COMMENTARY

On Women Writing Workshops

by Ceridwen Collins-West

It had been so simply arranged. Not with any of the fuss I'd imagined. I wondered if that would influence the outcome, for do you not have to fuss to make things run well? Where was the worry, the negotiation? The fine words that come out of books and contracts and are hard to pronounce? I had missed them. I had missed the preliminaries that come when people curry your favour. I wanted to be curried, as someone important, as someone whose skills were more than ordinary.

I wondered from where beyond the ordinary one could pull words that would instill passion in others.

But when it was done, I was just another ordinary writer teaching women how to write; without fanfare, without the telemarketing auctioneering that appears on posters and pamphlets and says: We have a great workshop for you! We have a great instructor for you! I was, instead, a woman writer whose abilities were of course negligible and whose worth was measured, falling short of big fancy floating bucks and champagne bubbles that come when you are a really important person with something really important to give.

So when I stood in the empty room I could have remarked how ordinary it was too. Just another room, off another hall, in a university that was also ordinary. Ordinary hall smells, like dust that has hung on books for a generation or two. Like the dust that gets under the rugs when you haven't lifted them for twenty years. Dust that clings to the throat, moving in a stale air where the wind doesn't blow, waiting to be inhaled, waiting to be told that yes, this is ordinary too.

I wondered from where beyond the ordinary one could pull words that would instill passion in others. The passion that goes beyond the ordinary into the realm of dream and fantasy where there aren't enough words to express what you see and where you can't see enough to express? Where in the world of the city, where transit buses and motorcars scream past striving for some unnamed space? Where the rent and the hydro bills are due, in regular time, to be paid? And the people walk ordinary lives in ordinary routines in very ordinary and boring days. Where is passion in all of this, when passion is unknown and would be too much of an effort to cultivate anyway when the day is ending and it's time to scramble up supper and feed the kids? And where was I to be in all of this? I, who, despite my billing, scarcely saw anything but the extraordinary and to whom the faeries and the Ancient Ones still played, still existed in this corner or on that field and in that lake? Where was it that I began to notice such wonders that I could tell them and they could find the passion too?

À propos des ateliers d'écriture pour les femmes

par Ceridwen Collins-West

Je me tenais dans une salle ordinaire, qui donnait sur un couloir ordinaire, dans une université ordinaire et me demandais quels mots peu ordinaires je pourrais trouver pour passionner d'autres femmes. Tous les yeux fixés sur moi étaient différents, mais tous étaient plein d'attente. Comme si, magicienne, je pouvais transformer les mots ordinaires du discours de ces femmes en épopées lyriques et faire accéder ces dernières à la célébrité en un clin d'oeil. Je savais que je ne pouvais pas les tromper. Je ne pouvais pas m'en sortir en leur livrant un récital ou une conférence perchée sur mon podium, qui se trouvait à un peu plus d'un mètre de la participante la plus proche. Je disposais de cinq soirs pour leur montrer qu'elles pouvaient se transformer en un cercle de femmes se passionnant pour l'écriture.

Elles ont bien écouté et ont écrit. Des récits de leur vie et de leurs souffrances. Coups d'oeil sur des vies se métamorphosant en récits fictifs. Larmes sur du papier, rires. Le plaisir de disposer d'un espace où jouer avec les mots et ne pas avoir quelqu'un qui dise «vous ne devriez pas». Et, entre-temps, dans cette pièce ordinaire des fils se sont croisés et se sont tissés entre ces femmes, au milieu de leurs rires, de leurs sourires et de leurs mots. Leur donnant envie de continuer seules.



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