The Makeover

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This month’s post is a fairy story I wrote some years ago (all rights reserved, folks!).

I hope it will amuse everyone and appeal to writers especially.  See if you can identify the different writing gurus, they are all connected with freewriting.  If you spot any resemblance to TV personalities or shows of the past, these are entirely co-incidental.

The Makeover by Kathy Hopewell

Once upon a time, a woman called Charlotte sent in her video tape.  On the film were pictures of her dressed as normal.  She wore Peter Pan collars, ugly brown glasses, and the most hideous beige skirt with a fallen hem, but secretly she had always wanted to be a novelist.
— Help me! she wailed, like a desolate child.

In the studio, the style guru is on the sofa watching Charlotte’s video.  She beams with anticipation as it comes to an end and swivels round to face the camera.
— Well, we thought we could help, she says, and we picked Charlotte out of two hundred hopefuls to come in and give herself up to us, body and soul. We started by showing her exactly what she’s been doing wrong all these years.

Cut to Charlotte herself, looking sheepish in her baggy grey underwear.  She steps into the magic room of mirrors to confront her misshapen and bulky outline.
She is prodded and spun on her heel.
— It’s such a waste!  The style guru shakes her head.  You’re simply not making the most of yourself.  And she puts an arm around her pale, wobbly waist.
This unexpected kindness brings out Charlotte’s tears.

Then it’s time to show her some new looks on shop dummies.
The first model is an American poet living in an adobe house in New Mexico.  The style guru explains that the way the skirt flows over the body, skimming the hips and giving the impression of slenderness, is achieved by completely letting go of the internal censor and writing whatever comes into your head without stopping for ten minutes.
— But do you really think I could get away with this? asks Charlotte.
— Yes! Yes! she shrieks, Just try it!  Try it and see!

The second model has confessed in the past to hiding under a baggy alcohol addiction but now gets up every morning to three clean sheets, which she covers with her hopes and fears.  After that, she knows exactly what to put on for the day.  You can see the clarity and sense of direction in the strong lines of her suit.
— But I don’t have a lot of time in the morning, says Charlotte.
— Oh for goodness sake, do stop being so negative! scolds the style guru.
Charlotte looks doubtful.

— You always wanted to be a writer, didn’t you?  Ever since you were a child?
— Yes, says Charlotte, Yes, I did.
— So what stopped you?
— Well, the truth is I didn’t think I could ever show my legs.
— That’s so common!  We hear it all the time!  But Charlotte, what’s the worst that can happen?  Are you afraid that someone will think you are too old, or too slutty?  Well you’re not and you’ll just have to trust us on this.  Do you trust us?
— OK, she says.
— Well done, Charlotte!  You won’t regret it.  Now, off to the shops!

The next day Charlotte clutches her pen, hoping she can afford what she wants.  The choice is amazing!  There are brightly-coloured chick-lit books, elegant and exclusive poetry collections and row upon row of horror novels.  She desperately tries to remember what she’s looking for, but her mind goes blank.  She is saved by the shrill descant of the style guru approaching.

— No, Charlotte, not the black!  Didn’t we say ‘no black’?  You have to give up this ‘do or die’ attitude, it’s too dark for you.  Look, before you try for a whole outfit, you need to get the underlying approach right.  Did you know that two out of three women are wearing the wrong underlying attitude?  And it shows in the way that they hold themselves.  Once you get that right, everything will look better on you.

They go to an exclusive boutique.  The walls are lined with shelves of frothy lace and shiny satin, and when Charlotte pulls one out, it is the most intricate and beautifully-designed quotation she has ever read.  By chance, she has picked up her exact cup size.  She reads: I shall not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.
— Charlotte!  It’s just right for you, and William Blake is the best.  It’s always worth risking that extra bit more.
— Try it on!
So she does, and it fits perfectly.
— You can come here whenever you want, there’s lots more pieces you’ll like.  You must try a Chekov some day.
— But what about the owner?  Charlotte feels a bit strange just helping herself.
— A genius! So sad to lose her.  She had the best eye in the business, and she even developed her own lines.

The style guru pulls out a drawer labelled Idleness and inside is something that will cure the drooping that you get when you feel guilty about doing nothing.  It is cleverly designed so that the rounded shape of the imagination is restored, and the lace is very forgiving.
— And look, she goes on, here’s one of her really racy black numbers.  She holds up the quotation in front of Charlotte’s entranced face: Be careless, reckless!  Be a lion!  Be a pirate! Write any old way.
— Oh, I want that one too! cries Charlotte.

