Cassandra Lewis

Martin Roper says the best way to be a writer is to write. He writes every morning and never lets anything conflict with the schedule he’s set for himself. He believes discipline is crucial.

To keep up with my goals as a writer, I’ve decided to structure my day to include time to work on my new play Terror Act or my novel Tracks. (This writing program is awesome and it keeps us busy, but it doesn’t cater to our long-term writing projects). I save the afternoons after classes, which usually end by 3 or 3:30 to spend at least two hours on my long-term projects. I hope I’ll still be able to keep up with the school assignments too.

I begin each day at 6:30. Before class, which begins at 9:30, I call Drew and I read something inspiring. My morning reading includes: The Collected Stories by Grace Paley, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time by Eavan Boland, and Samuel Beckett’s The Complete Dramatic Works.

Then I have the most glorious walk to school along the Grand Canal. Our school is in a part of town called Rathmines, pronounced “Rat Mines,” but the name is deceptive. I’ve only seen water, ducks and swans:

The other day I saw this drunken skipper who somehow got his boat stuck between the dam and the bridge. The man dressed in black is a Garda yelling at the skipper:

Most days begin with a workshop class. The eighteen students of the program have been divided into two groups. For the first three weeks one group works with Mary Morrissy while the other works with Martin Roper and then the groups switch instructors for the last three weeks.

Right now I’m working with Mary. She’s delightful. She has three books out: The Pretender, Mother of Pearl, and A Lazy Eye: Stories.

Mary says good writing should “look at the familiar and make it strange.”

Here are two writing quotes she wrote on the board on our first day:

“Perception is the first act of the imagination.” -William Carlos Williams

“Under the artist’s humid scrutiny, the object grows warm, it stirs and shies, giving off the blush of versimilitude.” -John Banville

We are to write an eight-page short story that somehow incorporates an email she distributed to us and we have until the 30th to turn it in.

On our first day of class, Mary handed out copies of Van Gogh’s Shoes and then gave us fifteen minutes to write what we saw and about who we imagined owned the shoes.

On our second day of workshop, Mary gave us three choices for a twenty-minute writing exercise that she’d gathered from the tabloid news:

1) Serial snippers busted for ponytail thefts

2) Piano stools helped retirement home nurses to get pregnant

3) Farmer’s wife turns husband into scarecrow

The idea was to try to discover the character’s motivation behind these crazy events.

But the most exciting writing exercise of my life happened on Thursday. Mary asked the class if anyone spoke Swedish. After she was assured we were completely ignorant of the language, she passed out copies of a poem written in Swedish. We were to translate it phonetically. It didn’t need to make sense. The idea was to sound out the word and write a corresponding word that sounded like the Swedish word.

This exercise helps writers to focus on language instead of story, instead of meaning. For many of us the language is secondary to the story or character that inspires the writing and this exercise it to help shift the focus back to language.

After we read our ridiculous translations Mary read a long list of words she’d gathered from a medical dictionary and from a Greek mythology book and told us to create our own poem with the assigned words. We were also allowed to use up to ten words from our translation too. It was a truly freeing exercise (especially since none of us are aspiring poets).

In addition to the workshop classes we have a literature class and a theatre class and weekly guest speakers. For literature we’re studying John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and Oona Frawley’s New Dubliners.

For theatre we’re attending a play a week for the next four weeks. Last week we examined Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. For this week we’ll be discussing my man Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Lenane and Mark O’Rowe’s Howie The Rookie. These two plays are extremely violent and upsetting and are part of a new school (started in the late 1980s) called In-Yer-Face Theatre.

In fact, one of our secondary resources is a book called In-Yer-Face-Theatre: British Drama Today by Aleks Sierz. I don’t really understand this movement, though I appreciate Caryl Churchill’s work and I think McDonagh’s a genius for writing The Pillowman. But I’m trying to learn more, particularly whether my work has to be this vulgar in order to be successful.

As you can see, I’ve a long way to go. There’s so much more to learn. But at least I’ve established a structure while I’m here (between going to class and gulping Guinness).