GATEKEEPING" is a bit too grand a title for what I`ve been doing the last few months around the office of Books in Canada. But as 1 read through the 632 submissions to our student writing competition, the term, with all its overtones of phoney importance, popped right up into my mind: 1 was a veritable St. Peter of student writing, separating the worthy from the worthless! Such is the head-trip of the first reader, especially when that reader is a young writer who still remembers what it felt like to be graded himself, and now finds the shoe stuck strangely on the other foot. Yesterday the judged, today the judge. It`s been my job to read through the manuscripts as they arrived and sort them into three separate piles. Since the only poetry I`ve ever read was by assignment or accident, 1 limited my judging to fiction entries. In one stack, 1 put all the stories that 1 thought should be forwarded to the editors, who then picked some to be forwarded to the final judges. 1 made another pile in the dreaded event that the editors hated everything in the first pile. The rest were stuffed gently into a cardboard box under my desk marked simply, "No." After all that reading, sorting, and piling, what I`m left with is not any great literary prophecy, no stately generalization about the next generation of Canadian writers. Strangely, what I am left with is something like the excited buzz of a voyeur. All 1 can say is that there sure are a whole lot of interesting lives going on out there, lives being mulled over and rehashed in creative-writing courses across the country. Generalizations don`t Stick; what 1 encountered instead were 632 distinct and varied worlds, performances strange and silly, thrillers and romances, rants and raves. All those people, living their lives! A herb grower named Raven, a girl seduced by Jesus at a neighbourhood McDonald`s, a hobo monologue, a gay affair, a refugee`s flight, and any number of suicides - if their style was sometimes problematic, their content was consistently fascinating. Which isn`t to say that most of the entries were badly written. All the top 10 finalists, and many others, were to my mind excellent, well-told stories. The others? I`ve heard that some people liken the effect of bad writing to the sound of fingernails screeching down a blackboard. Suffice it to say that my "No" box could produce a screech so powerful it would break every pane of glass in downtown Toronto. Why, then, was this a fun job, one I`d do over again? Probably because it was just so damn interesting, getting all these 2,500-word glimpses of distant lives. Student writers have a characteristic fixation on autobiography, which is really both a curse and a strength. The challenge became to stand the telling long enough to hear the tale, since the latter was often so utterly original. It was a fun job for roughly the same reason that I`ve always found creative-writing classes to be the most exciting places on any university campus. I split my own university time in two - half of it in California and half in Montreal. And while the two systems couldn`t have been more different in most respects, one guiding principle applies equally well to both: the real action on any campus can be found in two places, the pub and the creative-writing department. For one thing, a creativewriting course is the one class where after the bell rings, you know something about what the hell all those people sitting there actually think about, a rare thing to have happen at university. And because of the way these classes always seem to be structured - a round-table workshop arrangement - open, disorderly, and often quite nasty discussions reign supreme over the usual from-behind-the-mighty-lectern set-up. There`s another reason why I liked creative-writing classes best, and why I also enjoyed reading through these stories. There`s a certain thrill to be had from reading the kind of raw, hyperbolic stuff that comes out of us beginning writers. The compelling thing about such writing, in comparison to more practised, experienced work, is that the editorial apparatus is still unformed, held at bay for a while by the sheer energy of a newfound voice. It shouts! If at first it makes you cringe, soon it may make you listen. There is also something wonderful about many of these stories simply because they are not created by professional writers. These are the voices of people who know this whole business is not their career or lifeblood, and so can`t be bothered by the rules of the game. They report on their unwriterly lives the best way they know how. Curtains part on rooms rarely entered by the seasoned storyteller. If you can stand the sometimes messy, often sentimental approach, you`ll get glimpses into lives both exotic and true. Once I`d learned to cringe and bear it, I was astounded, amazed, and then a little sad. All those stories, all those lives, in the end visible only in those 632 manilla envelopes, all but one packed into an overflowing "No" box and destined to be soon enough forgotten. But not by me, in any event.