15 minutes and a byline

Not sure if I mentioned that a book came out with one of my pieces of writing in it. The book is a compilation of writing from a Uni subject I took in 2000. The lecturers of the subject take students' work, give them to other students doing an editing subject and a book is the end result. While it won't be a bestseller, they're hoping it'll be picked up as a text in some high schools. Anyway, this morning they organised a few of us students to meet with a journo from the Messenger (local free paper full of Real Estate ads + stories on what happened at the latest council meeting) to chat about the recent launch of the book. We did a photo shoot first, which involved five of us (two lecturers, 3 ex-students) sitting in a row pretending to be engrossed in a discussion pertaining to the book in question. The others had copies of the book as props. I had a cup of coffee (how relaxed and casual I shall look). Later we sat down and the journo asked us questions like, "Is it a bit of a thrill to see your name on the cover of a book". And I sort of felt obliged to take this guy's leading question and say "uuh, yeah". (I'll no doubt be quoted as saying 'Yeah, it's a bit of a thrill to see my name on the cover'.) That was probably the most patronising question he asked, thankfully. He didn't really seem that experienced and I could see how the questions he asked would fit together oh-so-nicely for the story he would later write. So many leading questions, so he could write the story he'd already written in his head, filling in the blanks with our completely spontaneous quotes. The interesting thing though, was hearing the lecturers and one of the students talk about the project. They pulled out all the clichés to do with creative writing. They talked about 'creating a dialogue with the subject' and 'ethnographic observations,' which are things I understand and can appreciate but are a bit esoteric. At one point, one of the other ex-students said something about a 'semiotic framework' and I could just see the journo's eyes glaze over. I just couldn't help notice the irony of the fact that we were all supposedly experts in the field of communication and here we were using this baffling and exclusing academic language. And I'm not going to bother plugging the book because I'm not really excited by the bit of my writing that's in there. Also because I won't get a cent from it anyway.