Postscript
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.
Students
THE SECOND YEAR I taught, one of my favorite students was a young woman who was a policewoman for the university. She had a fabulous uniform and a gun. Several times she wore the whole gig to come and see me in my office, but only once did she consent to wear it to class. “Packing,” the admiring male students said that day. “She’s packing,”
It took only a little nudging on my part to get her to begin writing about her experiences on the university police force. The other students loved reading her papers, especially in the nonfiction class. She was taking both my graduate nonfiction workshop and my undergraduate fiction workshop. She was a wonderful student because she believed what I told her and was willing to try the things I suggested. After she began to write about her police experiences she quickly saw how it could become a book of essays. By the end of the semester she had quit her job and gone to work in the bookstore instead. She had seen that in order to write the truth about the police force she would have to leave it.
The last day she worked for the campus police she came to my office wearing her complete uniform and her LOADED GUN and brought me roses for my desk. What a charming girl! What a wonderful way to end the semester.
I have no doubt that sooner or later she is going to write the book of essays and that it will be published. I can’t think of anything more refreshing than a look at a campus police department through the eyes of a young female officer.
She had stories about special treatment for athletes, drunken students at ball games, drunken alumni screaming to have their confiscated liquor back, corruption in the department, all sorts of inside information that she feared would get her sued or fired. I told her to write the stories and we’d decide later what she could publish. Instead she quit the job. Good choice, as my psychiatrist used to say.
APRIL 2002
The Ice Storm
I TOLD THE STUDENTS we had to leave the building before dark because ice was on the streets but they said, no, it was almost the last class and we had to workshop all the essays. Okay, I said, then we have to figure out a way to take each other home. How far away are your cars from the building because the parking lot is a sheet of ice? The fat, dependable girl said, mine is near the journalism department. The thin New Yorker said, I can take two people wherever they need to go.
They talked among themselves and got it worked out while I pretended to be engrossed in the next paper on the worksheet. I had begun the semester full of hope and ambition for their work but my interest was waning now that it was December. There is no substitute for talent. All the hard work in the world doesn’t make up for not having the poetic tools to make what you write seductive. I had hoped to make one or two of these students into writers but the muse was somewhere else this semester.
This was a creative nonfiction workshop. It wasn’t as heady and charged as a fiction workshop but in the end the same thing was happening. The most interesting things they wrote were small, autobiographical asides in their researched pieces. In a piece about being an army brat a thin, yoga-expert girl threw in a line about being forced to join and conduct prayer services before cheerleading sessions in a small, Georgia town. I told her to make a short story out of the material. “It was my day to lead the prayer service and I was terrified,” should be the lead, I told her. These were words out of her mouth when the class asked her to talk more about the incident. The story had a natural ending. She was saved from having to lead the prayers because the coach had discovered a girl necking in an automobile at a football game and had the cheerleaders do a therapy session for the errant girl instead of having their usual prayers. The cheerleaders formed a circle around the bad girl and prayed for her until she cried and repented.
On the afternoon of the ice storm the students worked very hard and the class lasted three hours and forty minutes instead of the usual three. When it was over we all went down together to the parking lot and got into the cars that were near the building. By the time the class ended I was back into an optimistic mood about their work. They were learning, they were working, it takes time, the muse will come if she is summoned.
While we were waiting for a young man to bring his car across the parking lot I overheard a conversation and it reminded me of what it’s really like to be a student and what they mostly, really are driven to think about.
“Celia Markham wants to go out with you,” the tall, gangly genius told the tall, good-looking boy with money who actually had talent although he wouldn’t use it.
“I don’t want to go out with her,” he answered. “But I’d go out with that yoga girl.”
“Celia only wants to fuck you,” the genius added.
“I’d fuck her,” the good-looking boy agreed.
“That’s all she wants,” the genius said. “Meet us down at Baby Lee’s. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Well, I decided, this class is definitely not a waste of time. I got into my car and drove home, remembering when I was a graduate student and used to go out after a Joyce seminar with a student from Montana. One night, after we had been studying the Molly Bloom episode, I made love to him in an eighteenth-century graveyard on top of a hill near the campus. We were laughing the whole time. I tried hard to remember what it was like to be young and wild and full of juice but I couldn’t remember. What the hell, I decided, I’m going to give them all A’s like Eudora Welty did when she taught us.
Creative Nonfiction (as Fiction)
WE HAD A WAR and an ice storm and still they kept on writing. What does that tell you about ego and ambition? Not that writing was the only thing going on in my undergraduate creative writing workshop which met on Wednesday nights in Kimpel Hall on the campus of the University of Arkansas where I work now that I can’t think of anything else to write.
