We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  It would take us only a few more days to learn that Simone always sat in the same seat in the rafters of the auditorium where we met for lectures and readings, the seat closest to the stage but farthest away from the students, as if she were afraid we might contaminate her, though she would have scoffed at the suggestion. Perched there, she loomed over the student body like some sort of modern, intellectual king. We also quickly learned that she was the biggest offender of the mmm, aah response to points that a speaker made, a verbal head nod, and an MFA affect we were almost all guilty of, a sin akin to laughing harder when you’re watching something funny with someone else than you would if you were watching alone. When she did it, it was half the noise you made when you were eating something delicious and half sex noise, which, given those cheekbones, wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Her X-rated ohs and aahs sounded even louder from where she sat. It was the first seat the speaker would notice when they looked up after finishing their lecture or their reading, so she was often the first person called on when it came time for the Q&A part of each session, and she always had a question—the sort of question it was impossible to answer, but that sounded smart when you asked it.

  We would learn all this soon enough, but that first dinner was the first time we had all been in a room with her, and it felt a little like a dinner held in her honor, not least because she’d chosen a seat at the head of the table at the very center of the room.

  * * *

  By the middle of the next afternoon, most of us first-years were finally starting to relax a little. We knew where our classes were, and we could make our way back to our dorm rooms without the hand-drawn maps that had been distributed to us at check-in, even in the dark, even after a few glasses of wine at the student center. We knew the names and faces of most of the people in our workshop and the people in our class, and we had the day and time that our own stories would be workshopped committed to memory. Those of us whose stories were scheduled for the end of the week worried less than we had upon arriving on campus, when our workshop felt like it could happen at any minute and so felt like it was happening at every minute, and those scheduled to go in the next day or two felt grateful to be getting it over with.

  We’re not sure if Penny’s email—which came at 12:13 that afternoon, when most of us were shoveling a second plate of caramelized Brussels sprouts into our mouths—was annoying because it arrived just when we thought we had a grasp on all the responsibilities we were going to have to manage, and it added to that list, or if it was because she sent it to us on such a nice day. It was one of those days of long shadows so perfect it looked like the sky had been painted. The kind of day so bright that even as the hours collected toward dinner, you didn’t really believe night would fall until it was all around you, already fallen. Most of us read the email in the hour window between lunch and the two o’clock craft lecture, checking only to make sure there was no crucial news in our in-boxes, and eager to get outside to the front lawn for the hour before we had to start walking toward the auditorium. Maybe it was just that she had used an exclamation point in the subject line, which most of us considered ourselves too serious to ever do.

  From: Penny Stanley

  To: First-Years

  Subject: Ideas!

  Hi guys,

  I hope you’ve all been enjoying these first few days as much as I have been. The one thing all the third- and fourth-years seem to agree on is that these residencies fly by, and I for one am trying to savor every second! The other thing that has really stuck with me is that we’re the smallest class Fielding has seen in a few years, and not for lack of applications. They’ve maintained their selective status by only admitting students whose work reflects a certain caliber, regardless of the number of applicants they receive. I think our size presents a real opportunity both to make ourselves stand out, and to become a really tight unit, in a lot of different senses of the word. I don’t know about you guys, but having a group of people to be accountable to was a big part of why I decided to come here. What if we got together tomorrow after workshop for just a few minutes, to talk about some of the things we might do to make the most of our next four terms here, and each other? Say noon, at the cluster of Adirondack chairs just before The End of the World? I have some ideas. . . .

  Yours,

  PS

  We could all agree, after reading the email, that the ellipsis at the end was the least enticing promise of something to come in the history of ellipses, and that even though it had taken only thirty seconds to read, it made the window of time we had until the afternoon lecture feel dramatically smaller. And there were very few of us who would’ve listed accountability to our classmates as a reason we had borrowed or emptied our savings accounts of the money we had to pay for the program. But the heights to which we rolled our eyes at the meeting she was proposing varied across our group, because it was made up of both joiners and drifters. Or maybe we were all a little of both—we all considered ourselves writers, the most solitary calling there ever was, but none of us was ready to go completely off map, with just a notebook and a story idea and a point of view, in true Cormac McCarthy or Jack Kerouac style, because there we all were, getting ready to gather at a preappointed time and place. We were reading other people’s twenty-page writing samples while Ernest Hemingway had been hunting elephants. It was the uncomfortable-making tension, many of us would realize across Penny’s committee meetings, at the center of a formal degree in creative writing.

  MFA programs have trained authors who went on to create some of the past century’s greatest novels, from Infinite Jest to Fates and Furies. We liked to think it was the programs’ deadlines and rewriting assignments that bred in these writers the discipline and stamina it would take them to achieve what they did, to say nothing of the contacts that would get their first, fledgling works into the hands that would shape them into what they became. These programs, we had to believe, had instilled in countless famous writers the confidence and determination it takes to get from a half-formed idea to a standing-room-only crowd at a book launch. But the very idea of these programs ignores the fundamental, inescapable fact that writing always has been and always will be a lonely pursuit, most often engaged in in dimly lit rooms. True writers are best pinpointed from space, little glowing orbs of desk light under which the typing of keys is the only sound against the hum of empty night or very early morning.