After this, finding the right things is easy.  Charlotte moves instinctively towards the muted greens of Virginia Woolf and prefers double-layered constructions, always in the well-tailored limited omniscient: she’s too heavy around the hips for the first person, apparently.

Finally the day arrives when Charlotte must reveal her new self.  She is sent to the hairdresser for the finishing touches.  John is quite severe and he won’t allow her to wear her long style any more.  He proposes to cut, dramatically.

— Well, all right, I’ve come this far, says Charlotte, looking for the last time at her haphazard, plentiful curls and embellishments.

He smoothes and snips and divides her scruffy tangles.  He brushes a last ink-black lock into the sleek shape of a comma.  Now, the strong lines of her cheekbones come out and it’s as if her real personality has emerged for the first time.

At last Charlotte stands in front of the covered mirror.  She feels a sort of fizz in her fingers.
— Ready? asks the woman, fidgeting with anticipation.
Charlotte shuts her eyes and thinks the word ‘eagle’, then nods.  Off comes the cloth.  Her knuckles prickle, and feathers start to appear, wetly snapping out from her hands and elbows.  Her back feels tight and uncomfortable; something is trying to grow, very quickly, from her shoulder-blades.  At last she begins to beat her large, new wings.  The style guru is speechless, which has never happened before.  With a deafening sound like falling rubble, Charlotte flies to the open window and away into the sky.

A few weeks later the style guru is on the sofa once again, armed with the remote control.
— So let’s see how Charlotte got on, after her transformation.  Has she kept to our rules or is she wearing those awful slippers again?
She shoots her remote at the screen like a gunslinger and Charlotte appears, resplendent in gorgeous caramel and vanilla plumage.
— Wonderful! See how she’s mixing and matching and creating her own look!  Then the woman leans in close to the screen.  Hold on a minute, what’s that?  I think it’s an egg!  Well, she’s done magnificently to lay that all by herself.

The egg is small but robust.  Charlotte has had to sit on it, to keep it warm, pretty much all of the time, even when she’d rather have been watching television.  Suddenly, a crack appears and a corner pokes out.
— My goodness!  It’s a paperback! exclaims the woman.
It takes quite a while to ease it out of the rigid shell, but soon the pages are dry and Charlotte beams with maternal joy.  She cradles the young book.
— I just can’t believe it! she says, See how bright and glossy it is!  And it’s all mine!

The End of an Era

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School uniforms and new pencil cases are in the shops and this is the time, every year since 1989, when I look forward to meeting my new students at Bangor University’s School of Lifelong Learning.  But not this year.  Lifelong Learning closed on 31st July.  So although we’ll be teaching out all those who want to complete their qualifications via different parts of the university, there is now no dedicated centre, staff or courses for mature and part-time students at the university.

It’s such a loss.  A loss to the community.  A loss to the families of the students who might have been.  And the greatest loss of all is to the individuals themselves who might have dared, heart in mouth, to step forward and enter higher education and have their lives transformed as a result.

And what a loss to me!  The people I’ve encountered through teaching literature, women’s studies and creative writing have immeasurably enriched my life.  And Lifelong Learning has enabled me to devise and deliver modules that would have been unlikely to fit into mainstream degree courses, such as the one on freewriting that I’ve mentioned more than once in this blog.

When I heard the news that Lifelong Learning was being axed due to financial cuts I turned to my notebook and began to freewrite.  Out came a whole host of voices and stories from these past 28 years.  Once edited, they became the prose poem below: a series of first-person statements based on the real students I’ve taught but each one a mixture, a composite, of many different people.

I hope that these voices celebrate and commemorate the great achievements (and heartaches) of the last three decades of the “extra mural” project at Bangor University and show in some measure what has been lost by allowing money to be the ultimate determinant of the value of education.

 

Cost Effective Lifelong Learning by Kathy Hopewell

I run a local charity.  Before going back to study part time, my cancer diagnosis had stripped everything from me: marriage, work, hope, confidence.  The course was a lifeline, literally.

I am a schoolteacher and my evening classes at the uni are the only times anyone asks me what I think.

I’m agoraphobic but once I’d registered, my desire to learn about psychology was greater than my fear of going outside.  Now I’m thinking of going into social work.

At work, I was the one who stayed late to lock up and the one who cleared up spillages.  After I got my degree, things changed.  Now I do the orders, now I have a section under me.  Now I have enough to put some money by.

I’m disabled and having the classes spread out was the only way I could have got through a whole degree. 

I was an old-fashioned salesman with a briefcase and a business card.  My degree was the best thing I could have done because when the company went under, I didn’t, and now I’m self-employed.

