September 2
Second meeting of my undergraduate fiction workshop. A female student is writing horror stories about werewolves that contain so much violence and verbal abuse I can hardly bear to read them. She insists this is all she wants to write and is going to keep on writing it so I called her this morning and told her I thought it would be a good idea for her to drop my class and take one taught by a man we have here this semester who publishes “genre” fiction. That’s an academic code name for writing that doesn’t aspire to be literature and makes no claim to beauty. This may be a class thing.
I am learning. As soon as I finished talking to the student I called the chairwoman of the English department and told her I was sending the woman to her to see if her schedule could be changed. The chairwoman was marvelously understanding.
This afternoon I have to meet with the young woman and tell her again that the only way she can stay in my class is to write two more stories that are not horror or fantasy stories and which do not contain gratuitous violence. I am treading on eggs here, fragile egos. I want to help the young woman but I don’t think she is going to let me help her. I will protect myself in this matter and protect the integrity of the class.
“You should call this class teaching writing literature then,” she told me when we had our meeting.
“I took that for granted,’ I answered. “I assumed anyone would know the Department of English was teaching literature.”
What a tangled skein. She dropped the class and I am glad she did. I am learning as I go along. But it isn’t easy. I took her down the hall and introduced her to the “genre” writing teacher and she agreed to take his class. But she didn’t thank me and she didn’t smile. You can’t please everyone, I knew when I was young, but had forgotten in the protected world I lived in until I started teaching. I had to deal with reviewers when I was publishing books but at least I didn’t have to have them scowling at me in person in the halls.
September 9
I went over to the university yesterday to pick up the New York Times and stopped at my office to leave off some papers. On the sidewalk outside the building I ran into the young woman who is writing about werewolves. She was trying not to speak to me but I said hello twice and asked her how the new class was coming along. “I haven’t met it yet,” she said, and swept by me. I still maintain that it is not my job to read about werewolves killing their young. Then why this strange haunting guilt? I cannot be a psychiatrist to troubled students. It does not fit my personality and disrupts the work I want to do with the other students in the class.
NOTE: We need different books at different times in our lives. When we are young we need poetry and fiction to tell us how to live our lives. Later, we need information so we can be informed members of our culture. If our lives are peaceful we have time to learn anthropology and biology and geology and political science, and all the things we are taught when we are too young and confused emotionally to understand what we are being offered.
As we get older we become wiser, I hope, or at least we must try to be wise.
SEPTEMBER 2003