BACK TO CLASS – THE JOY OF WRITING
(Writing lessons with Patrick Pfister)
In the Casa Orlandai, a beautiful modernista building across from the Sarrià metro stop, the International Women’s Club of Barcelona holds court. My wife is a member and suggested I sign up for one of their activities: attending a Writing course, four Mondays in March. She convinced me that Patrick Pfister, an American author living in Barcelona, whose books are published in the USA by Spuyten Duyvil, would enhance my joy of writing. De Spuitende Duivel made my orange heart skip a beat: the spewing devil in ye olde Dutch lingo of Manhattan. I felt it would be fun to sharpen my pencil.
While everybody else seemed keen to follow Patrick’s instructions to the letter and write short fictional stories, his passion motivated me a different way. I had just read one of his shorts and felt the urge to impress the teacher with something that shaped in my head ten minutes into the first lesson. Alas, it wasn’t fiction. Instead I decided to try and own my most embarrassing experience, or at least one of the most embarrassing, which occurred right here in Barcelona. Same town where Patrick found so much inspiration for his ‘Far from Home’ collection of short stories.
We were supposed to keep polishing our pieces throughout the course, but I finished mine on the spot, blogged it, Facebooked it. And emailed it to the people that I hurt that chronicled day, some forty years back in time. Patrick had pumped my adrenaline. I worked more concentratedly than ever. Did research on my phone, slyly hidden under the table, where I normally just trust my guts. The research paid off. I thought things had happened the year before the Barcelona Olympics, 1992, but my problem took me back deeper into the past, to September ’88. And to my surprise I found that my folly, my gaffe, my awkward conduct, was witnessed by a crowd of 120.000. Holey Moley! I won’t go into the fine finesse, but the last paragraph says it all:
… Slowly I tried to digest the feelings of the morning after. And discovered that the mess I got myself in did no longer feel like my happy comfort zone. Flying some 33,000 feet over Paris, one thing became obvious: never go for two bottles of Jack! - One is enough!
Lesson number two covered the cons and pros of a short story. I learned that a short story mostly counts some three thousand words and that there are things you can and things you can’t cover in such a short story. Patrick gave as an example that it would be impossible to turn an atheist in a devout Catholic during such a petite narrative. My brain fired up and started mulling. The idea of salvation got crushed between the wheels and ink started dripping. In six minutes I had the story:
“It’s summer 1975. My first time out in the world. From rural West-Friesland to midtown Manhattan may be a small step for Mankind, but heck, it is a giant leap for me. My neck hurts from craning, trying to look all the way to the top of every building on Fifth Avenue. My atheist view of the world pines even more, and the feel starts gnawing that this skyscraping can’t have been done without God’s hand.
That afternoon the feverish, trembling feelings of outlandishness calm down walking the cemetery of Trinity Church at Wall Street, when I absorb all those Dutch names. My landsmen who built the center of the world at a time that God’s steeples never topped two hundred feet. I follow George Washington’s footsteps into the St. Paul’s Chapel and sink down onto the pews. Whilst George walked out with the joy of never having to attend church again, all of a sudden I experience the joy of being saved.”
Lesson three was skipped for a week in Valencia. Another city with an absorbing personality and a surprise waiting at every corner. Feed for a trilogy! But, hey, we’re in week four now and still getting trained on short stories. Today it’s about focus. Patrick launches the idea to illustrate with haikus how only a few words are needed to define a scene.
Haikus bore me more than anything in print. Every time somebody pushes a haiku on me I have to remedy the tedium with a naughty limerick. Charlotte the Harlot is a great cure. Patrick insists we compose one. Hell no! Heck, yeah! Boy, did I surprise myself. I never ever wanted to even try a haiku, but now two flowed on paper without a drop of sweat:
Old Barcelona
The Springest Smell of Cherries
Flurries In My Soul
Orgasm In St. Pauli
My Sadness Turns Into joy
Glad To Be Alive
And this time I managed fiction, too! Yes, it sharpened my pencil. Yes, it beefed up my joy of writing. I’m hoping to encounter the author again in similar circumstances. I’m sure he can teach us all to write little miniatures the way Amina develops her Talent for Tapas in the fascinating first tale in ‘Far from Home’.
Evert Wilbrink,
March 2024
P.S: Two more pictures… First my high school teacher Dutch and great author Har Scheepens. Second my high school teacher English and prolific writer J.J. Schilstra (with Prince Bernhard) without whom you wouldn't have seen me in this blog…
