The Big Red Chair

During my sophomore year, back at the UofA I took intro to writing poetry. English 209. This class was taught by Professor Steve Orlen, who is exactly what I visualize when I close my eyes and think of a poet.

He was completely out of his mind, but he knew what he was talking about. He knew it so well that I’m sure his lessons only got stronger as he got crazier.

On the first day of our lecture, he blindfolded all of us. 100 people in the class, I kid you not. All of us blindfolded. Then he told us, without taking off the blindfolds, to get out a piece of paper and a pencil. When that was done, he turned off the lights and told us to write poetry. Really. That simple. He turned off the lights and said, “Write poetry.”

But then Professor Orlen started yelling. He wasn’t yelling at us, he was yelling to us. He was yelling things like “VACCUM CLEANER, USED CAR SALESMEN, GARBAGE DISPOSAL, WHEEL BARREL, OAK TREES, BARNUM AND BAILEYS CIRCUS, JUMP ROPE, JUMP ROPE, JUMP ROPE!!!” This went on for about 10 minutes, and then he yelled “HAAAALT!!!!”

Blind folds off.

Lights on.

“Now,” he said softly. “I want you to take every abstraction, and write in its place, “THE BIG RED CHAIR.”

So, we go through and change every feeling-word to the phrase “THE BIG RED CHAIR,” and then he asks us to read them to ourselves. When we finish that, he says we may leave. Inevitably, someone asked “What was the point of that?”

To which he responded:

“When you understand that – then you’ll be a poet.”

Every once and a while I have a mental explosion that, when it settles, a bunch of things I’ve learned all have become incredibly clear. I still don’t understand the big red chair exercise, but I had one of those mental explosions this week.

My first short story of the semester was due this past Friday. Professor Henry Sutton said at the beginning of the class that it MUST be a complete story, and it absolutely must fall in the word limit he gave us. (between 1,350 and 1,650 words). 1,650 words is an incredibly short number of words with which to tell a complete story. The shortest story I’ve written in my college career prior to this one was 3,338. To give you an example, in this post you have so far read 413 words.

The draft I had the class workshop fell within range. But as many rough drafts are, it was ROUGH. It didn’t make sense. It was very, very fragmented. I figured out what was happening as it went. This is very normal, but I didn’t go through and sand down the edges well at all. I decided I needed to completely re-write the story for this draft. When I finished writing it, it was 2,400 words. I felt very panicked. It did everything it needed to. It told a good story, made sense, had good characters. But it was 750 words too long.

Slowly but surely, I made it shorter. I started by cutting out short sentences, and bits of sentences. I re-wrote descriptions to make them more concise. By the time I got to 1,850, there was nothing more I could do but go through and take out individual words. It was in the middle of finding individual words to take out that I had one of these mental explosions.

I don’t remember who said it, but for sake of loyalty I’m going to credit it to William Butler Yeats. He said that in both fiction and poetry, every word must be able to stand alone as art.

Every single word in that story was individually selected, hand crafted, and inserted as art on its own. Every single word was re-considered and it’s value appraised as I decided whether or not to keep it or cut it. Every phrase was read aloud to hear that it flowed smoothly and to assure that there was nothing superfluous. The plot of this story is not my favorite of the ones I’ve told, or the ones I’m working on but the craft, style and composition of this story is by far the best thing I have ever written.

The mental explosion was not simply the satisfaction that I’d written one of my best pieces to date, but that for the first time I had felt the process of turning every single word on the page into art an of it’s own.

I have yet to write about feeling homesick in this blog. At the point when I wrote “I haven’t felt a lick of homesickness” I wasn’t lying, but it would be lying to say that I still haven’t. The reason I’ve chosen to not write about it is that it has come and gone each time before I had a chance to write it down, but now is my chance to tell.

I certainly have felt homesick. I do feel homesick as I’m writing this. I felt homesick on the train into London last weekend. It comes in two ways and from two different parts of me. The first one is that everything is so new to me all the time. I was talking to Mom on the phone the other day and said to her that I miss using US currency. It’s little things like that. Money doesn’t feel the same, doesn’t look the same. I still have to convert it to US currency in my head before I buy anything.

I miss food at restaurants not being so damn expensive too. Not only that, but I miss the familiar restaurants. I miss my local Thai restaurant on Grant and Campbell where they know me by name: but not as Dave, but instead as “No Soy.”

I miss the weather. I know I’ve spent the last 9 years whining about how hot it always is in Arizona, and how I wished it rained more… I truly thought I could come to a place where it was always raining, and I would feel the excitement I feel in Arizona when it rains, but feel it every day. I honestly do miss the days on end sunshine. In my pile of stuff I kept by the door, (keys, wallet, phone) my sunglasses used to be one of the essentials. Right now, I’m not even sure where they are because I haven’t needed them more than a handful of times since I arrived.

I miss the people I got so used to being with so consistently. I still have the key to Pat’s front door on my key ring here and I miss using it! I miss going over to Kate and Rachel’s apartment to watch the Daily Show at 11 p.m., accidentally falling asleep on the couch and then getting to have breakfast with them in the morning.

And lastly on the familiarity front, I miss the little mischievous fuzzball who stands on the toilet seat and pounces at the shower curtain while I’m bathing, and licks my shoulder while I sleep.

This is the picture I currently have set as the wallpaper on my computer.

The second front on which I’m feeling homesick is the reality that the house really isn’t going to be the same, if even still ours, when I get home. Dad sent me 28 close-up photos of my room about a week ago and asked if I could go through them and tell him what to keep and what to throw away. I couldn’t just tell him what TO throw away without mentioning what not too. The response to the pictures, for the most part was, a history of the things I wanted to keep. “That blanket is the one I had on my bed in Manchester from the day I got out of a crib until the day we moved to Arizona.” “That yellow box contains every note and memento every girl I dated in high school ever gave me.” “That pile of wood nailed together is a sailboat we made together when I was in kindergarten…”

I told the stories of the lead action figures from Nanny and Poppy, bronze piggy banks from Grandma and Grandpa, porcelain dogs and puppies Mom had when she was a little girl. I told him my memories of souvenirs he would bring me when he first started going on business trips when I was little.

I sent Dad this email this morning and within an hour got a call from him. I really didn’t think the emotion I was feeling while documenting everything important to me would come through in the writing but it clearly did. He told me he laughed through parts of it and had tears in his eyes through others. The way he put it was that the story behind everything in my room was the history of my life, which I think is a very accurate description.

I have very mixed feelings about not being there for this. I have very mixed feelings about everything the separation of our family has brought in the last few years. When I stay in that house, it is so easy to feel the bad memories and forget the good ones that did occur, but there really are plenty of good ones. The fact that even a small part of me wishes I could be present for the final dismantling of the home that the 4 of us once shared seems to be a good sign that once this is all over and done with, I will think fondly of the years I grew in that house.