The Writing Life

by Ellen Gilchrist

  I HAVE TO LOVE THEM. I have to believe that they each have a story to tell and can learn to tell it in their true voices. I have to be brutally honest and kind at the same time.

  I have to teach them to write a line of poetry. Then a second line. And a third. And a fourth and so on.

  I have to find the poetry within their first drafts and say, here is the good line. Believe in this line.

  I need to find a way to grade them, but, so far, after three years, the best I can do is give A’s to anyone who really tries and turns in the requisite number of manuscripts or tells me enough sad stories about funerals they have attended.

  As I begin my fourth year of teaching I will do better. Creative writing classes should not really be graded but since it has to be done I want to devise a system that makes some sort of sustained sense. The one I have been using isn’t dependable in a changing world. We have had ice storms, flu epidemics, and a war while I was teaching. These things are real barriers to finishing creative work and since I experience that in my own work I believe the students’ excuses too readily.

  I picked up a book of essays about teaching on a sales table at Barnes and Noble and began to randomly turn the pages. One woman said that she had given up assigning three stories a semester, which has become the gold standard for writing workshops, and begun to tell the students to turn in five pages a week. She did not say whether these assignments had to lead to a story. This is the question my boss, Molly Giles, asked when I told her I thought this was a fine idea. Molly said she used a version of that method when she taught novel writing. I’ve decided that is what I will do this coming fall semester when I teach the undergraduate fiction workshop. These are the best writing students in the English department. They have to take creative writing I and creative writing II before they can take the workshop.

  I am looking forward to teaching them. I will tell them they can turn in finished stories if they wish or they can turn in five pages of prose a week and if any of these assignments begin to turn into stories or the workshop can help them find ways to expand what they have written to make stories, well and good.

  If this works well with the undergraduates I may use the same method when I teach the graduate fiction workshop in the spring. I am learning. I hope.

  FALL 2003

  Onward

  August I

  In a few weeks I will begin my fourth year as a writing teacher. Is it possible to teach verbal skills? No. Is it possible to polish a stone until it becomes a mirror? Maybe.

  It is possible to be an editor if the raw material is heartfelt and true. It is possible to be a coach if the players are sober and not on drugs and have drive and ambition and can learn to believe in themselves and will stay home and write instead of staying out on the streets drinking beer and looking for love in all the wrong places.

  It may even be possible to keep the untalented students from blaming their failures on me. That is my goal for the coming year.

  I have had pleasant surprises in the past three years. I have had housewives publish poems I edited and their joy is all the reward I need. I have had graduate students publish in good magazines and win awards and that gives me joy and hope for the new year.

  This fall, the only writing class I will be teaching is the fiction workshop for undergraduates. Many of them are students I have had in other classes and I am looking forward to teaching them again. Maybe some real short stories will come out of the class. Maybe we will have honors, rewards, treasure. Maybe I will be a magician for these handpicked, special students. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

  Last year I made Buddhist prayer flags to bring luck to my graduate students. I had them write their initials on pieces of blue cotton cloth and then I hung the flags on the icy winter trees. A few weeks later one of them called to say he had won the Playboy College Fiction Contest.

  I don’t believe in magic but I believe in luck, especially in this business, or art, or whatever it is I tell myself I’m doing, and now, to compound the hubris, teaching.

  August 28

  The first meeting of the fiction writing class. Leo Van Scyoc, the angel genius who makes the schedules for the Department of English, has given me the beautiful seminar room where the graduate workshops usually meet. This may be to make up for the fact that I have agreed to let extra students into the class. A workshop should not be more than fifteen students and this one will have seventeen. I will manage. Since I don’t know what I am doing anyway I suppose I can accommodate seventeen students if I make up my mind to do it.

  “And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight . . .” These are young minds that I see before me. I will teach them what I know, by God. I am honored to get to do this work, deeply touched to be here.

  AUGUST 2003

  Hitting a Snag in the Teaching Game

  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

  Rip Van Winkle a
nd the Unwanted Wings

  HOW CAN I TEACH my undergraduates to write short stories? In many ways this is the easiest semester I have had since I began teaching. I feel that I know what I am doing and what to expect to a greater extent than I did three years ago but each student and each class present new problems and I feel I must devise new strategies for solving those problems.

  The real strategy is to tell them the truth about their work in a kind and helpful manner that does not harm the “dust on the butterfly’s wings,” as Hemingway called Scott Fitzgerald’s talent.

  Perhaps one of them has that talent. What a wonderful thing it would be to help someone become a writer who would give the world the gift of an unforgettable story, a story or poem that helps us live our lives and that stays with us for generations.

  Like Dylan Thomas’s poetry, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower . . .” Or Salinger’s wonderful story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” or Chekhov’s story “The Student,” which he wrote after many years of writing many stories not half so fine, or Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.

  Such a student with such a gift is not the only dream of my daily work as a teacher. I want to teach each of these students that writing is an easy, natural act. It becomes difficult when the writer tries to push an idea farther than it needs to go or gets writing confused with being rich and famous.

  My lovely student, Miroslav Penkov, from Bulgaria, is writing well and clearly in his second language. Sometimes he writes the dialogue in Bulgarian and then translates it into English.

  This week he turned in a lovely, very Russian story about an old man who loves only money and power. He has had a succession of mistresses who are all called Megan. He insists they dye their hair golden red to resemble the young Megan who jilted him when he was young and poor.

  After many pages of setting up the old man to have to pay for the havoc he has wreaked in the world of business, Miro has wings begin to grow on the old man’s back. They are growing exactly two inches a year. In the end the old man has the current Megan cut off the wings, which creates a cascade of health problems that ends with the old man in a wheelchair unable to feed himself or move.

