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  • Six Lectures in Normal
  • Sharon Solwitz (bio)

1) beginning your story

Find the germ, embryo, seed crystal—an event or image that lingers voluptuously or creepily. With the image in the back of your mind, write a scene that makes you nervous. Now where are you?

Bad news used to come in the mail and here it is on my phone. The judges of a contest in which I was a finalist chose someone else's book. Please keep us in mind: The Eds. The line writhes under my gaze like a strand of hair in water. Which Eds? In mind for what?

I'm at a writing conference, though not a big one. It's in Illinois, a town called Normal (honest really), or sometimes Bloomington-Normal. I'm a presenter, ill-paid but new to this world and grateful, or I would be if I weren't nervous. Across the small room my conference-assigned roommate sits on the edge of her bed, brushing her thick, red, curly hair down from the nape of her neck. Hairs land on low-pile carpet of a color so rigorously neutral it resists a name. I'm not the type to flash my angst around, and certainly not at a near stranger, but now I'm confessing in the crackle of her brushing.

"Shit, shit," she says companionably. "That's so disappointing!"

It's past disappointing. It seems shameful, with an odd substrate of malice. And suddenly I'm angry with her, as if she's a man who has somehow inveigled me to take off my clothes.

2) conflict

Divide your inner self in two or three, and let 'em fight. Scary, but it works. Learn to love scary. Two Emmas.

As it turns out, we've met before, at someone's large party. She has a wealthy, chatty husband, a boy my son's age, a way of looking people in the eye—men and women alike—that feels flirtatious. Her voice is nuanced, an actress's. We have the same first name, a coincidence I'd found beguiling; now I'm peeved. In the conference brochure there are two Emmas—Emma Rosen (her) and Emma Nordstrom (me). I have a PhD and a tenure-track teaching job but she has published more fiction. She has just won another contest, she often wins contests, and will soon (she says, as if amazed at herself) receive in the mail a [End Page 132] check for 5K along with a ticket to London. Her burgeoning fame thrums off her head and arms. I plan to do my job, and if at the end of the week I go home no more depressed than usual, I'll consider myself lucky.

Lunch brings me to the cafeteria and Rosen waving from her table. Exuberantly. I sit down on the edge of the group of which she is hub.

Like most of the presenters, she's come fresh from her first workshop, which "is gonna be a trip," she says. "Eight bright, affable women, and a guy who won't shut up." She rolls her bright brown eyes. "We did an exercise and he read his aloud. The guy walks around town leaving poop on people's doorsteps—the protagonist, I mean." She pushes a lock of bright hair behind an ear. It springs back, asserting its shape and color and right to be. "How is gross as a critical term?"

There are six of us at the table, all writers and teachers of writing. We all have had students like that. How smart does he seem to be? Is it his own poop (his meaning the protagonist's)?

We hope he has a dog.

To protect him (hipaa) she won't say his name and we call him The Poopster. "Poop," she says, "what a strange word." She says it again, then again and again, an onrush, a cascade, her face bright and amused. "Most words self-destruct if you repeat them enough, but this dissolves in an instant! Poop-poop, goodbye!"

We try out other words to see how long, in the face of repetition, they remain intelligible. "Fiction" dissipates quickly...

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