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
The Geology Field Trip
October 2
I took my graduate creative nonfiction class on a field trip to see the two-hundred-foot cut through the Boone Formation (a plateau in northwest Arkansas). This was to pay them back for reading In Suspect Terrain, by John McPhee. I am beginning to understand that I can’t teach them everything at once. I can expose them to some of the things that have been valuable to me as a writer and hope some of them profit from what I know. They don’t all need to know the same things. They are not all inspired by the same sort of books or by the same experiences.
I believe in a sound mind in a sound body. More than anything else I want to show them that there is a wide and wonderful and exciting world outside of the creative writing program and its uncertainty and disappointments. There is so much to be seen and learned and explored and written about. They forget that when they spend too much time worrying about their lives or hanging out on Dickson Street drinking beer and waiting to fall in love.
The cut through the Boone Formation was made to build a shopping center containing a T. J. Maxx, a Best Buy, and a Shoe Carnival. It is a marvelous thing to see. The history of the Ozark Plateau going back to the time when this land was an inland sea six or seven hundred miles north of the equator, with a sandy shore somewhere in Kansas. This part of that sea was part of its continental shelf. The limestone and chert of the wall is filled with fossils at the level of the parking lot behind the Shoe Carnival where we were exploring.
Did they learn anything from going to see a wall of ancient earth history? Did it inspire them to read the book with deeper understanding? Was it fun to pretend we were geologists for an afternoon? I don’t know I can only follow my best instincts and hope it was a good idea.
Luckily one of the three undergraduates in the class is a geology student. He is a geology and English major but is mostly interested in geology. Earth Science, he calls it. I call it The Mothership.
His name is Jay Taylor and he is a beautiful, thin, intense young man who carries a book bag full of rocks with him everywhere he goes. He gave me a rock that is more than a billion years old last week. He found it on a real geology field trip to Oklahoma the week before. Also he showed me a large sandstone rock and a bag of ground-up sandstone he got from a quarry near their dig. It is toxic and causes irreparable lung damage if inhaled. He has it in his book bag in a single plastic freezer bag. “Put the sandstone dust away,” we advised him, after we had finished exploring the wall and were happily sitting on stools in a local coffee shop having iced sports tea and quiche and banana nut bread.
“I will,” he said. “I just keep forgetting to take it out of the bag.”
(It weighs five or ten pounds. It is a very large bag of toxic sandstone dust.)
I have a beautiful undergraduate named Rivers who teaches Pilates at the athletic club where I work out every morning. She has to get up at four thirty every morning to be at the club by five. Then she has classes all afternoon, then has a second job in a gift store at a golf course. I don’t know how she has time to study. She has been looking tired lately and that bothers me.
Rivers drove with me to the field trip because I had asked her to take photographs with my camera. On top of her other accomplishments she is a gifted photographer. Later that afternoon she left the coffee shop with a young man who is one of the stars of our graduate program. I immediately began to worry. Two beautiful young people thrown together on my watch. What
if one of their hearts was broken. Would it be my fault?
October 6
The photographs came back from the field trip. Half of the photographs were of the young man who had taken Rivers home from the coffee shop. He is very handsome and powerful, charismatic and hard to catch. In one photograph he had climbed thirty feet up the vertical rock wall. Rivers had climbed almost as high as he was. I don’t know who took the photographs of them together clinging to rocks, daring gravity and each other. Fortunately I had not seen that going on. I was farther down the wall searching for fossils with Wolf and Dusty and Leslie and Marissa.
“Is something going on between these two?” Dusty asked, when I ran into her yesterday and showed her the photographs.
“Oh, God,” I said. “I hope not. Is this my fault? They might get hurt.”
“They look fine to me,” Dusty said. “I saw them both this morning.”
October 2003
Postscript
Nothing developed between them except friendship and admiration. Rivers has graduated and is touring Europe with friends. The young man is teaching summer school and waiting for an agent to send his novel to publishers. I would take a vow not to worry so much but I would have to have a prefrontal lobotomy to keep the vow and that seems excessive.
JULY 2004
Monday at Dawn
I STARTED OFF TO GO to a Pilates class at six a.m. at the athletic club, then came back home after half a block of driving. The stars were glorious and there was a small waning moon. A CD of Jon Kabat-Zinn talking about the way we waste our lives rushing from one thing to the next trying to fulfill ambitions or serve obsessions stopped me and I went back home, turned off all the lights in my house and went out on the back porch to view the early morning stars and moon. It would be good to go out in the early morning to finish dying if it’s true one has to die.
OCTOBER 2003
The Big Question
HAVE I BEEN TOO HARD on the students in the past? Am I being too nice to them now? All I know for sure is that if I show work to my agent and he says “it isn’t working” I lose interest in it. A long time ago, when I was just beginning to publish, my agent or editor would tell me I had to do certain things to make a piece of writing better and I would fiercely go back to work and change the parts they thought were “wrong.”
Having a salary and being a professor has changed how I react to that sort of criticism. Half the time I just go on writing the way I was writing without having any interest in changing or rewriting the piece. Is this the effect that teaching has on writers? Is this why so many of my most talented friends never published again after they began to teach?
I have written a book of stories, a novel, and a novella in the past year and I don’t want to rewrite any of them. I like them as they are. “The characters are just talking,” my agent tells me about these pieces of fiction but he has no suggestions as to how I could make the pieces more publishable. Maybe I just want to write dialogue. I know the characters I am writing about so well I don’t need to describe them or comment on their behavior or conversation so I just amuse myself by telling their stories in dialogue.
