What WRITE CLUB Means To Me…

Last night, on the drive back to Athens with my boyfriend, we discussed writing and the exchange of energy and the absolute magic of WRITE CLUB.

Let me go back… Because I can’t talk about how amazing WRITE CLUB is without first introducing you.

Last summer, I got an email from Shelby Hofer, c0-director of PushPush Theater in Decatur. Apparently, they needed woman writers for an event they were hosting and she had asked Hollis Gillespie, my mentor of sorts, for some suggestions. Shelby included me, with others, asking if I wanted to participate in this new writing event and could I please send over some writing samples.

Writing samples? Uhhh… What? Huh? So I scrambled for some samples, I’m pretty sure I sent over one or two Date Wrecks pieces and one piece from here and then I sat on the edge of my seat, pathetically refreshing my gmail for a reply. The reply was, “Oh, you didn’t have to send in a sample. Hollis says you’re good enough, then you’re in.”

Gulp.

It was my first time speaking in public, outside of my public speaking class in college. It was the first time I had ever had to write a piece on a topic, outside of my English classes in college. I was nervous and scared and overwhelmed. I spent days pouring over my piece, editing, reading it aloud, irritating all of my friends, “Would you look at this and tell me what you think?”

WRITE CLUB, at it’s core, is a literary event with three rounds, six combatants, paired off with opposing topics. Light vs. Dark, Chaos vs. Order, Fantasy vs. Reality, etc. Each combatant gets seven minutes, and not a second longer, to read an original piece on the topic they are assigned. The audience determines, by applause, who has won the bout and a portion of the door money collected goes to the winning combatant’s favorite charity.

It ended up being a night that ushered me into a new realm as a writer… Prior to WRITE CLUB, I was a girl that sometimes wrote. I had been writing my entire life and I was on the tail-end of Date Wrecks, a shockingly successful little project that took me by surprise. The thing is, as much as Date Wrecks was a part of me and reflected my writing style, once upon a time, I had outgrown it… WRITE CLUB was a big part of that process, of realizing that I was hitting the ceiling inside of Date Wrecks… Of realizing my full potential as a writer was yet to be realized…

As fun as Date Wrecks was, it was the kind of thing where… Hm… I had been doing it so long and it had, mostly, remained the same. It wasn’t challenging anymore. I could look at a Date Wreck’s Online Dating Profile and rattle off a laundry list of insults and wise cracks in almost no time, with almost no effort. Foolishly, I thought for a while, “This is it… This is so easy because this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” But after a while, I grew bored with it… Like an exercise routine that doesn’t even cause you to break a sweat anymore, I wasn’t growing.

My essay at WRITE CLUB on that first night against Ian was very much in the same voice, the same style as Date Wrecks had been. And I still I won that night. I don’t mean to cheapen the style of Date Wrecks… I don’t mean to insult it as “not art” or anything like that… It was, and still is, a worthwhile work. I had just outgrown it… And having a live audience was doubly as addicting as having a digital audience.

I’m telling you, the electricity that you feel when a room full of strangers howl at your jokes and scream and stomp and cheer when you’ve finished… It’s an entirely out of body experience. When I get up on the stage, the first minute or two I’m still a little shaky, lights both blinding and hot in your face. But once I hit the three minute mark, I’ve found my stride, I’m in a full sprint. I stop listening to the sound of my voice and start listening to the audience and the words on my paper start to float up and leap off the paper. The writing becomes me… The performance takes over me.

Maybe I’m partial because WRITE CLUB is the only literary reading style thing I’ve ever done… But I feel like WRITE CLUB is my church. I go through the month, plowing through work and my duties as a parent and a girlfriend and a friend… I might find time to write, but it’s always the thing I put on the back burner because, as much as it satisfies me, it’s a selfish kind of satisfaction. It’s not something that I have to share with anyone else to enjoy. Finding “me time” is hard. But once a month (or as often as I can go), I make the pilgrimage down 316, down 85, down 285… All the while, the whooshing hum of the highway guiding my meditative re-reading, final edits, nervous hand-wringing… The excitement of not knowing who is going first until RIGHT BEFORE IT HAPPENS… And then, Nick screaming, “Jami, are you ready?” It happens, right then… The magic. And the buzzing and vibrations inside of my body don’t stop for days sometimes.

