Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Author Carrie La Seur leads a fiction writing workshop Tuesday at the Community Crisis Center.
A fiction writing workshop held Tuesday evening a couple of blocks from McKinley Elementary School got off to an enthusiastic start.
Local author Carrie La Seur was waiting at a conference table as those attending the session filed into the room. The first person to enter, a woman, exclaimed, “I heard ‘book seminar’ and I hopped to it!”
A moment later, another attendee turned to the woman he walked in with and said, “I don’t see no treats! You told me there were treats.”
After everyone sat down around the table, La Seur briefly introduced herself, saying, “I’m a lawyer in town and I write novels.”
“I need a lawyer,” the man sitting next to her said. He and several others around the table peppered La Seur with questions, wanting to know what kind of law she practiced, and whether she dealt with civil or criminal matters.
They were unusual questions, but this was an unusual workshop, held at the Community Crisis Center, a haven of last resort for people with mental illnesses and addictions.
La Seur said her involvement with the center happened simply enough. She saw in her church bulletin, at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in downtown Billings, that the Community Crisis Center was looking for volunteers to share their skills with its clients.
An environmental lawyer who recently published her first novel, “The Home Place,” La Seur thought maybe a writing seminar would be therapeutic.
By coincidence, the writing workshop took place on the same day a “Faith Engagement” event was held at another downtown church, First United Methodist.
Organized by Deirdre Loftus and Jessi Courier, AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers with the Billings Metro VISTA Project, the event brought together representatives of churches and agencies that provide services for the homeless and those deep in poverty.
Nearly 130 people turned out for the half-day event, which itself was a lead-in to the Community Innovations Summit scheduled for Wednesday, aimed at developing solutions for transiency and public intoxication on Billings streets.
There is a limited number of beds at the center. Once they are filled, people take shifts sitting on plastic chairs in a tiny vestibule before cycling outside so others can sit for a while. For an hour on Tuesday, La Seur gently helped a few of them think beyond their immediate needs.
She began by reading short descriptions of characters from three Annie Proulx short stories, then asked her students—11 Crisis Center clients and one employee of the center—which of the characters they identified with.
She also read a short passage on using the active rather than the passive voice in writing, from “The Elements of Style,” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Then she passed out pens and pieces of paper and asked those around the table to write a short paragraph, maybe just two or three sentences, about a character, real or imagined.
After seven or eight minutes of deep thought, light banter and considerable head-scratching, the students, or most of them, read what they had written. One man described his father’s good friend. Several others described their grandparents, including a grandmother who “drives a vehicle like Mario Andretti.”
After reading the short passage about his grandmother, the man added, “To be continued. I have a lot more to go.”
An elderly woman filled a legal-size piece of paper with writing but never looked at her words when she told what she said was a true story—of the rape and murder of a good friend as she was forced to watch.
“My life went up in flames,” she said at the end of the story.
Asked by La Seur if she wanted to read what she had written, the woman answered, “No. I’d rather tell it than read it.”
Another woman filled both sides of a legal-size piece of paper with the beginning of a story about a journey by characters named Tanus and Syrie to the Crystal Caves, a place “with natural crystals of many colors and treasures, monsters and mysteries.” There was also, in that short piece, a slaughter of orcs.
After she finished, she asked La Seur if she could have a whole legal pad.
“I want to start up a novel,” she said. “And this will be the first part of my book.”
La Seur also gave them a few book recommendations, which she said they could find at the Billings Public Library, then asked if they all wanted to do this again. She was met with an immediate, loud “Yes!”
They agreed to meet again in two or three weeks.