  Our practical fathers had hinted at this when asking us to explain what, exactly, the point of the program was when we called to tell them we had been accepted. To boost our résumés? To get published? We thought their questions made them shortsighted, our logic-loving fathers who knew how to fix things and how things worked, who had gone to trade schools for jobs that didn’t have business cards, and fancy colleges and law schools for jobs that did. We thought we knew things they couldn’t understand but the truth was, of all the things we disagreed with them about—the best candidate in the next election; the names it was acceptable to give a child—this was one issue on which we had to concede, although maybe not to them, that they had a point.

  English majors and book nerds and almost everyone in the program knew that a piece of literature can be the perfect antidote to loneliness, but the truth is that creating that antidote often makes the writer more vulnerable to the thing it’s fighting. Some writers—the good ones—accept their lot, and the mood swings and the depression, the frustration and the isolation and the strain on their most intimate relationships that creating something of any substance will almost always entail. Many find their way through this forest using creative writing programs like ours. But these programs are also filled with people who want the validation that comes with telling people they’re pursuing their MFA, as if that alone ever made anyone a real writer. They do it for the transcript and the sweatshirt and the cocktail party conversation. Getting an MFA is part luxury and part necessity and we were all hoping our own experience would be heavier on the latte
r than the former, for both our practical fathers’ sakes and the sake of the stories we wanted to tell.

  If she was being honest, Jenny Ritter, whose daughters were two and five that June, knew that she would’ve been happy to pursue an advanced degree in balloon animal making if it guaranteed her a few days away from her family twice a year, but most master’s programs were full-time commitments. Though he had always saved some of his weekly allowance for his school’s annual book fair as a child, and had always gotten his easiest As in English, Patrick Stanbury knew, on some level, that he had started looking up MFA programs online because the completion of one would hold the perfect weight to balance his science degree.

  Penny’s email made Jenny and Patrick and all the rest of us uncomfortable, not only because of the punctuation, and the time obligation, but because it reinforced the possibility that we were here to pledge allegiance to the tribe of aspirants, rather than to make something.

  We were all still polite with one another at that point, though, so outside of Leslie writing back “Unsubscribe” to everyone and then, two minutes later, “JK I’ll obviously be there but I’m not missing lunch, is it just me or are you guys ALWAYS HUNGRY here?” to which nobody replied, we all simply added the time and place Penny had suggested to the schedules that we had assumed, until we’d gotton her email, were final.

  * * *

  Jude Morgan’s comments in the workshop just before Penny’s meeting the next day surely helped Leslie and Hannah’s friendship evolve past their first, terse workshop exchange at the speed that it did. Like fights between Red Sox and Yankees fans in sports bars, and tattoos in Saturday morning yoga classes in Austin, the Jude Morgans of the world are an inevitable fixture in writing workshops across the country. Some workshops are friendlier than others, and some have more rigorous course loads or longer reading lists, and they range in size, but there’s always that one guy. Who had a lot of sisters where a brother or two might’ve served him better. Who thought the sun rose to hear his writing. Who loved to cite Nabokov or David Foster Wallace when trashing perfectly fine stories, stories that bore no obvious similarities to the works he compared them to, and were also better than his own. It quickly became clear that his knowledge of these authors came from their Wikipedia pages or excerpts from their biographies or an undergrad lecture rather than anything the men themselves had written (and they were always men). The Jude Morgans of the world might have read the novels themselves in high school or college, and even underlined a paragraph or passage that touched something in him that his video games and sports huddles and garage band practices had not, but he cited them now out of laziness or hubris rather than nostalgia or love. It never occurred to him that these citations, and the points they were in support of, might offend anybody, because this type of boy is used to being adored.

  This guy’s work was almost always in the distant third person, and he used uncomfortable synonyms for his male protagonists’ genitals, which almost always made their way into his stories. And while his protagonists were often kinder or nobler or did more interesting work than he did, it was clear that the writer was mostly just talking about himself. He almost always started writing later in life than everyone else had, and went around telling people that fact like it was a fancy alma mater, like it meant that writing was a calling that you had to listen to eventually, no matter how many years you tried to ignore it, as if the rest of us didn’t know by now that it almost never was. It was really just hard work and, like so many other things in life, wanting it more than the next person. And this guy couldn’t want it, because he assumed he already had it.

  While there might be a temptation to attach a privileged-white-boy bias against this workshop menace, and he usually is white, and almost always male, all the other white boys in the workshop hated him, too. Even the professors stepped around his annoying habits, never criticizing his work to the extent they did the others’, not wanting to hear a dissertation on which portions of the canon proved wrong whatever helpful suggestions the professor had for him. But of course this restraint encouraged the problem behavior.

