Home Again, Home Again
by Frank Ard
This week, a special thing happened to eighteen writers in this world. Each year, the Clarion West Writers Workshop invites a couple handful of fiction writers to Seattle, Washington to eat, sleep, dream, bicker, steep, and stew in writing. No doubt, the most important aspect of this ritual isn’t the writer’s seclusion (most times, seclusion is good for the writer), it is the community. Despite all portents as an intensive boot camp, Clarion West is a support group, each class a bizarre, or maybe normal, family with their own vices and customs and lingo and oddities and over-the-top personalities. Many come to the Clarion West house with little, if any, semblance of a support group specifically for their art, their talent, the blood and tears they wonder if anyone will ever, ever see. To come into a group who will become the writer’s closest allies on this road, to come into this lucky meld on this week of all weeks of all the year, to have this social net suddenly available for forty-two odd, long-and-short days, changes the writer.
The growth is all of a sudden, and the change is irrevocable.
A year ago, this was my story. I was one of the Clarion West chosen. And afterward my writing has never been stronger. The process has never been more difficult. Life after Clarion has a tendency to chip away at your bones. You may be seized with death or disorientation or divorce or love or ocean dreams or a chaotic desire to run into the wilderness, never to return. Writing makes nomads of us all, and Clarion steeps us so that all we can know is the thrill of exploration, stepping whatever chance we get into unknowing, for we have been there. We’ve been to the edge of the world, glimpsed the shore. You find yourself staring at the cobalt walls, remembering six weeks of freedom and imagination and ideology resolved with a constant supply of tea, coffee, square meals. And sure, there were rough seas to weather in that house, as with any domestic situation, but the waves weren’t those back home. You’ll wonder if back home is home and if home is always somewhere else. Those times in the Clarion house, the brilliant and the dark, those are the testing ground. Because of that, you just might stand on your own two feet in this world.
You will stir in your bed in the fog of night and morning. In the blur between sleep and awake, you will see that house, those people you shared it with, and you will laugh with them and you will fight with them and you will say what you meant to say when there wasn’t enough time to say it.
It was me stepping into that house a year ago. This will become someone else’s story now. For the Clarion West class of 2011: your episode begins. It will be a breathless six weeks. And you may not sleep again for your waking dreams of that house in Seattle.
