Living in Fredericton has seen me accomplish all sorts of feats I had never even dreamed of adding to my list of things to achieve. The one I’m still quaking from is reading erotic fiction aloud to a bunch of strangers. How do I get myself into these situations?
In a double attempt to tear myself away from under My Very own Newfoundlander’s feet AND to become the next great Irish writer I joined a writing class in Fredericton, intriguingly called Writing Hurts.
MVON drove me to the first class all the while reassuring me that everything would be fine. I was petrified that the other students would actually be real writers – as opposed to a lazy blogger with aspirations far overshadowing any talent. I imagined half of them to be sporting berets and the other half to have Dublin 4 accents. Don’t worry about grammar the introduction e mail had informed us. Grammar isn’t important. This is about writing and it will hurt!
It was no wonder that I came up with ten good reasons not to open the class room door when I got there. But someone else did it for me and without time to compose myself I was facing the teacher asking are you Mr B, in a voice that resembled a startled mouse. That depends he answered in a booming authoritative voice, who are YOU?
Off to a great start I thought. When my identity had been confirmed I sat down, meekly in the corner, trying not to shake. We are going to deal with topics that are difficult to write. Immediately I thought of broken relationships, lost youth, yearning for the meaning of life…
Today we start with SEX he almost shouted. And we’ll begin straight away with your first in-class assignment. You have ten minutes to write a sex scene and then we’ll each read what we’ve written. Go! I spent the first three minutes panicking and wishing for an old fashioned grammar lesson and the last four minutes desperately scribbling something that resembled sex but could still be read out to a group of strangers without my face turning into a tomato. Or so I thought.
I’ll spare you the results and the following hour and a half. Mainly because they are locked tightly away in my enormous denial vault. Suffice it to say that I will not be launching a career in erotic fiction anytime soon. In fact I’m half tempted to dispose of my pen and join a monastery.
One thing I have learned without a doubt so far; writing DOES hurt!
Conortje 
