Graduate school at Vanderbilt was all English classes, all stories, all novels, all the time. It was paradise for any reader and even better for a writer wannabe like me who liked to spend most of the day making up stories in his head.
The best course I took at Vandy happened because I brazenly approached a professor I liked and admired, gave him a list of thirty novels I hadn’t read yet but was dying to try, and said, “Let’s read some cool books and talk about them.” He bought the idea.
So we picked fifteen novels, and that was the course. Imagine that. You read books that you really, really want to read, then you talk about them with another book lover.
I would read a novel or two a week and then we’d talk for an hour or more over Dixie beers in a nearby country-music gin mill. It was great, probably the best experience I ever had in school. In fact, it might be a model for a college English course just about every student would love. It could just as easily work for a class of two hundred and one professor. The students read books they’re aching to read; the professor talks about big-picture stuff.
The creative-writing course I took with Vanderbilt professor Walter Sullivan was the other highlight for me. Sullivan was a very conservative Southern gentleman. He could’ve had his own show on Fox News these days. I looked like a little hippie, because I was a little hippie. I had long hair, a beard, wore bell-bottoms and flip-flops.
But Walter Sullivan loved me—at least, he loved my short stories. He’d read one aloud every other class. The other students probably wanted to kill me, and I couldn’t blame them, but I was starting to gain some confidence in my writing for the first time. Sullivan said, “You have the gift. Don’t waste it.”
I probably did. Sorry, Walter Sullivan. You set me on a righteous road, I just didn’t take it where you wanted me to go. I sold out and wrote a bunch of thrillers.