It’s not just about my performance either… Being in the presence of other like-minded creative-types, exchanging ideas, listening and cheering each other on and going head-to-head, figuratively smashing one another and then afterwards, actually toasting each other with beers and slaps on the back. It’s the sense of community that it creates, it’s that part, for me, that makes it like church.

On the ride home, Colin and I were just buzzing back and forth, feeling inspired and chattering away about what writing means to us and how we feel so energized and renewed… I got choked up last night in the car talking about it. That’s the first time it’s happened to me. As much as WRITE CLUB seems to be about literary bloodshed, a battle to the death, it’s so much more than that. I could write and write and write about it, but you just need to go. You need to go.

You need to go.

If it doesn’t change your life, you’ll at least do good without being all preachy.

The Seven Minute Jami Show, aka WRITE CLUB Atlanta, Chapter 3

I have decided that I can’t wait for the podcast to go up on the WRITE CLUB Atlanta website. I mean, I went in the final round so, if Myke uploads the podcasts in order of appearance, I’ve got to wait three weeks?

No way, no how. My exhusband snidely called WRITE CLUB “The Seven Minute Jami Show” which, while hilarious, is hardly accurate. We’re doing good without being preachy, raising money for non-profit organizations all over Georgia. Have you been benevolent lately?

Here’s the piece that won last night. Winnings (when calculated) will be donated to Extra Special People, Inc. It was a packed house, so I can’t wait to hear what the final numbers were!

Chapter 3, Round 3: Creation vs. Destruction

Creation

The first thing I do when I get a write club assignment is go straight to Google, type in the word and play internet roulette. Oh, shut up. Don’t judge. It usually ends up being a pretty worthless exercise because typically, I have an idea of want to write about as soon as I get my topic.  It was a particularly futile effort this go ‘round because the entire first page of a search for “creation” brought me links from nut-job religious websites going on and on about creationism and how it ought to be taught in our schools.

Heh. I’m not going there, don’t worry. Biblical fairy tales are nice and all, but I’m taking you someplace better than the Garden of Eden… I’m taking you to my lady garden.

Yep… Because what other place to start with a practical discussion about creation than the horse’s mouth? Errm, I mean, my lady parts.

I was 20 when I got knocked up.

It’s your typical love story. Boy meets girl, boy woos girl, boy leads impressionable and stupid girl down experimental paths involving sex, drugs and rock and roll (or, rather backseat blowjobs, blunts and Three6Mafia). And from this love story, a baby was created.

Ahh, yes. His little swimmers fought the upstream battle through my lady cavern all the way to fertilize my little egg. When you think about conception, strictly from a scientific frame of mind, it’s a pretty fascinating and powerful idea. Cells splitting, hearts beating, fingernails growing. All inside of me… The vessel for supreme creation, right?

But really, it’s not a skill. It doesn’t take any brain power to make a baby the traditional way. I suppose anybody with working genitals can do what I did. As much as I love and value my son, the action that brought him into existence was not romantic, beautiful or hell, even all that difficult.

The real manifestation of creation isn’t inside my uterus. It’s not in Genesis or the Garden of Eden. A real, true representation of creation exists here [touch heart]. It’s the kind of creation that is always beautiful, always timely… Perfect.

If you’re here tonight, chances are you’re some kind of creative person. A writer, an actor, a musician… a waiter. If you’re not, well… Then you’re probably looking around thinking to yourself, “Damn, look at all these fucking hipsters.”

If you have ever created something meaningful or moving or memorable, you have embodied the essence of creation… Turning what was once empty space into some kind of beautiful expression. You can’t fake it… It’s not something you can pretend to do… That’s transparent. A real true artist loses absolute control of the creation – it becomes bigger than them.

You’re the writer, hunched over a laptop, fingers precariously perched on the home keys, staring begrudgingly at that mother fucking blinking cursor! You’re stuck… No ideas. That was me at 9:00 this morning.

Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” You know that, if you just stick with it, you’ll be able to finish this essay for Write Club! Dammit!

And then it happens. The ideas are exploding in your head, your idle hands are now powering away, slamming so hard into the keys that the clickity click becomes a soundtrack for the symphony you are composing. You can barely type fast enough to keep up with the ideas… That…

That is magic.

