Digging Through The Dregs: Revisiting My Old Writing

I've been rifling through my file cabinet and reading drivel that I wrote years ago back in my BA days at San Francisco State University. I've even found some things from junior high.

I've spent the last hour banging sheafs of papers on my head and trying to read the stuff aloud without gagging. I'm at odds whether to shred the stuff or keep it just because I've always had a hard time parting with the old me. I can only imagine what other writers who I've workshopped with must have thought of my abilities.

Awful. Talentless. Pathetic. Cliche. Annoying. Trite.

How many times have I read someone else's writing and rolled my eyes?

In 2008, while workshopping with Doug Rice at CSU Summer Arts in Fresno, he said [paraphrasing] "Be kind when criticizing others--you never know what kind of writer they will become." He went on to discuss the writer's ability to grow and improve. He talked about a writer's best friend: Revision. He handed this out in class. It's with me always:

Original Paragraph:

I stood on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light and the two attractive young women in white dresses who sat on an enormous couch in the middle of the large room. I could feel a nice breeze. there were white curtains over the open window and a wince-colored rug on the floor. On the wall was a landscape painting of some sort. Tom joined me, and we walked into the room.

Revised:

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Amazing, no?

I admit, most of my dregs need to be chucked or maybe buried somewhere, but I think I've found some terrible pieces in which I might be able to salvage a line or two with some work.

If you've never taken the time to REALLY sift through your old dregs, I recommend it. Go back as far as you can. Old love letters you wrote to an elementary school sweetheart. English papers.
Notes passed in class. These all say something about your evolution as a writer.

You'll be embarassed. Humiliated. And proud of how far you've come.

I know I am.

For funnies. The following is an old 'sensory exercise' I wrote for my very first creative writing class. I might not have understood what 'sensory exercise' meant because it's littered with lots of 'smelling' and 'feeling' nonsense. This is going the way of the hatchet, so I don't mind pasting it here, except that I'm SO embarrassed. If anyone has something particularly shameful to post in kind, feel free.

...10 minutes later...I'm losing my nerve...don't think I can bear to share this...okay fine...and yes, the poem was center justified when originally written.

Soft with Clouds, Hopes and Dreams

Smelling my wet insides soaked.
Feeling my chest breathing, stretching, falling in on my heart.
Tasting the bitter tears of emptiness of love.
Hearing the tortured sounds from my throat.
And seeing the shredded tissue in my hand.

Smelling, feeling, tasting, hearing, touching.
Swimming in the endless fathoms of my salty tears.
There’s just a little bit dribbling,
Catching in the small cup of my ear,
To soak and mix with the blood thrumming in my veins.

Seeing the tissue, sweet tissue!
Tasting your endless kiss, caress, and sweep against my face.
My nose, my lips, the soft underside of my eye.
A sweep of my brow, check and trembling chin.
Catch them.
Save me.
Shredded, sweet, drenched and mangled tissue.
Love me!
Soak aloft the tears,
And take my pain.

Tissue. Sweet tissue. Will you go to heaven?
You healed my pain, eased my sorrow, and took from me
All I could pour into so small a space.

How much love flows into our dead trees.
Breezes, wishes and rivers.
Soft with clouds, hopes and dreams.

Long and lasting, visits did they come
To funerals,
Teenage bedrooms, mother’s, father’s,
Endless of people’s of times lost and reborn.
Dead and strong on the tarmac of life,
Clenched in the hand of a weeping lover’s heart?

Tragedy wept with rivulets into our woods
Breezes, wishes and rivers.
Soft with clouds, hopes and dreams.
Tissue, sweet tissue. Will you go to heaven?