I never used to speak to anyone after my wife died.  Now I get together with my classmates to talk about the assignments.  I suggested they came to my house next time.  The doctor’s taken me off the anti-depressants now.

I’ve worked in retail all my life.  Getting to grips with social theory was the first time I’d used my brain in years.  I reckon the two things together will really give me an edge: it’s like seeing the world with completely new eyes.

Before I came on the course I honestly didn’t know that I felt so strongly about social justice.  Now I’m running a drop-in centre and it’s all paid for by an application that I put together.

I’m in recovery but in class, people see something more interesting in me than my addiction.  In fact, I don’t even think about myself much anymore, instead I think about the next time I can get into the library and what I’ll say during the session next week.

This is a freewritten blog…

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This is a freewritten blog, the first time I’ve tried it and it’s not going to be easy to be thinking in public and actually put down my genuine thoughts as they occur because that’s what freewriting is and there’ll be a fight going on here, even fiercer than usual between my hand moving the pen and not allowing my mind to edit as I write with the need to say useful, coherent, appropriate things.

It’s 30 years since Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and the long online interview in LA was so good! [“Natalie Goldberg with Steven Reigns” at http://nataliegoldberg.com/]  She even confesses to always having been in competition with the author of Bones meaning she never hit such heights again but that might just be sales because she must know that Wild Mind and Thunder and Lightning and now True Secret are every bit as good if not better than Bones.

writing-down-the-bonesI’ve been doing this [freewriting] for 10 years at least but to go into a classroom and explain it and why people should do it (if they want to write) is still very hard.  I can’t say I do freewriting properly anymore or even completely regularly but I can’t go for many days without it.  And now I’ve lost my track because just now the phone rang…it was out of area so I didn’t answer.  If it’s anyone who really wants me, or exists (vs a computer) they’ll leave me a message.

So what to say about Natalie and Bones?  Without it, no writing.  Absolutely. It was the decider, the guide, the best friend I had when it all seemed pointless.  Natalie was the only person who ever fully convinced me that writing is worthwhile for its own sake and surely the relaxation, the dropping of all that tension around being good, and competing and how to succeed, the letting go of that, has meant I could come to write the stuff that’s turned into our performances.  Such a good gig on Sunday! [Hopewell Ink, see “About” page] Everyone there was linked to me speaking we were all in the same moment and D’s new soundtrack was so good, it was motoring on, giving a sort of drive to the whole thing at the end and the coffee helped too.

So Natalie feels like to me, and presumably lots and lots of others as the one giving permission (Who Gave You Permission? is a chapter in Wild Mind, I think) and that’s who I want to be in the classroom on Saturday.  And will they be smiling by the end?  That’s the test.  The room warms up and people connect and you can feel the energy change.  That’s what happened before and it did my writing good and I wrote all the exercises and played the games too.  I have to get the paper slips ready and using scissors will make this RSI in my hand worse.  I resent it when it’s cooking or cleaning but nothing will stop me writing I’ll take ibuprofen if necessary.

natalie_goldbergNatalie is older and she’s had cancer but of course she’s written about it and that’s how she’ll have coped.  How would I manage if I couldn’t write?  What if I was in prison?  But what good does it do?  Natalie says you’re not creating any more suffering no she says everything is, she she I am stuck now which is odd because it’s more usually at the beginning and now I’m thinking about Women’s Studies and the conference which is it? where they need a speaker because someone’s dropped out.

The Zen stuff is very hard to convey from Natalie’s book, where it makes complete sense, to students.  What does Monkey Mind mean?  It’s what I’m trying to get past: all that stuff about the gig and the uni e-mails.  And what’s underneath?  Me, a woman in navy joggers because I’m hoping I’ll do some yoga later (unlikely but there’s a chance) and sitting here in Bethesda at my desk and so relieved, so relieved that I don’t have to drive to the hospital tonight.

So a blog abut Natalie and the 30 years since Bones.  Well, it could be about her core message: observe the mind, or it could be just me, taking it to some new people again this weekend and hoping it does change their lives for the better, as education can but only as writing does on this deep and dangerous level.  And now that sounds bad so I’ll have to edit it out but that would be cheating.

I used to despise D’s friend for not editing and think I knew better.  I wasn’t a writer then.   Now I know that it’s two halves of the same thing.  The freewritten and the edited are the two halves of a whole piece of writing.  And the freer the freewrite (and the writer who writes it) the stronger the final piece will be.  That’s a simple message, from Natalie, through me, to everyone listening.