There is something supremely amazing about the power in that kind of creation… Turning nothing into everything. Changing vapor ideas into tangible somethings. To me, there is more value and magic in that kind of creation than in a biblical fairy tale or physical conception. If you’ve got this gift, you rule the universe. You control that blinking cursor. You can lead us down whatever path you create.

It takes an innate skill to be a creator. It isn’t something you can learn (so, no… You shouldn’t go to art school.). It either exists in you or it doesn’t. If it exists in you and you feed it and cultivate it and express it, it will grow into something that is bigger and stronger than anything you could imagine. Writers don’t write because they want to, they write because they need to… Because that thing inside of them, that nagging itch that whispers to them, “Put it down on paper,” is stronger than their insecurity telling them that they can’t do it.

In the face of rejections and red-pen editing, we, as writers, push on… We continue to create. We look failure in the eye and resolve to write it better next time, to go in a different direction or just send it someone else because that joker that told you it was shit was probably an illiterate moron anyway.

The naysayers… The hecklers… Those that criticize our work and trivialize our skill? Those that, either by subtle force or outward blast, work to chisel away at the work we have done, which for most of us, we have been doing all our lives? Those people are weak. Skillless. Talentless shmucks.

True, it only takes a second … A tiny effort to destroy. You can spend hours upon hours working on a sand castle to only have the tide sweep it away in one crashing wave. A swift blow to the delicate structure that you have been working on and it, and you in the process, can crumble to the ground.

Words are powerful. Writers know this more than anyone else. And the right combinations of words can destroy a lifetime’s efforts. A stinging, burning reminder of your insecurity has the power to prevent you from ever reaching your full potential.

But only if you let it.

If you know in your heart that you have this gift to create…. That you have been called to create things… Every little asshole that tries to destroy you or your work is meaningless. It takes NO talent to destroy things. Those bottom-feeding, talentless suck-ass punks can destroy, but you will look up, surrounded by the rubble, clouds of dusty smoke billowing around you and you will smile sweetly. And then start again.

Picasso said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”I don’t agree with that. Some of the most beautiful things that are created are spontaneous in nature… peaceful in conception. With the exception of Write Club, it isn’t a competition. You don’t have to destroy anybody to be successful. You don’t have to write better than someone, you just have to write. Real creation is above destruction, immune to it… Because no matter how many times they come to knock you down, they cannot stop you from starting to create again.

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If you haven’t already, you need to go like the Facebook Page for WRITE CLUB Atlanta and make it a point to come next time. It really is, as Randy Osborne so poignantly put it, “a hard-to-classify and wondrous thing for lit’ry types.”

Reflections of Dysfunction

I can remember the feeling so vividly… My throat would actually hurt, scratched from the screaming. Chest rising and falling in heavy, deliberate heaves from being so worked up that I had to take some time to catch my breath. I was angry and I had shown it…

Slamming doors, flinging myself onto furniture, screaming threats and I-hate-yous… Empty words thrown haphazardly, without worry or care where they landed or how they hurt. Teenage pouty faced, arms crossed, nostrils flaring.

For a long time, I thought my relationship with my mother was dysfunctional. She just didn’t understand me! *back of hand to forehead, realllll dramatic-like*

Getting older has taught me a lot of things, but this was one of the biggest lessons for me. Sure, my mom gets on my nerves sometimes, but she’s human and I’m human — it’s inevitable. As an adult, having had more and more interactions with other people in different dynamics, I’ve learned that what I had with my mother as a teenager was normal, shit, healthy even.

And now I’ve got a pre-tween, an eight year old trying so desperately to be BIG. Wanting all the perks of being a big kid with none of the responsibility… Storming off and huffing and muttering under his breath when he realizes that I’m not budging and that he can’t do whatever it is that he wanted to do… I’ve got this beautiful little bit of clarity.

Oh, the things my mother must have thought about me… The times she must’ve said behind closed doors, the laughing, the “bless her heart”ing… I’m sure I made her mad, totally… But watching my teenage body revert to a flopping, fish-out-of-water toddler-style tantrum was probably hysterical.

Hey mom, what do they call it? Come’up’ins?