Blog By Knight
I got an A in Hollis Gillespie’s Shocking Real-Life Writing Acadamy

Today I went over to the Telephone Factory for Hollis Gillespie’s Shocking Real-Life Writing Acadamy which was held in Grant’s Studio. It was a really great thing. First off, I loved being in Grant’s studio with his Sister Louisa art covering every available surface. It gave the afternoon a rather holy atmosphere with paint by numbers of the Last Supper and such, all over the walls.

You see Grant collects paint by numbers mostly of religious scenes, cats and women with beehive hair. He then writes on them in his Sister Louisa font with such things like The Higher the Hair the Closer to God. When I first met Grant I told him I collected paint by numbers not realizing that this was his specialty, He and his friend Hector just looked at each other and laughed. I mostly collect ocean scenes and dogs, but most of my really good ocean pictures were washed out to sea by Hurricane Ivan.

There were about twelve of us eager writer wannabes around a big table and Hollis showed us that we were actually already writers and we needed to just get on with it and write something. I loved the part where we told each other our stories and Hollis helped to tell us what was a book and what wasn’t and why. I am basically nosy and one of the good things about being a psychologist was getting to hear people’s stories.

My favorite client story of all time was a meter reader man referred by his EAP program at work for having sex with a horse. When he came in he explained that he had been out reading meters one day and stopped to eat his lunch on the side of a road by a horse pasture. He had gotten out of the truck to take a leak by the fence when one of the horses came over to him. The thing that really cracks me up today is that he then said, “And well you know, one thing just led to another. . .”

I believe that everyone has a story in them. Its just daunting for me to pick the one from all of the many. I believe the one I will focus on is how I ended up going from listening to Dr. Laura while driving my kids carpool to going to California to learn how to have one-hour orgasms. The working title is, How to Enjoy your Mid-life Adolescence and Other Advise from a Psycho-Shrink. Whew, I got that part out of the way. Now, I can get on with writing it.

Filed under Be a Better Person — Subscribe, Trackback,