  The only way to victor over this particular breed of workshop menace is to outlast him. To be as blatantly terrible as him. To send out empty, meaningless gusts of wind to meet his own. Filling this role was deterred by the amount of time and effort it would take to engage.

  But Leslie didn’t have much else to do. At least not yet, anyway.

  It wasn’t just a time issue. Though she could tell you every word of every album that the Strokes had ever written, picked up references to every movie from Citizen Kane to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and had read social satires from every century of America’s existence, Leslie was totally oblivious when it came to the predictable and time-honored types that human beings fall into, and the empty gestures and routines they perform every day. She had never said or done anything she didn’t feel or believe completely, and couldn’t fathom that anyone else might. Decorum was not a word she spoke in any of her four languages. When skinny girls made references to their bulging thighs she asked them how much they weighed and how tall they were instead of dismissing their claim out of hand, not knowing it was just something insecure people who needed a compliment said. It wasn’t difficult for us to imagine that when her teachers in junior high and high school pleaded a complete lack of understanding as to why one student would slander another so viciously or spread a malicious bit of news, true or false, Leslie would have politely raised her hand to explain that it was so that other people would like them more, never thinking for a second that even teachers had once wanted to be liked more, and had to plant themselves firmly on the slippery slope between mean girl and Pollyanna. So while the rest of us telegraphed rolling eyes to one another without actually looking skyward whenever Jude Morgan spoke, Leslie responded to each of his claims and questions and suggestions as if any sane person had said them, instead of taking his idiocy for granted and looking politely away.

  She might simply have continued to engage him on the low, ambient level she had during their first two workshops, if Jude hadn’t reacted to Hannah’s story the way he did during the third.

  To be fair to Leslie, while no one liked the story as much as she did, we all certainly liked it more than Jude did. We respected it. It was narrated by a nameless young woman who works at the local grocery store in the small town she returned home to after graduating from college. She gives nightly dispatches from the graveyard shift. She’s generally miserable, but there was a magical passage at the end about all the dented cans and broken eggs employees got to take home for free, and how determined she was to use every last broken egg and not let a single one go to waste. It was imperfect, yes, but it had heart without sentimentality. The language was clean, and the voice didn’t try too hard to seduce or impress you, but it did. The protagonist’s pain at the recent death of her mother was quiet and fierce, and filled the pages as mightily as any story line could without a single darling or exclamation point. And you had to stop whatever you were doing when you got to the final line.

  It was short, and it was called “Broken Eggs.”

  As usual, Hannah was asked to read a paragraph of her choosing before the workshop conversation began about the strengths of her story, and the ways it might be strengthened further (we were not to call them weaknesses). There were a good twenty minutes between the moment Hannah finished reading the final paragraph and the moment Jude started talking. During that time there was a five-minute discussion of whether the broken eggs of the title were a reference to the broken eggs in the opening of Joan Didion’s essay “The Women’s Movement” in The White Album, and the temptation to give a feminist reading of the narrator’s pain on account of the possibility that it was. One student professed sympathy for the narrator’s father, which got a few nods, and another student said she would’ve liked to know more about the store manager, which got even more nods. When no one responded to Professor P
earl’s question about what kind of insight into the narrator’s life and story this additional information might contribute, he changed the question to “Does anyone have any further suggestions?” and Jude saw his opening. He raised his hand and started speaking before he even got the go-ahead nod.

  “There’s no plot,” he said. “No scene.”

  “Well, Jude, that’s not really a suggestion,” said Professor Pearl, doing a remarkable job of withholding you asshole from the end of his sentence, though it was implied.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “These rules of discussion are here for a reason, Jude.”

  “Okay. I think the story would feel more intimate and immediate and alive if there were scenes for us to witness firsthand, and a story for us to follow.”

  “Uh, yeah, that doesn’t even really mean anything,” said Leslie. Professor Pearl’s considerable eyebrows seemed to sit a few millimeters higher above his eyes than they had before she’d said this, eagle alert, but he didn’t stop her right away. “How is a story alive or not? That sounds like bullshit to me.”

  Though Leslie had disagreed with pretty much everything Jude had said in class up to that point, her voice hadn’t had nearly so severe a fuck you quality until now. Feeling the assault of it even as bystanders, the rest of the class later reported surprise that Jude continued with no pause, without withering or stumbling even a little.

  “It’s like Henry James said, ‘Characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life.’”

  “Look, let’s not pretend this is a Henry James thing,” Leslie said, not addressing the content of Henry’s message. “I’m sure you watch a lot of Bravo. I mean, that’s pretty clear to anyone who’s spent more than ten minutes with you. And that’s fine. Some of those shows are funny. But everything in a story doesn’t have to reside right there on the surface. And someone doesn’t have to fuck someone’s husband or pull someone’s weave off their head for it to be a good story.”