Beyond Baroque

So I came to Los Angeles. After struggling for awhile, we ended up living east of here by just a few blocks and I went to check it out. Their poetry workshops were ok. I decided I would volunteer to do a fiction writing workshop for them. This was 1982.

I was full of myself and what I was working on. I was serious. This was the Bibliography for the workshop:

If this wasn't enough to scare folks off, I obviously wasn't doing my job correctly. I would analyze everyone's work by whether they were writing perfect paragraphs or not. People would come, there was one lady that came and read a marvelous story about an anorexic girl that the more she starved herself, the larger she became, until she was fifty feet tall. A television writer showed up and invited me to come to a workshop in Westwood that was run by an old radical from the 50's that she would start up whenever she was out of jail for her various protests. People came and went and I didn't seem to be able to get people to come back. Then a guy presented himself to the guy would ran the foundation and told him he could do a better job and he would bring in more people. So they fired me and made him the Workshop guy. It might have been Jack Grapes, who has been running little workshops around Venice for 20 years, but I don't really remember. I do recall my wife at the time giving a very very cold shoulder to the director of Beyond Baroque when we ran into him at a grocery store. She was loyal.

I went back a few years ago, looking for a fiction workshop and tried out theirs. Two guys attended. One couldn't write at all and the other could barely speak English, so he would write in Urdu and then try to translate it into English. I wished them well and never went back.