Remember that piece in Harper’s a few months back wherein Lynn Freed compares teaching creative writing to suffering in a gulag? Did it seem a bit over-the-top? From the mind of Mark Pritchard, author of Too Beautiful and Other Stories and How I Adore You, comes a hilarious spoof, The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag. Here’s a sample entry:
October 5, 1983
I try to begin each class with a bit of Proust, Stendahl, or Trollope. One of the students snickered every time I said “Trollope;” he thought I meant a whore. Faced with À la recherche du temps perdu, only one student had a question: “Has anybody ever read this whole thing?”I moved on to a discussion of point of view. A student wearing what I later discovered was a cap associated with the American sport of baseball offered this observation: “So, no matter how many people you got, third person is only one person.”Only two more months before I go to Ibiza.
Maybe Freed should try my waitressing job. Talk about gulags…