There were twelve students in the class, a one-eyed veteran of the Vietnam War, three chubby girls with pretty faces, a thin girl whose name I never could remember, a wealthy divorcee from Little Rock, and six tall young men, all sexy, interesting, and talented. Three of the young men were friends before the class began. They were the editors of the campus literary magazine, which had recently been given a large sum of money by the Tyson Foundation and was gearing up to publish a 150-page special edition in the spring.
Listen, any one of the young men in that class would have kept young women coming to class when I was in college, much less six of them. Plus, the one-eyed veteran wasn’t bad-looking either and after he started turning in work and the other students read it, I noticed the divorcée moved her chair next to his and kept it there. Talent has its uses.
We had two classes before September II. On the first class after that I expected them to be unprepared and to want to talk about the attack on New York City and Washington, D.C., but they surprised me by coming to class having read the assignments and ready for business. We were reading Turgenev and Chekhov while I waited for them to begin turning in stories to put on the worksheet but again they surprised me by turning in stories almost immediately. Most of the students were from rural or small-town backgrounds and I had thought Turgenev would be good for them and it had turned out to be true. They understood landlords because of the big corporations which run northwest Arkansas and they especially understood kindly landlords, what with
the hundred-thousand-dollar grant to the literary magazine and so forth.
So they wrote on through the war on terrorism without a hitch, turning in stories about children who blow up pigs by mistake, children who kill their father’s fighting cocks to stop him from drinking, children who manipulate their parents to get candy, children who don’t answer their parents’ phone calls after they get to college, children who don’t visit the nursing home enough and feel guilty afterwards, children who meet Jesus in a meadow and ask him to bring their dead father back to life, children who grow up and take dope and then quit and go back to being sober.
It was several weeks before anyone began to write about the war. It was the veteran who wrote about it. He started putting doomed passengers into his stories. They were always about to get on the fated airplanes when his love stories ended. No matter how much the other students begged him to stop putting doomed airline passengers into his stories he kept on doing it right up to the last class of the semester. It was his signature plot move. He wouldn’t budge on it.
Meanwhile the real action was taking place between one of the chubby girls and an editor of the literary magazine and the thin girl whose name I couldn’t remember because she seldom came to class.
The chubby girl wanted to date the editor and was losing about three pounds a week to gain her objective. She wasn’t that chubby to begin with and by October she was looking like a contender. The thin girl was still sitting by him but I noticed he was referring questions to the chubby girl.
A redheaded girl meanwhile was going out for coffee after class with the even taller and more handsome second-in-command at the magazine and he asked her out loud in class to submit her work to the magazine for publication. The four of them left together after every class as the fall wore on into November. Then the ice storm came and power went out for four days and no one could print or write no matter how much I had preached to them about writing first drafts by hand and even went over to the campus bookstore and bought some legal pads and gave them to students for a joke.
FALL 2001
The Semester from Hell
IT WAS MY THIRD SEMESTER teaching creative writing at the University of Arkansas and I had decided to tell the graduate students the truth about what they were writing. I had the idea in my head that I should be a take-no-prisoners coach and demand from them the things I demand from myself when I am writing, absolute devotion, contempt for bad writing, the ability to go back into a piece as many times as it takes to make it lush and beautiful and true.
So, instead of writing pleasant little queries in the margins of their stories, I did what I do to my own first drafts. I marked out words that ruined the sound. I marked out whole sections that were unnecessary or preachy or poorly written. I wrote NO in the margin when I came to something that was really bad writing or written for its shock value or just ugly or boring.
Reading the stories that were turned in to my workshop for the first three weeks was torture for me. They were so bad, with a few exceptions, that I thought every day about resigning my position, quitting, giving up. But in a few weeks the younger writers began to improve.
Because I had rejected their first manuscripts and refused to pretend to take them seriously, they actually began to write stories that were better than the first ones. A few of them even used my tortured editing to improve their stories. Then, suddenly, a breakthrough. A young man from Louisiana turned in a story so fine and polished I told him to send it immediately to good magazines, beginning with the Atlantic Monthly.
A few weeks later it was accepted, along with a second story, for publication in the Atlantic. This stirred up jealousy in some of the other graduate students but the ones with real talent were encouraged by their fellow student’s success.
By the end of the semester his closest friend had won the Playboy College Fiction Contest for 2002. I took more pleasure from the success of those two young writers than I have taken from my own successes in many years.
