as well, so you're more prepared for all that brings."
Pearce called these final stages "the marriage of content and aesthetic." It also brings to high consciousness the potential difference between words that are pleasing for the eye, as they hang in lines on the pages, and words that are pleasing to the ear when read aloud to an attentive audience.
This semester's audience hungry for fiction is invited (free of charge, manuscripts will be for sale) to the Stan Shaffer Theatre (Room 1-306) at CNC starting at
7 p.m. on April 14.
