Let's depress people.
The Writing faculty did a reading tonight (they're all published authors), and it was a lot of fun. Senior writing students introduced each of them before they spoke, and I must say that Tom Bailey's intro as well as his own comments before reading proved quite entertaining. His introducer gave this anecdote:
Tom Bailey once decided to dispose of his family's Christmas tree by hurling it off the cliff behind his mountaintop house. After the resulting detached bicep and reconnective surgery, he proceeded to tell this story proudly during all of his classes while waving around his good arm.
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To give a little context to this next part, Bailey's second novel centers around lynching and infanticide (I've yet to read it, perhaps with good reason).
As a result of this, one student has a theory that every good story has a dead baby in it, while another said that the book put her off dead babies forever.
When Bailey got up and gave his own address, he said:
"I would like to take this opportunity to dispel the rumor that if your story has a dead baby in it, you will get an A. That's only half true. I like other dead sh*t too."
The short story I'm working on now for fiction class happens to have a dead girl child and a dead deer. I'm starting to think this isn't coincidence, even though Dr. Fincke is teaching the class, not Bailey. Hopefully though, I'll graduate without killing a baby. As Fincke says, in some seriousness: "Don't write depressing stories. Just write stories with depressing things IN them."
Kind of hard to pull off, but we shall see, we shall see. I do hate being depressed just as much as the next person.
Tom Bailey once decided to dispose of his family's Christmas tree by hurling it off the cliff behind his mountaintop house. After the resulting detached bicep and reconnective surgery, he proceeded to tell this story proudly during all of his classes while waving around his good arm.
---
To give a little context to this next part, Bailey's second novel centers around lynching and infanticide (I've yet to read it, perhaps with good reason).
As a result of this, one student has a theory that every good story has a dead baby in it, while another said that the book put her off dead babies forever.
When Bailey got up and gave his own address, he said:
"I would like to take this opportunity to dispel the rumor that if your story has a dead baby in it, you will get an A. That's only half true. I like other dead sh*t too."
The short story I'm working on now for fiction class happens to have a dead girl child and a dead deer. I'm starting to think this isn't coincidence, even though Dr. Fincke is teaching the class, not Bailey. Hopefully though, I'll graduate without killing a baby. As Fincke says, in some seriousness: "Don't write depressing stories. Just write stories with depressing things IN them."
Kind of hard to pull off, but we shall see, we shall see. I do hate being depressed just as much as the next person.