Maureen is rock'n'roll.

She's the smile on the Buddha's lips. She isn't a writer, she is writing itself....

Well, maybe not quite (that last bit was adapted from a fictional description of Neal Cassady, by someone prone to flights of exaggeration), but she really is a very good teacher. Even having gotten some chunks of her teaching materials before, last summer in Seattle, the re-mix album is fantastic, with lots of new tracks thrown in. And, really, class is almost secondary...she's gone out to lunch with whatever students feel like tagging along every day after class, and I've gotten as much out of the discussions at the lunches as I have out of the class. (BTW, I want to categorically deny, in advance, any of these spurious internet rumors that might crop up about drinking going on at these lunches.)

Hell, the night before the class started, she caught me as I was leaving the hotel, we sat down on the outdoor patio to catch up for an hour or so, and in the course of that hour or so of casual conversation--"what have you been up to? what are you working on?"--I got the single most insightful analysis of the current state of my writing, and the direction I need to go with it, that I've gotten in the last year, if not ever.

None of this, of course, is to denigrate the exercises and critiques in class itself. I won't bore anyone by mentioning the stuff that's remixed from her Clarion West material, but I will mention something some regular readers of this blog (all three of them) might appreciate.

This, after all, being a workshop on plot, at one point on Monday, she passed out, yep, the *Lester Dent master pulp plot outline* (this was passed around informally last summer at Clarion, generating great entertainment), and proceeded to guide us through actually constructing a serious plot out of it (for a fairly original, mainstream, character-driven mystery story, which, actually, I'd like to read if someone wrote it.) [BTW, if anyone knows where the Dent link is--Shawn?--I'll include it in this post.] Easy to make fun of, and doubtless easy to construct really silly plots out of, but in a pinch it can actually also be useful as a serious plotting tool. Who knew?