October 2
Things are settling down in my undergraduate fiction workshop. These are the best students in the English department, honors students, creative writing majors, powerful, self-assured, well read, smart. I’m lucky to get to teach them.
Here’s what’s happening. Remember I told you there were seventeen students in the class. That has shrunk to fifteen, which is about perfect. The tall, very beautiful, blond girl had her heart broken two weeks ago. Her boyfriend of two years threw her over to drink with the Pi Kappa Alphas. She mourned for a week, missed classes, then started going out for coffee and crying on the shoulder of the strongest and most mature of my male students. I had him in fiction readings class last semester and his maturity and usefulness in the class never wavered. Also, he’s a good, smart writer and critic. He is not classically handsome but has the kind of quiet male power a girl can lean on. I couldn’t have imagined a better man for her at this point. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she has told me several times. “We’re just studying together.”
Been there, done that, I should have answered, but I am learning to keep my mouth shut when the students confide in me.
I suppose she is going to break his heart before the semester is over because she really is stunningly beautiful. My wild, creative, six-foot, three-inch writer from the Delta is also hanging out with them so I suppose he’s in love with her too. She is a quiet, dignified girl. I think she will help me keep this second young man in line. He is so smart, so imaginative, so energetic it is hard to get him to sit still. He lives at such a fast pace that he always forgets to register for the next semester’s classes. This is the second semester that he has come to me at the last minute and begged to be allowed into classes that were already full. I can’t resist him. He is straight out of my gene pool. Maybe if I help civilize him someone will be doing the same thing for some of my progeny somewhere in the world. He thinks I am crazy about him but it’s his mother down in the Delta with whom I feel the deep connection.
He is so talented, such a quick study, so interested in so many things. I let him into a graduate class last year and he paid me back by learning to write. Now he is the best and most generous critic in the seminar.
He’s writing a novel based on On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Except my student’s book is funny and light-hearted and not self-destructive. The other male students say “this reminds me of On the Road” and both they and the student author take this as a huge compliment to the manuscript.
I stopped class when we were editing it the other day to declare, “I hate drugs and alcohol and cigarettes and unlawful behavior. I am the Carrie Nation of this writing program. Why would an intelligent person want to do something that makes them dumb.” Then I gave them a five-minute sermon about sugar addictions and alcoholism and wasted lives.
The young women were all shaking their heads in agreement. I couldn’t read the young men’s faces. The ones who agreed with me wouldn’t dare admit it to the other men.
“Au contraire!” yelled my gorgeous young man from the Delta. “Strongly disagree.”
“I’m calling your mother,” I told him. It is a threat I’ve been giving him for two semesters. I think he wonders if I mean it. I would call her if I didn’t think that he was shaping up under the force of his ambition and dreams of glory.
He has captured my imagination. Also, his generous editing of their work has made him popular with everyone in the class. No one minds him showing off or coming roaring into class talking about infinity and saying, WHAT IS REAL AND HOW DO WE KNOW IT?? WHERE ARE WE, AND WHAT ARE WE DOING INSIDE A BUILDING ON A DAY AS BEAUTIFUL AS TODAY?
My most prolific student (shall we call him Matthew) is also turning into an ace line editor. He has learned the power of compression in writing. He believes, as I did when I was writing at my finest, that every word must earn its way. He sits on my left, very near to me, and has sort of declared himself a polished, real writer in the midst of neophytes. He is not as talented as some of the other students but he is making up for it with acquired skills in the trade. I didn’t teach him these editing skills. He picked them up in creative writing I and II from my colleague Molly Giles and one of our best graduate students. This young man means a lot to me. He tells me that what we are doing in the writing program works where there is fertile ground. Even though I need the job right now I wouldn’t keep on doing it if I thought it was a scam. There have been plenty of times when I thought the whole writing program network around the United States was an elaborate scam to give easy work to unsuccessful writers. Even if that were true, on a scale of one to ten it is about a five for usefulness to the culture.
This young man makes me believe it is at least a seven or an eight.
Update, April
The prolific, hardworking student I called Matthew just won the departmental Fiction Award for Undergraduates. The beautiful girl is going to be a graduate student in the English department. The young man from Bulgaria is in my graduate fiction workshop and is writing wonderful magical stories that dazzle the graduate students. His name is Miro Penkov. He says he cannot write in Bulgaria because there are four fabulous writers there already and no one else can get published. We are telling him he must not believe that is true but we are glad to have him here nonetheless. He has a wonderful scientific mind and is very helpful to other students when they touch on scientific subjects. Plus, he is a perfect student, turning in work on time with no typographical or spelling errors. My native English writers can learn much from Miro.
OCTOBER 2003, APRIL 2004