  I am tempted to tell Miro that he can achieve all the ends of the story by having the old man simply grow older and become incapacitated by osteoporosis and other health problems. Life can exact its revenge without the help of the supernatural.

  Will this take the dust from the butterfly’s wings? Will it chastise Miro’s creative imagination? I am going to ask him to try it both ways and then decide for himself. As it is, the ending is too contrived but the old Russian writers he likes to read would probably prefer the angel wings.

  Fortunately Miro listens to help and criticism better than my American students. He has come from a colder, more dangerous world and doesn’t expect things to be easy I believe I can tell him what I think without harming him.

  My other problem this week is a beautiful sorority girl named Amber who had the brainstorm last week to rewrite “Rip Van Winkle” and set it in a contemporary office building. I suggested that she use a quotation from the other “Rip” to begin the story so the reader would not be surprised when Ripp, her character, goes to sleep and wakes to find himself with a long beard in a world he could not have imagined. She was very taken with the idea. Now if I can get her to write about something she knows or somewhere she has been. The most mysterious thing about her story is the office she imagines in Ripp’s life before he is transformed. She says it is her father’s real office.

  Onward. No one said this would be easy but I had imagined it might be or I would never have agreed to try to do it.

  FALL 2003

  Teaching, A Journal (Continued)

  September 29

  I am trying to teach my students that writing is an easy, natural act. Sometimes it is an easy, natural act, then it becomes difficult because the writer tries to take his idea further than it needs to go. Or he doesn’t know enough yet to take the idea further. A writer has to know some stuff, he has to study, has to be “continually roaming” with a curious eye, has to be reading, learning, watching, thinking.

  Study epistemology, logic, ethics, geology, biochemistry, water tables, visit farms and factories, travel if it’s possible, by foot and bicycle and by automobiles and trains. Keep a journal or at least have a pad and pencil with you to write down impressions. Memory will serve for most things, but street names, county names, wonderful names of people, all those things will come in handy someday if you keep on writing.

  Another thing that happens to young writers, especially in writing schools, is that they become jealous and competitive. Then writing becomes a contest and the muse disappears. When writing becomes a contest, the simple, earnest desire to communicate wonder or terror or delight or praise gets lost in pride and the delusions of the ego.

  How to teach my students to hold on to the simple desire to tell a story or make someone laugh or just tell about something to someone else? I don’t know how to make this happen, but since it is my goal, I will find a way if I try. I want to be the best teacher these young people have ever had. Surely my desire to do that will find a way. Water always runs downhill. Osmosis. Perhaps that’s how I will make it happen. I’ll be there with the knowledge that thirty years of writing and publishing has given me and I’ll be as generous with that knowledge as I can and some of it will flow into the students.

  I must remember to be kind. It is hard to be criticized, easy to praise. Praise is a muse of sorts. She is a goddess in the realm of human relationships. I will serve her if I can.

  Wednesday at dawn, October I

  I have been learning to meditate, or thinking of it and doing it a small amount.

  This morning I drank a small coffee, looked at the stars, saw the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, then hurriedly dressed, am hurriedly writing this and then running out to a Pilates class. Just for fun.

  Wednesday at dawn, October 15

  A bright, waning moon, like a spotlight, still high in the sky at 5:45 in the morning. The sky is very clear and dark, beautiful, blue. The stars are shining and bright. It’s chilly, the first real fall day. It has been two weeks since I wrote in this journal. The leaves have changed color and begun to fall and color the ground. I have been deep into a meditative state, doing breathing exercises, listening to Andrew Weil and Jon Kabat-Zinn on meditation and breathing. I was led to these wonderful CDs by listening over and over again to an old Zen Buddhist tape by Alan Watts. I profited so much from his lectures on Zen that I began to think I should go to the bookstore and see if there were other tapes on the same subject that I could buy to keep me calm for the work I have to do with my students and also the exciting and scary things that go on with my large family. I have become the guru and matriarch of sixteen people, or of some of them, the ones I know well because they live near me.

  I have to be strong and mentally alert and objective and all the things my psychiatrists were for me. I have to keep in mind how dear all these people are to me, my family and my students. I have to keep on learning and trying to be wise and clear. I have to learn so I can teach. Here is what has happened since I wrote in this journal two weeks ago. Good things with my students. Hardin came to see me and said he was back at work on his book, perfecting it. It is already written. He is going to get it to my agent, Don Congdon, by November. Josh is being wonderful, very helpful in class. Wolf has cut his education class twice to come early to class. I am cutting him slack because he is writing well and trying so hard, burning the candles at both ends. He has hiked in the Himalaya. He will be all right and I will give him an A for the writing no matter how late he has to be to class.

  Leslie has an idea for a book and is hot on the trail of her dream. Steve has a big idea that he got from reading In Suspect Terrain. One of my undergraduates wrote a story about his wife, who died accidentally. It was so touching we were all in tears. He looks like he is twenty-one. Yet he has a child and a d
ead wife. Or else he has an imagination the size of the moon.

  So many other stories from my students and my work at the university. Plus, Tulane is asking me to be the Mellon Fellow for a semester. I’ve never been a Fellow and it would be all right with Molly and Skip if I take the position for one semester.

  I am going to Mary Margaret Healy’s wedding next week. Into New Orleans to stay at the Windsor Court, have dinner at Antoine’s, see the wedding, go to the reception at the Plimsoll Club, then spend Saturday with my darling, darling granddaughters.

  I will see Mother on my way back.

  I am trying to drink green tea with ginseng instead of coffee. I wish I could talk to my old psychiatrist, Ed White. I might try to do it or to talk to Gunther Perdigao, my first psychiatrist, my Freudian.

  SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2003

  After Six Weeks of Classes

  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.”