I am beginning to understand why people love to teach. It is challenging and terrifying and uncertain. Then, suddenly something you have said or done makes a real difference in a student’s life and you are so proud and happy.
I must remember not to expect this to happen every day or even every year. And I must not forget this joy or be too greedy for more of it.
FALL 2002
Drunks, Dope Addicts, and Losers, Characters My Students Give Me
IT IS NOVEMBER and I am tired of teaching these sad students. They are like baby birds waiting to be fed. They are older than the leaders of the Lewis and Clark expedition and they look like I have been beating them when I tell them the truth about their writing and tell them I am not going to give them A’s for turning in first drafts and expecting me to edit and revise their stories.
I do not like them anymore. The semester, which started out so full of hope, is running down and, with the exception of two very talented young men, nothing is happening in my workshop of which I can be proud. I’m not teaching and they’re not learning. I cannot line edit first drafts about dope addicts, drunks, or losers.
In an attempt to jump-start the remainder of the semester I wrote them the following letters.
Dear Students,
You have to know things to be a writer. You have to read constantly and broadly and be curious and “continually roaming with a roving eye.”
If you are not writing well and happily, or if you feel your writing is forced, stop for a while and read or go out into the world and watch building projects or street-repair crews or get a job in a mall for Christmas or get into the car and drive to a city and look at art. Learn, learn, learn, be curious, and, if possible, uncritical. Everywhere men and women are doing wonderful things, marvelous things, interesting things. Write paragraphs about what you see and don’t try to turn them into anything but praise and understanding.
If you are teaching, find out the life stories of your students and write little sketches of them to use later. Ask them who their grandparents were and how they came to live in the places where they lived.
Learn, learn, learn, read, read, read. I will be thinking about you and wishing you well every day.
Ellen
Second letter
Dear Students,
I am enjoying teaching you and getting to know you all. Each one of you has talent and the ability to write and publish if you also have the will and stamina to do that difficult thing.
A few of you, maybe three or four, are making A’s in my workshop so far and that worries me deeply. I want to give you all A’s. As I told you at the beginning of this class to make an A you have to participate well in the class discussions and you are all doing that, and you have to write three stories or two stories and a brilliant rewrite of one of them.
In other words you have to give me at least one finished, rewritten story by the end of class that I would put into a magazine if I were editing that magazine.
I can’t give you an A for turning in first drafts and not working hard to make them better. If you are seriously blocked and can’t turn in good, finished work to me before the semester ends, please call me and we will set up a time when we can talk.
We are going to be very busy from November 17 to November 20. The next week I will be gone. The week after Thanksgiving we will begin our final push to the end of the semester. Talk to me now if you are having trouble writing a story that will earn you an A in this class.
With all good wishes and good luck for your work.
Ellen
Postscript
Here is the hard part of this letter. Please read this carefully. I have to tell you this. What you do with the information is up to you.
If you are writing sad, dark stories about drunks or dope addicts and if the characters in these stories are not attractive in any way or redeemed by hope or charity or goodness of any kind, if the settings for the stories are bars, if the characters are losers, then you won’t publish these stories anywhere
except in small, unstable literary magazines that don’t pay enough to make up for the postage. Publishers are business people. They are in business to sell books. The few people left in the United States who buy books are not drunks or dope addicts and don’t want to read about such things.
Just because you see such stories in magazines doesn’t mean that the writers are making a living writing.
Go back into your lives and find the places that were charged by hope, goodness, charity, joy, intelligence, love, courage, understanding, learning, and write about those moments.
Ellen
At our class meeting after I put the second letter in their university mailboxes they came to class in a very subdued state. A couple of them had fresh haircuts and were dressed in shirts and ties. It was a serious class. I didn’t ask them if they had gotten the letter and they didn’t mention it.
Meanwhile I had taken a story on which I had written “this isn’t worth your talent,” and thrown it away. I got a fresh copy of it and wrote on the top, “This is almost finished. You can start on something else.”
I may not last long at this teaching career. I certainly won’t last long if I have to teach the graduate fiction workshop very often. The next time I am scheduled to teach it will be in the spring of 2004. It will be the second semester and one of my confederates in this dream merchant scam will have had the students first and, I hope, made some dent in their needfulness and disorder.
It’s a paycheck, I tell myself. And I will tell them the truth no matter what happens or whether they like it or not.
FALL 2002
How Can I Help These Students Learn to Write?
The Writing Life Page 11