IN THE BEGINNING I was all hope and ego. What others had failed to do I would do. I would be generous, gracious, I would take their stories and make them better, I would be a great teacher and a great coach and a fabulous, unforgettable editor. I would not try to turn their stories into my own. I would let their own voices run down the wide unfolding paths of their imaginations. I would unleash their genius, give them hope, teach them to be professionals. Most of all I would not be jealous of them.
Alas, there was nothing to be jealous of. As the months rolled on into November and Thanksgiving came and we all caught colds from one another, as our heads filled up with fluid and presidential politics invaded literature and took our brains away, I began to lose hope that the teacher evaluations would say BEST TEACHER I EVER HAD. I LOVE HER. HIRE HER AGAIN. WE CANT STAND TO LET HER GO.
Miss Popularity in the creative writing staff of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Arkansas. Was that what I had been going for?
There had been bright spots. Getting paid was nice. Talking about the students with other professors was fun, especially at the beginning when I thought things were going to start happening, when I believed the talented ones were going to break loose and write stories that would win contests. (Two years later they did. I didn’t know how long it was going to take.)
There were other bright spots. If I have one thing to teach it is perseverance and hard work. I love to work. I love to write and I like to rewrite and I don’t care how long it takes to get something right. I like to sit down at a typewriter every morning and make something out of nothing. I can take it when half of what I write is not “any good,” i.e., publishable. I learn from writing. I feel good after I have been writing and I miss it like crazy when I don’t do it.
At least one of the students actually began to believe what I said about writing every day and getting the work done. At the end of the semester she turned in two long stories and showed another one to one of the other teachers. That was the only time I got jealous of anything they did. I wondered why she didn’t show them all to me.
Also, when I would look around the table during workshop I fancied I saw recognition of the intelligence of what I was trying to teach them in some of their faces. They were believing it even though they weren’t all ready to do it yet.
I preached to them that WRITING IS REWRITING. I kept writing that on the blackboard as a joke. “Wait a minute,” I would exclaim in the middle of some entirely different matter. “I just thought of something.” Then I would run excitedly to the blackboard and write WRITING IS REWRITING.
Another bright spot was a quiet young woman who turned in simple, hopeful stories that were easy to edit and who listened when I told her how to fix them. One of the stories was chosen to go to Intro, a publication of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which is a very nice coup for a young writer in one of the programs and sometimes even gains them notice from a publisher.
I held on to the hope that they were learning what I was teaching them whether it showed in their stories yet or not. Most of them had been in many writing classes before and knew all the mantras about point of view and so forth. I couldn’t help remembering that William Shakespeare and William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov and Cervantes and Turgenev never went to writing classes or sat in workshops letting fourteen other people pick their creations into pieces.
I tried to control the criticism and never let it go past the point where it might be helpful but I’m not sure I succeeded in that. After a few months I fell into the workshop mentality and stopped being careful enough with what I let happen.
Also, I began to worry about how I would grade them. Because they had all had so many writing classes they were very good critics and editors of each other’s stories. They could pick stories apart with the best of them. They could talk critically about what was wrong with the stories better than I could because I had tried my best for twenty years to never read criticism or think of writing in the abstract. My modus operandi was just to read the best and most beautiful writing I could find and never read a line of bad writing if I could help it.
But, as I said, I was getting paid so I read their stories with the best attention I could give them.
At the very end of the semester we had a visiting writer. He was not a man whose writing I admired or could even force myself to read so I was dreading having to drive him around for four days. I have always been very careful not to have writer friends unless they are people whose work I really admire. I had asked Larry McMurtry to be our guest but he said he no longer gave advice to people. Then I asked a writer who I thought was a good technician if not a great writer but he didn’t want to do the huge amount of work required by the gig. For seven thousand dollars we needed someone to come to town, stay four days and have individual meetings with each of fifteen writers, plus give a public reading and attend my workshop. That’s a lot of work for seven thousand dollars in today’s creative writing gig market and you get what you pay for as my father knew.
I spent a sleepless night the night before our visiting writer arrived trying to get myself up for entertaining him. I told myself his job was to talk to the students and give them a different perspective on their writings and I should be glad to have the help. I told myself that I would be nice to him and try to remember how weird it is to be in his position. I have been in that position although no amount of money would ever tempt me to read student papers back then.
I tried not to resent the fact that besides being a writer whose work I thought was boring he was the new editor of an anthology and had removed one of my short stories from the new edition. Plus he had published his own story in the book so that was another thing I resented.
RESENTED. Had one semester of teaching creative writing turned me into a RESENTER. Jesus Christ, I muttered. Let me out of here.
The visiting writer arrived. He was a sweet, kind, ex-alcoholic who is part of the large group of teacher-writers who run the writing programs around the United States and invite each other to lecture and seem to believe in what they are doing and work hard to do it well. He had been invited by another faculty member after I couldn’t find anyone I admired to accept the job. I should have been grateful that I had anyone to do the work but I kept thinking about the terrible writers who were brought in when I was a student and how cynical it made me when my professors pretended to admire their work. On top of resentment I was getting cynical. No wonder people stop writing when they start teaching, I decided, which dug my resentment grave deeper.
My visitor had been on the wagon for a year. As soon as he arrived he fell off the wagon and started getting drunk every night with an emeritus professor he knew from his past. He met with the students, drank with some of them at lunch and with many of them at night, gave an embarrassing reading, was too hung over to stay at my workshop and told all the students they were wonderful writers.
They loved him. I gave him his check for seven thousand dollars and put him on the plane back to California. So it goes.
The best thing about his visit was knowing I didn’t have to have a visiting professor again for several years. I knew one thing for sure. Whoever I invite will be a sober person who would not go out and drink with my students. I am the Carrie Nation of the creative writing program and I intend to stay that way.
Meanwhile, onward. I still believe that I am doing more good than harm.
At least three of the students I had that fall are well on their way to careers as writers. Two of them have a good agent I found for them. One of them won the Playboy College Fiction Contest. Another sold two stories at once to the Atlantic Monthly. The third has sold seven pieces of creative nonfiction and has an assignment from Outside magazine for an eighth.
Plus, several of my nonfiction students are selling pieces to good magazines.
It is all taking longer than I thought it would take but it is beginning to happen. I am looking forward to next fall. Who knows what will happen next. This is turning out to be a very exciting thing to do. I think I’m hooked although I still wouldn’t do it for free.