WINE OR DIE

This morning I attended a short story workshop led by Manuel Gonzales, whom the University of Kentucky is unfortunately losing to Bennington College. It was more of a dialogue than a workshop, in that we did not manage to get to any of the prompts that Manuel had prepared. I was expecting to have to write for a few minutes, then share with the class.

All eight of us did collaborate on something, however. Manuel (I keep referring to him by his first name because we have met several times, so I feel like I know him a little bit. Also, he went to high school with one of my longtime blogging friends, Awesome Joolie. SMALL WORLD) mentioned how fantasy novels often have a map at the beginning of a book. So he drew an outline of a terrain, decided to call it "James," and asked what landscapes would fill the country. He pointed to the northwest, and I suggested mountains. In hindsight, that seems spectacularly unoriginal. Someone else put a swamp at the foot of the mountains. We had poisonous plants in the northeast, and a desert in the southeast. Another person wanted to plant grapes in between the desert and the poisonous plants. Manuel said, "So, you can either die or drink wine, " and I blurted "WINE OR DIE," and we all chuckled, even though I was laughing pretty hard on the inside. It doesn't take me much to laugh at myself. WINE OR DIE. That's hilarious. To me.

We continued on, building a city named "Ralph" in the middle of the country, and another city called "Ed" south of the swamp. The Ralphers were urban farming vegans, and we decided that the Edites were angry about having to eat so much alligator meat. The whole exercise took maybe 10 or 15 minutes, but at the end, we had two peoples who were in conflict with each other, and there was an invader arriving by boat in the northwest. And then Manuel turned Ralph and Ed into roommates/best friends, and the conflict arrived in the form of a partner, or cancer. I had never thought of transposing that kind of délire into a more real-life situation.

It feels hard to explain this process, this thing we shared, and you probably did have to be there. Even though we did no actual writing, I got something from the workshop, if only a fun way to brainstorm. And Manuel is going to email us the prompts he meant to use.

I tell myself that I can't write fiction, because my attempts at it haven't gone very far. But I'd like to create my own fantasy map, and see where it takes me.

PS: Manuel's novel The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is a rollicking good read.