Set in a graduate art program, Anne Elliot's "Three Lessons in Firesurfing" is narrated by Sara, a first year art student who's afraid she doesn't fit in and that her work isn't up to the standards of the other students and the instructors.  She's right, I think, on both counts, one because of the other-- She doesn't fit in because her work isn't good, or at least it isn't yet.  In fact, I think it's fair that what she's doing at the beginning of the story isn't yet art, although it does start to become art by the end.  Early on, Sara first describes her art like this:

I've been getting into felt lately.  It's such a magic process.  Just a little soapy water and manipulation and the wool shrinks and thickens.  I've discovered it hardens and dries nicely around objects, which is my main experiment now.  I made a good sized felt bowl, then filled it with felt objects I brought in fron home.  Important objects, to me, like an old sketch journal, or a kitchen timer my mother gave me, or a framed photograph.  I shroud each object in the natural-colored wool, then submerge them in a soapy bath, one by one, and let the materials take over.

Sara's obsessed with both the known quantities of personal items and in the covering up of what is personal.  Later, as she rediscovers these objects, she finds them changed by her actions, which has made them both functionally useless and artistically alive at the same time.  By being hidden and then uncovered, they become something else completely, requiring new modes of thinking about them.  This change is also reflected nicely in the ensemble of characters that inhabit the story.

Part of almost all coming-of-age stories is the recognition that the other characters are just as confused and scared as the narrator, and that by recognizing this quality in others the narrator can learn to deal with it in herself.  Sara first realizes this about Steve, the serious "teacher's pet", as she watches him gleefully play dressup in a government surplus store when the others aren't looking, and then again when her friend Karla becomes angry at yet another person assuming she's a lesbian, an assumption the narrator admits to sharing.  Neither student is as simple as he or she seems to Sara, and realizing this helps Karla discover that she might not be that simple either.  Her artistic discoveries push the story along, but it's her personal ones that give the story its weight and its surprisingly satisfactory ending.

Read Anne Elliot's "Three Lessons in Firesurfing" in Hobart #6.

Bonus materials at the Hobart Website: "Aquaria"