When at The Glen Workshop… 13 comments

By Bradford Winters

…Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Perhaps not as enticing a mode of conduct as its idiomatic Roman counterpart, but no less enriching when all is said and done.

For now that the 2010 Glen Workshop is said and done, I stand enriched in the afterglow as if with a holy kind of hangover. Not that there wasn’t some indulgence of the Roman stripe as well, but the hangover I mean isn’t one, thankfully, to leave me any time soon.

As I said in my plenary talk at the conference, being a first-timer among all the veterans attending this year’s Glen made for quite a profound experience—I started the week in a manner befitting this year’s theme, “Creativity at the Margins: Art as Witness.”

That is, I started as something of a witness at the margins of a culture in which I knew no more than one or two souls. Then, because it is a culture defined by love, I found myself drawn in like the most recently adopted member of a large and excellent family.

A family that includes the godfatherly Greg Wolfe and his astounding staff at Image; the illustrious likes of Barry Moser and B.H. Fairchild (I was gobsmacked to find myself chatting with them the first night of the conference); other staff members whose scant mention now might begin to sound like name-dropping; and my fellow bloggers, Laura Good, Jeffrey Overstreet, Brian Volck, Lindsey Crittenden, and Dyana Herron, all of whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time in person, having met them repeatedly in print right here at “Good Letters.”

The highlights in this arena were enough to leave one suspended in a mild but ongoing state of bliss throughout the week; from Barry’s video presentation of the making of his gloriously illustrated and typeset Pennyroyal-Caxton Bible, to B.H. (“Pete”) Fairchild’s reading of one heart-stopping poem after another; from Joel Sheesley’s numinous slideshow of paintings that places Jacob’s Ladder in his own driveway in Illinois, to Jeffrey Overstreet’s lecture on his forays in film criticism that was so utterly enjoyable it left me feeling like a freshman at New Jerusalem Community College (and not a little bit reluctant to follow him the next night with my own presentation).

And then there were my students in the Screenwriting/Playwriting class, who provided for a more discreet but no less memorable week to take home with me.

With scripts, plays, and proposals on hand whose subject matter ranged from the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and Western intervention in Rwanda to Albanian blood feuds and Christmas in a Japanese internment camp, whose characters ranged from Buffalo Soldiers and female disciples of Christ, to Corrie Ten Boom and Adam and Eve, they were a group equally inspiring as they were inspired.

All had come ready to put their work on the line. But one came willing to put his life on it, too.

His name is Gordon Williams, and I should note that I almost typed “was” instead of “is.” For Gordon had come to The Glen a very sick man, ravaged by cancer and his treatment regime alike. The first day of class he spoke about it openly, slowly and deliberately, as if his words were measured for the toll it took to speak them.

The second day of class he presented two pieces for workshop from a series called “The Prayer Monologues,” one in the voice of Abraham after the flight from Sodom and Gomorrah, the other in the voice of Mary after the flight to Egypt.

The third day he woke up to blood on his pillow and had to be admitted to the E.R.

Good news (he was stable) soon gave way to bad (he might not make it through the night), and all fourteen of his fellow students had filled out a card by the time I left for the hospital with Stephen Schneider, an Episcopal priest and attendee at the Glen.

You can’t imagine how heavy that card felt for being so light, inasmuch as it felt like a “going away” card disguised as a “get well” one.

And before I could even hand it to Gordon at his bedside in ICU, upon opening his eyes in the midst of dialysis he saw me and said: “I do apologize for not being there in class today.” As if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough, he then went on to ask how Barbara’s piece had gone that morning in workshop. He really did seem to care more about her script than his own two kidneys.

I read him the inscriptions on the card from his classmates, and after we prayed I left to let Reverend Schneider in. I left not knowing whether it was farewell or just goodbye.

You can call it sentimental or foolish of me to think there was something providential in the fact that, having failed to find proper anointing oil for Gordon through the hospital chaplaincy, Reverend Schneider returned from the gift shop with a bottle of baby oil.

But if not providential, then at least beautiful. Consecrated baby oil. How unspeakably fitting for a man on his deathbed. Whether it had anything to do with Gordon’s turnaround and bad news turned good again (he was dehydrated but stable), who knows?

More to the point, though, was his fellow students’ being there at the hospital on the last day of the conference. A group of them had taken it upon themselves to organize a van, and there they were at his bedside with hymns, prayers, and readings to supplement the green tray of his so-called “dinner.”

Having gone to The Glen a bit nervous about my first-time teaching gig there, I came away a student as much as anyone else, enriched to be so reminded afresh that the one subject always is, has been, and will be, love.