Anecdotes from My Residency V — Close Encounters of the Whidbey Kind?
from the January 2011 residency
Part of the Whidbey tradition is that one student is good enough to collect pictures of everyone – faculty, MFA students, and residency-only students (when possible) and assemble a great photo board. It serves a practical purpose, not only useful to the new students and residency-only students, but also helpful to a good many of us who weren’t in class together for the last six months. For example, as a fiction student, I wouldn’t be shocked if one of the newer CYA students needed help to match my face and name.
The board also gives everyone a chance to complain about their photos, a pastime enjoyed by many. After all, although one student has put a fair amount of work into the photo board, most of us forget about our pictures until the last possible moment. Thus, many of the photos are grabbed rapidly from Facebook, a friend’s wedding pictures, online postings from the previous residency, or similar sources.
In my own case, my photo was arranged rapidly with my wife, who tried to find a place outside that met the nominal background requirements of the i.d. cards and still did not require a flash in the late afternoon sun. We snapped one quickly, and I was laughing inside about something or other.
The laugh showed up on my face as a smirk, described by some of my friends as smug.
They might have been right, too. I don’t remember what I was laughing at, but if it were a particularly bad pun – not outside the realm of possibility – I may well have been feeling a bit smug about it. Or at least amused with myself, which might look about the same.
But I digress.
Now the spot with the best lighting also happened to have sunlight above me in the shot. Forming a cone. With the point up and away.
It was quickly determined that this light had to have come from an alien ship, and the only question under debate was the meaning of the smirk: should the caption be, ‘“See, I told you they were real,” he said just before the aliens abducted him,’ or ‘Did you think I came here without back-up?’
Obviously I favored the latter, but it wasn’t really my call.
Neither caption appeared, but one of my fellow students (name withheld by request of the Men in Black) put up a flying saucer drawn on a Post-It note, complete with the first part of the beam of light, arranged to join up with the photograph. I think I answered more questions about that picture than about anything else over the course of the residency.
Some of us talked about taking pictures with our pets for next semester. Now I’ll have to figure out how to do that with three cats. . . .
Submissions Update:
It’s 2011 and I’ve decided to get organized. I set up a new e-mail address to use for solicitations only, and put together a spreadsheet listing the titles ready for submission, where they’ve been submitted (with date), whether the submission was electronic or USPS, response, and a column for any other notes I have about it. I also started actually using duotrope, instead of saying to myself that I needed to get around to it.
But, has this made me better about submissions?
Yes, it has! I set everything up yesterday, and have sent out twelve submissions in the last twenty-four hours. That’s just about everything that’s ready to go right now, and with that spreadsheet I can add titles as I finish them, so I have a complete list of what’s out and what needs to be sent.
