The Joy Of Writing Class

Barbara Gonzales holds her class at her home in Makati, a penthouse unit with a lanai, a living room full of books and art, a really nice couch made of wood with white cushion, and soft lighting. She ushers me in, as I make my Tuesday appointment since I had to miss the September 15 start of her class.

She looks lovely at her age, and after a stroke, her life alone, teaching, painting, working at home, is enviable. I notice her clear skin, with very few lines, and she still can be sexy, with her top exposing a little of her back. She must have been really hot when she was younger. As we say to Lester, " may asim pa".
She asked me why I am taking the class, and as I was retelling the story to Xtin after, Barbara instantly remarked that ," You speak in English and Filipino noh?...like most Filipinos.." She was just pointing out that in her class she wants us to speak in one language as part of the training (although she herself would speak in Taglish, with an Assumptionista tone pa). Oh well.

I love her dining table, which is a long mahogany table, enough to seat 12. We sat there for over an hour, mostly her giving an introduction about herself and her class, which is essentially based on the book Writing The Natural Way (guys if you can find this book, please buy for me). She teaches the method she learned from this book which is guiding our brain to use the right side and blocking the left side which tends to prevent our part of the brain from evoking thoughts, feelings, emotions, associations. We start lesson 1 which is clustering. Instead of outlining, which is how I would do a technical report, a business plan or most business correspondence, clustering would involve encircling the focus word and connecting and encircling words that would come out of our thoughts as we let the right brain focus on the word. We continue to write until we feel the shift, when we have explored all possible associations with the word, and then we are ready to write.

She asked me for a word. I said, " Art?". Then she starts her clustering on the whiteboard across the table, where I can see her dirty kitchen, and then she stops. Then she writes on the left side of the board. Magic!

She then gives me a word, and I was asked to write about rain (which is amongst my many repetitive subjects in this blog). She had 2 comments. I had one wrong grammar (told you about this weakness), and then she said it was good.

"The grey skies and the cold wind warn me that the rain is coming. The change in atmosphere reminds me that summer is over , yet it brings back days of fun-filled youth. The rain is here, and it brings back memories, turning me nostalgic as I listen to the sound of the raindrops touching the ground. The soft billowing wind accompanying the rain makes me remember the past. Was it all good?"

The assignment is to write about someone who has had a tremendous impact in my life using a modeling approach- likening the tone, format, ending to a work by a famous American poet Peter Meinke.