First Lesson.

Male attention.

I had always enjoyed writing. As a teenager, I wrote stories, music, scripts, and poetry. Usually just for myself unless it came to music. I’d had original scores performed by live ensembles and routinely made songs with my friends for our rock band. But in college, I wanted to continue all of it as a hobby. Refine it, even. Every type of writing. So one of the clubs I joined that first week was Fiction Writing Club. 

As part of the first meeting, we were shown what the end product of our work would be - if we were chosen. An end-of-semester publication. A collection of short stories in a small white book, this one with original art - also student made. It was a tree that took up most of the cover leaving just enough words for a title. Whoever’s story was chosen as the cover story could get original artwork like that added. Eager to see the quality I was up against, I flipped quickly to the winning story. 

We focus on a man wandering through the forest but a particular tree catches his eye. Upon closer inspection, he finds a hole in the tree that is the perfect height to insert his penis into. Upon doing just that he realizes that this is no ordinary tree. This tree was the best masturbatory experience the man had ever had. He becomes addicted to it until one day the tree was gone. He cries alone and unsatisfied. 

I can’t tell you how the story ultimately ended because I stopped reading there. But whether meant to be humorous or not, that helped me assess the value of male attention. They’d fuck a tree. And as I grew older it would be reinforced over and over again how correct of a metric that was. 

Fiction Writing Club: Immortalizing the no-so-quiet part in ink.