I like what I am doing with these stories. I am having a very good time being a writer with no audience. I am watching all of this happen with small interest. I have become too Zen to be a writer in the way I used to be a writer.
All of this is useful to me as a teacher, however. I have learned that criticism is poison to a writer. Now, what am I going to do to help these students learn to write stories they can publish without hurting their feelings and making it impossible for them to write at all? I will teach them how to kindly edit their fellow students’ work and maybe the lessons they learn by doing that will allow them to learn to look at their own work objectively. WRITING IS REWRITING I tell my students over and over again because when I believed that I published everything I wrote. Now I tell them that WRITING IS REWRITING but I no longer care to do it myself.
Perhaps I am telling myself stories to get myself ready for death. I will die in about thirty years if my genetic history is any indicator. Actually, I take such good care of myself that barring accidents I will probably live forty more years. So I don’t think I’m getting ready to die. I just think I am tired of showing my imagination to the world and want to keep it to myself.
Or perhaps I am getting lazy. I don’t think that’s true because I have never been lazy in any way but you never can tell what Zen meditation may be making happen to my mind and psyche. Maybe I have actually learned to live in the present. I have been trying to learn to do that for many years. It may have happened while I wasn’t watching.
I am happier than I have ever been in my life and more patient. HOORAY FOR EVERYTHING as a poet once wrote in the crazy 1970s when poets reigned supreme in the United States of America that I knew.
MARCH 2004
The Tar Baby
I’M IN SO DEEP I can’t get out. I have started liking teaching more than I like writing. My students are doing well. One of my undergraduates won the departmental fiction award for a story he wrote in my workshop. My students have won the award for three years in a row. I’m terribly proud of them and proud of myself for inspiring them to rewrite the stories until they were good. This year’s student, Kevin Brown, rewrote his story four times. We put it on the worksheet three times. He believed me when I told him that writing is rewriting and now he has his reward. His face was glowing as he ran into my office to tell me the news. He said it was the best thing that ever happened to him in his life.
Where in sitting all alone at my typewriter is there any emotion to compete with this? There isn’t. And that is why people stop writing after they start teaching.
Teaching is fun! It’s exciting and challenging and full of surprises. I have been teaching for four years now. My students work all over Fayetteville. If I go down on Dickson Street to get a smoothie one of my students makes it for me. If I have a flat tire in front of the Whole Foods Market a student is standing there to help me. If I go to Target to see the new clothes Isaac Mizrahi designed, I run into one of my graduate students and she helps me buy a seersucker skirt and later we go to my house and drink ginger tea and walk around the yard and look at the prayer flags I hung on my trees to bring luck to the students’ writing.
Teaching has filled my life with wonderful, imaginative young people. My own grandchildren are far away from me. I talk to them on the phone and see them in the summer and at Christmas but I don’t have them with me every day. My students are all around me. They enrich my life, they teach me things, they give me books to read and tell me about music I would never have known about. The chairman of our department is an aficionado of African music. He has a radio program on Monday nights of music from all the African countries. I would never have known this wonderful music if I hadn’t met Robert Brinkmeyer. Now I am addicted to it and listen every Monday night.
My poor old writing has suffered. I write books still. I have written two or three of them in the last couple of years but I don’t REWRITE THEM ANYMORE. I tell the students that writing is rewriting but I do not tell them that it is hard, arduous work. They can find that out for themselves and the ambitious, driven ones will find it out. Let them rewrite their stories and win awards. I’m through with all of that. I have a job I absolutely love, a paycheck every month, a retirement account, a rich and full life. Why should I spend my mornings rewriting my stories to make them into something the world will find valuable enough to print and read? I like them as they are. If I go back into boxes of my papers and find first drafts of things I have published, often I like the first drafts better than I like the finished PRODUCT.
I’m tired of turning my wild imagination into PRODUCT.
Here is what I’m doing with my life in the last year before I am seventy years old. Exercise, careful diet, devotion to beauty and order, devotion to my children and grandchildren, being here in good health and good spirits for when they need help or advice, enjoying the
wonderful house I bought with money I made writing books, enjoying the spring rains and winter snows and flowers and trees and all the beauties of the earth and sky. I am meditating and doing yoga and reading Shakespeare with my friends on Sunday afternoon.
Last week I went on a news fast, an idea I got from Doctor Andrew Weil, who is my spiritual guru. After fourteen days of my fast, I put on my glasses while running on a treadmill at the gym. The first thing that flashed across the screen was a story about a man in California who had shot all seven of his children in their faces with a gun and killed them all.
I took off my glasses. My news fast may last another month. Or forever. I already know who to vote for. I don’t need commentators who have been corrupted by making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to tell me what to think about the events of the world.
Teaching is a tar baby. I’m stuck and I love it. I don’t even want to get away although I am always glad when a semester is over and I can go back to writing first drafts of novels and stories and putting them away in boxes to read when I am old. I probably won’t get old. That may not be as inescapable as some people seem to think it is.
FEBRUARY 2004
“The Middle Way” © 2002 by Ellen Gilchrhist. Originally published in the anthology entitled The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage, published by William Morrow 2002.
“The Shakespeare Group” © 2001 by Ellen Gilchrist. A slightly different version was originally published as “In Love with Shakespeare” in The Book magazine, October 2001.
The Writing Life Page 13