Vernon Downs Read Online Free PDF Page B

at Glendale Community College—represented the least distinguished credentials among those in attendance, who all seemed either to be enrolled at Iowa or Columbia or Williams, or to have decades of life experience, which lent an air of authority to their theories about writing and what constituted art.
    Workshop was another matter entirely. He spent evenings in his room conscientiously reading the stories passed out that afternoon. The quality of the stories was markedly better than those he’d seen at GCC—several read as smoothly as published stories—and he couldn’t find anythingsubstantive to say, so that by the third meeting, he was the lone participant who hadn’t spoken, forcing Jane Martin, the workshop leader and author of a famous book set in an eponymous small town, to call on him. He fumbled through a string of exhortations about the quality of the writing and plotting, aping speech he’d heard in the hallways and dining room, finally making an original point about the likability of the narrator, a widowed herpetologist who falls in love with a woman half his age. The con held, though he wasn’t sure that all his workshop mates were convinced he belonged there, a suspicion he feared would be confirmed as the deadline for him to hand in his story approached. His small cache of original work was archived on a blue diskette he kept in the suede pouch, and he reread everything he’d written on a computer in Crossett Library, but none of it exhibited the quality of the work they’d been considering at Camden. One of the first stories he’d written, “My Last Jenny,” was too upsetting to finish reading. Another, about people all over the country mistakenly spotting Lee Harvey Oswald in the moments after the Kennedy assassination, rose in his estimation, but the story was too personal, written during a sensitive time—he hadn’t even shared it with Olivia—and he wasn’t eager to hear it dissected in workshop.
    The situation plagued him all through the field trip arranged by Jane Martin for the purpose of an elaborate writing exercise designed around the tragic disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, the Camden sophomore who walked out into the campus woods in the mid-1940s and vanished.
    Charlie tramped along the worn trail, the campus receding behind the group of students lacquered with astringent bug spray. They listened as Jane Martin described Paula Jean’s disappearance, how she’d marched out the front gates in the December cold without a jacket or scarf, how a garage owner closing for the night was the last to see her alive, if you discounted the bus driver who claimed Paula Jean had grabbed the last bus to New York City, or the waitress at the Modern Café who swore she’d served Paula Jean a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage with a side of pancakes.
    â€œThe rumor that she was underdressed led searchers to believe that Paula Jean was rendezvousing with someone who had a car or a cabin,” Jane Martin said. She gathered the group under a stand of birch trees, the sunlight spotting the faces of the would-be scribes, anxious to please. “So take out your notebooks,” Jane Martin said, “and sketch out a few paragraphs about what you think happened to Paula Jean.”
    Notebooks and pens were wrestled free of bags and backpacks. Charlie took out a pocket-size Camden notebook he’d shoplifted in the campus bookstore. He held his pen to paper like a reporter but drew a blank. The other workshoppers scribbled furiously, constructing whole lies out of the scraps of a girl’s unsolved disappearance. Charlie found it exhausting to speculate about Paula Jean, a little disconcerted that the others found it so easy. Weren’t they worried that adopting a tendency to fabricate would leak over into their real lives? The girl standing opposite him swatted at a red spot on her tanned leg with her notebook.
    Jane Martin