I Survived the Harvest Jazz and ... er ... the Maritime Writers' Workshop. Or did I?

This year’s Workshop went off the beaten path to explore new horizons with a workshop on Science Fiction and CyberPunk, which was quickly expanded to include discussions on fantasy and vampire fiction. This is their story. Well, part of it.

OK. This is a tiny sliver of their lives, a mote window into the their inner workings.

OK, ok. It’s really neat pics with bullshit text.

Yeah, that’s it.

This is the Science Fiction and CyberPunk workshop. From top to bottom and north to southeast, they are Frank Herbert, H.G. Wells, Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, and Mary Shelley. It was an impressive line-up. We went for tours to the Regent Mall food court in search of aliens, through the jungles of UNB’s geology and biology buildings to build alternate worlds, and deep into our inner landscapes to find beer. The instructor is under the table. He found beer.

This is the instructor, reincarnated after finding too much beer. Parts of him are still out there looking for more beer. (Photo by Mike Stewart)

This is H.G. Wells attending class through astral projection. He found beer. However, he had no substance and was unable to drink it before the instructor found it and absorbed it through a process of pixellated osmosis.

This is the SF and CyberPunk class looking for beer in Mission Hill. The mission was a flop … the beer was warm as hell and full of ashes. The bartender wore earrings. In his corneas.

This is Ursula Le Guin telling Sylvia Plath from the poetry workshop to get her iambic butt out of the SF section and into the poetry section to which Plath responded with, “Yes, nice chair, but lacks epiphanity.” Le Guin grabbed e e cummings’ coke can full of laudanum and banged Plath upon her noggin until she was jarred enough to hear bells. Nobody messes with people who write about triffids and Tralfamadorians.

On the bright side, Le Guin and Plath drank the contents of cummings’ coke can and rewrote Finnegan’s Wake as a haiku set on Mars. They were canonized for bringing Joyce to the common people.

Coming next … a ghostly tale of Mem Hall horror. Or maybe bar-hopping for words.