Wilson 207 12 "My Summer in Vulcan" by Rita Mae Reese 229 Appendix: "Open Arms" by Robert Olen Butler 253 INTRODUCTION Sometime in the early 1980s, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes came to Florida State University to conduct a series of workshops. I had already been teaching writing for a decade and had published a book on Writing Fiction, and I was disconcerted, not to say traumatized, by her methods. She had us do calisthenics, pair up and draw portraits of each other, imagine the insides of our stomachs and set play scenes there. At the end of the last session, I told her, "I've spent twenty years understanding my process, and you're asking me to change it entirely." Fornes bounced her palms at the air. "You must always keep changing your process!" she declared. "Because there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't." I have taken her advice to heart and have tried to keep changing—expanding, twisting, tricking—my writing process, but the truth is that only two teachers have radically changed it for me.
