ANAHEIM : Seniors Class Writes From Experiences

Barbara French’s creative writing class sat attentively as she picked up two tulips and asked the students to contemplate the petals, stems and leaves.

“How would you describe them?” French asked, slowly turning the flowers so all their sides were visible.

Sitting behind the dictionaries, thesauruses and copies of “Writers Market” on their desks, the students stared intently, framing the words.

After all, if you’ve been looking at flowers for only 55 years or so, maybe there is something you missed.

For three hours every Wednesday afternoon, about 25 senior citizens of ages 55 to 91 go the West Anaheim Senior Center for French’s creative-writing class.

Sponsored by the North Orange County Community College District, the class allows seniors to hone their skills and write their life stories, and in some cases helps them fulfill a lifelong dream of being published.

Besides flowers, French uses sleigh bells, toy clowns, teddy bears, antique spoons, even a bag of hats to inspire creative thoughts in her students.

“Many seniors are young and vital,” said French, an Anaheim resident who has been teaching the class for 18 months. “They have a lot to offer.”

French, a writer and retired radio actress, began listing renowned authors who weren’t published until their later years.

“P.M. Roget didn’t publish his thesaurus until he was 75, and then he spent the next 10 years revising it,” French said. “Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t write ‘Little House on the Prairie’ until she was 65. Many people just aren’t aware of what senior writers can do.”

On a recent Wednesday, French gave a quick lecture on plot development--probably the biggest weakness of most aspiring fiction writers.

It was then time for the students to read something they had written.

“This is what I come for,” said Dave Baughman, 71, a retired mechanical designer from Placentia and an aspiring children’s author. “We get an interesting variety of people, and I enjoy listening to their stories. We had one man who had been a miner in Alaska, and I could have listened to his stories all day.”

On this day, Yorba Linda resident Florence Bush, 91, read an essay she wrote in 1920 as a 17-year-old newlywed who was about to leave her New Jersey home for the Southern residence of her soldier husband. She spoke of how youth is blessed with the “bubble of ignorance”--anything and everything is possible and fear is remote.

Costa Mesa resident A Stephens Lowrie, 77, read a humorous tale about her childhood when “on matters sexual, I must have been the dumbest kid in the country.”

The retired social worker recalled that when she was 9, her mother joked to a pregnant friend they encountered: “What did you do? Swallow a watermelon seed?”

“Aha! thought I,” Lowrie read. “So that’s how it happens.”

The class roared with laughter as Lowrie read how weeks later she became convinced she was about to disgrace her family after she swallowed a watermelon seed at a picnic.

The students’ camaraderie comes in handy when they take turns reviewing one another’s work. Most of the writing is praised. But the students aren’t afraid to criticize.

The pans always start politely: “I really liked your story, but. . . .”