Clarion Daze I

Clarion is a six-week intensive writing workshop for writers of SF or fantasy. It started some time in the 80s and there was (may still be) Clarion East and Clarion West, which happens in Seattle.

I was accepted into Clarion (you had to submit several pieces of writing) more years ago than I care to think about. I went down to Clarion with one of two other Canadians (and Vancouverites) that year, Janet Waters and Clelie Rich. We were the three Canucks out of twenty-one people.

People ranged in age from the youngest who I think was just out of high school to a couple of people in their forties. We were about two-thirds women to one-third men. Most people stayed in the dorms on Capitol Hill. Our six weeks consisted of going into the classes every day and critiquing stories, back to the dorms to write and read stories for the next day, sleep if you could fit it in and on Fridays there was a party for the guest instructor of the week. I ended up surviving on about four hours sleep a night for six weeks.

Clarion was set up with five authors, one per week and one editor. Our year we had Ed Bryant (short story writer, mostly, and one-time protege of Harlan Ellison), the extremely intelligent and diverse Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Connie Willis, editor Tappan King and Samuel Delaney. This is close to the order in which they taught but I'm not completely sure anymore.

The first week, Ed set the tone by saying, "We're taking bets to see who sleeps with each other." It seems marriages went up like firecrackers at Clarion workshops where the stress/closeness caused people to cozy up with those they may not normally have thought twice about. I'm not sure if Ed intended it but perhaps it put a damper on what might have happened. All I know is that there were only two people who did sleep together and they were pretty discreet. Most of the others to this day wouldn't even be able to guess.

Suffice to say we had to take our frustrations out in other ways and there were some monumental water fights that had the halls of the dorms soaked and a few people put into the showers. I still have a Princess Leia like picture of me sporting a realistic water gun. We've even took it to the campus but had to be careful that we didn't look like we had real guns on the street (this was pre-9/11 by years).

By our second week, we were somehow into slugs. Ursula Le Guin had made some comment about them, Octavia Butler had a phobia of them and there were slug races (this was the summer) in Seattle. Yes, the Pacific Northwest boasts the gigantic banana slug, which can get to at least one and a half feet in length (the biggest ones I ever saw--gross!)Long slimy monstrosities that range in colour from brown with spots, anemic white, pale yellow with new-shoot green, blackish and bright yellow with brown spots, just like a banana. I ended up drawing Cyril the cyber slug, complete with mohawk, earrings, mirrorshades and a bolted, metal body. He became the image on our Clarion T-shirts, along with all the best/worst bits from our stories.

Of people, we had a range, no one yet that famous in their careers. There were a few needy princesses, the quiet shy ones, the nerdy ones, the confident ones, grass roots cowgirls and nature lovers and I think at that time, only one of each sex who were parents.There was also the name dropper, the obnoxious person who never read peoples' stories and barely wrote anything the whole time. Clarion critiques are set up thus.

(Tomorrow--Part II)