ON THE FIRST DAY of a weeklong creative writing workshop, I sit across from a group of serious-minded first-time novelists, people who have come to me, their teacher, to make their books better. I’ve just been going over the schedule, a series of craft talks, workshops, and one-on-one conferences. “Are there any questions?” I ask.
A hand goes up. It’s the hand I’ve been dreading.
“Yes, Mom?”
Anyone who’s ever taken a creative writing class knows how scary it is to show your work to a group of strangers. But what they may not know is how fragile the instructor can sometimes feel, too. Teaching writing seems so incredibly important to me that I can never completely overcome the suspicion that I’m slightly ridiculous, pretending to know something about the art of Faulkner and Proust.
And then add to the mix my mother, leaning forward in the seat in front of me, a determined and earnest expression on her face.
I look around at the other class members, all of whom are now gazing at me with a new sort of bemusement. “In the interest of full disclosure,” I say, “Frances is my mother.”
“I thought I saw a resemblance,” says the woman to my left.
“It’s the eyes,” says another student. “You both look so serious.”
“Robert’s always favored my side,” says my mother, looking pleased.
“Does this mean we have to go easy on her manuscript?” asks a guy in the corner, grinning.
“That’s exactly what it means,” I say—joking, and sort of not joking at the same time. I worry that my credibility is already draining away.
“Nonsense,” says my mother, turning in her seat to face the others, barely suppressing a smile. “What good would that do me? I’m a writing student—just one who happened to give birth to the teacher.”
MY MOTHER BEGAN WRITING after my father died: little fragments of things, a dream in which he spoke to her, an anecdote from their forty-year marriage. She wanted to recapture what was gone, to make him present again—or perhaps to acknowledge the strange fact that he was still present, even though he was nowhere to be seen. She would read these pieces to me when she came to visit in North Carolina, and I would listen with the bittersweet ache of recognition, hearing my father’s voice, recognizing his quirks and mannerisms. My mother turned out to be good with words, an inspired sort of gossip, the kind who leans forward to lower her voice. “Well,” she would begin, love, sorrow, amusement, and revenge mixing together.
I was happy that she had found writing, and yet a part of me was secretly annoyed, too. A small, childish voice inside of me said that writing was my thing, not hers. I had started writing twenty years earlier because I couldn’t get a word in edgewise at home—about anything.
So, in some ways, I wanted her to go away and leave this most important part of me alone, even as I told her that my wife, Karen, and I would be teaching at a summer writing conference in Iowa that year, and that she should drive out with us and the kids and take some workshops. Even as I sent her the catalog. Even as I called her up to remind her about the registration date.
“I see you’re teaching a novel workshop,” she said. “It looks like just the thing I need.”
I felt a surge of panic. “Wait, you can’t take my class.”
“Why not?”
I had imagined meeting for dinner at the end of a long day of workshops—separate workshops.
“Why not take the class on dialogue?” I asked. “You’ve always wanted to improve your dialogue.”
“No, I don’t like the guy’s picture.” She meant the teacher’s faculty photo, which looked perfectly pleasant. “Besides, I need help getting started on my novel.”
“What novel?”
“The one I’m starting.”
“But, Mom,” I said—and then realized that I didn’t want to argue, because I wanted her with us. My kids were too young to remember their grandfather, and I wanted them to know their grandmother, which wasn’t easy given that we lived seven hundred miles apart. She was seventy-five, and the only parent I had left. “Okay, sign up,” I said.
AS THE WEEK PROGRESSED, the other students seemed quite amused by the situation, and not at all put off. They were a diverse group, including a woman from Belize who made her living as a traditional Mayan shaman, and a man who did something vaguely cloak-and-dagger in “computer security.” From the standpoints of ancient herbal healing and cyber spying, what was so strange about a writing teacher who traveled with his mother in his class?
It helped that my mother was such a good student, listening carefully and making thoughtful comments. She didn’t ask for special attention, or criticize my teaching, or otherwise try to diminish my authority. It all went beautifully, in fact, till I tried to talk her out of signing up for her student-teacher conference at the end of the week. “You’re not like the others,” I told her one night, after dinner. “If you have a question, you can ask me any time.”
She drew herself up. “I paid my tuition just like everyone else, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then fair is fair.”
We met the next afternoon in the café that I had been using as a makeshift office. She sat down and took out her pad and pen. “So what do you think of my novel?” she asked, looking at me intently.
My mother’s novel was an odd reading experience for me, and not just because it contained sex scenes. It was astonishingly well written, with a wonderful voice full of the verbal energy she brings to even the most ordinary conversation. But the main character was clearly an idealized version of herself, and whereas her previous pieces had been about recapturing the past with my father, this one seemed to experiment with an alternative life as a bohemian, and decidedly single, artist—a life that didn’t include a husband or children.
My first impulse was to tell her that I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt, given that she had effectively erased our whole family from the face of the earth just so that her imaginative alter ego could date a series of charismatic and very pretentious painters. But my next impulse was to stop and think.
It’s always been a matter of faith for me that good writing begins with the ability to say what you want without worrying how others might react. Nothing worthwhile happens in writing without that basic expressive freedom. I’d worked many years to achieve that imaginative openness for myself, however tentative and fragile it still often felt. Did I want to refuse it to my mother?
“Yes, the novel,” I said, stalling for time as the writing teacher and the son fought it out inside of me.
“You don’t like it, do you?” she asked.
I looked at her across the little table, as she sat very straight and still, awaiting her writing teacher’s verdict. Suddenly, I could see the emotional logic driving her novel: if she hadn’t married my father, she wouldn’t have had to suffer the pain of losing him. And I could understand how imagining that pain away might look like an attractive option right now.
“I do like it,” I said to her. “I think it’s got great potential.”
“Really? You think it’s good?”
“You have a terrific voice, but what you need now are more scenes. The more you get your main character talking and doing things in scene, instead of explaining and describing in exposition, the more complex and interesting she’s going to get. She’ll start to grow in ways you can’t plan or control.”
I hadn’t known I had advice to offer when I began talking, but there it was, almost in spite of my own intentions. And my mother seemed to understand it. She took some notes with a satisfied air, as if she could see her way forward.
We started the two-day drive back to North Carolina early the next morning. The car was crowded, and the kids were watching a movie on the DVD player, but my mother crouched over her notebook in her lap, writing with great determination. “Looks like you’re on a streak,” I said to her.
“It’s her,” she said, meaning her novel’s protagonist, the freewheeling painter. “She’s just so interested in everything. She never gives up.”