I woke this morning and made coffee first thing. I feel rested, although a bit unsteady. I battle my contacts but quickly retire them to their case and don my glasses. My left eye burns. I fill my travel mug with coffee, pour a cup for Stephen, and walk next door to the room where he is staying. He is not there.
I make my way down to Salvadore's, feeling groggy and full of head fog. Stephen sits with one of his students from the last semester, having breakfast and chatting about her writing. I say my name when he notices my shadow standing at the end of the table. He smiles and tells me I look like Cary Grant. I tell him, "I'll take it," and smile broadly. He is refreshing. Witty. Cavalier. An unrepentant flatterer.
We make preparations for his craft talk -- cue up the CD to the proper track, set up his laptop, and wait for Shelley to make the morning's announcements. It's typical fare for the morning: room changes, cell phone reminders, etc. And then Stephen steps to the microphone.
He begins by talking about underpants. Underpants, that's right. The room immediately fills with the muted chuckles of educated people taking delight in the bathroom humor of it all. I can see some reluctance from them, how they wonder if they are above this kind of humor, but I let fly with a laugh. It's funny, I'm sorry, but it is. Stephen knows this and explains that you can make any group of people laugh at the mere mention of underpants. The chuckles dissipate into the ether and the room steadies its reverberations into silence.
He begins in earnest. I won't pretend to speak on his subject with as much poetry and lucidity as he does, but he talks about listening, about the language of sound, about simile. He talks about textures in writing, about how we must expand our senses beyond the visual into sound, smell, and taste, and how this forces us into a poetics of simile, about how rain on a tent sounds like bacon frying, about how the high C of the opera singer Caruso is like milk and iodine. He is firing on all pistons, the room is stunned into silence. I watch Jack and Bonnie beaming at him on stage, Peter whispers "damn" on more than one occasion. The talk is pure inspiration, poetry, and brilliance. I am in awe.
His talk casts me back to the experience of reading Perfume by Patrick Suskind. I studied this novel, about how Suskind, with very little language available for smell, had to connect smells to memory. Comparisons needed to be made in order for the smells of the novel to come alive, and Stephen has done something similar with sound. He's linked what he hears to all kinds of unlikely things, which drove the language of his talk to a poetic place, full of simile and concrete detail that allowed us to experience his world in a very tangible, a very personal way.
At one point, I was tempted to close my eyes and to simply listen, but I fought against it. It is good to highlight the sense of sound or smell by eliminating sight, but it is contrary to how I need to work in the future. I need my visuals, my images, but I ALSO need to be aware of how my other senses are interacting with the world. I need to layer these perceptions on top of my images, I must use all the tool sets available to me in a textured tapestry that will naturally elevate my prose to poetry.
I'm awake now and, I hope, paying attention.
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