The Writing Life

by Ellen Gilchrist

  APRIL 2004

  Part Three: Teaching

  Teaching, A Journal

  “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?” I asked Jim Whitehead, when I agreed to teach the graduate fiction workshop in the fall of the year 2000. I had blithely agreed to teach it; then, a week before school began, I panicked and ran to Jim for advice. He founded the creative writing program and nursed it for thirty-four years. Now he was retired but still available for advice.

  “Be a coach,” he told me. I liked that answer. I was raised by an athlete and spent my youth listening to lectures on playing to win. My own sport was tennis so the best things I know are slanted toward singles tennis.

  Here is what it says over the desk where I write.

  Play to win

  First serve advantage

  Never let them see you sweat

  Take care of business

  Slow down

  Stay calm

  Send a message

  Don’t let up

  No fears

  Practice, practice, practice. Matches are won on the practice court

  Andre Agassi runs up hills on Christmas Day to get ready for the FIFTH SET AT WIMBLEDON

  Stretch the lead. Once Steffi starts winning you cannot stop her

  Move your feet

  Get in position

  Focus

  Get your racket back

  Keep your eye on the ball

  SERVE THE WHOLE

  Teaching, A Journal (Continued)

  IN THE FALL of the year 2000 the University of Arkansas hired me to teach two classes in their writing program. I was thrilled with the assignment. I had never taught school but I loved schools and classes and I believed I was ready.

  That first fall semester went well. It was easier than I had imagined it would be. The students were bright and well read. I liked them and quickly became maternal, especially about the brightest ones.

  I protected myself from my deepest worries by writing them a letter which I passed out in the first class to both my groups. In it I asked them not to come to class with a fresh cold and not to write the details of childhood abuse as I was incapable of reading such details. I remembered two terrible accounts of abuse that I had read in newspapers over the years and which I could not get out of my head. I had expended a great deal of energy burying those accounts and didn’t want to add others to their store. One of the things I have never been able to get out of my head was an episode that Geraldine Ferraro encountered when she was a prosecutor. I am sorry she passed the knowledge on to me and hope she has been able to forget it herself.

  So, shielded by my letter, I watched the first semester pass uneventfully and signed on to teach again the next fall.

  That second fall is here and already I am feeling vulnerable. I encouraged my undergraduate fiction workshop to such an extent that last week, at the second class meeting, they handed me nine short stories to put on the worksheet. I was elated and proud and clutched their offerings to my chest. The next morning I went to the office to have the secretaries turn the stories into a worksheet for the following Thursday.

  As I was removing the paper clips and staples from the stories and putting them in order my eye fell on the first page of a story. A three-year-old girl was being ordered by her father to put on her robe and slippers. THEY WERE IN HER BEDROOM.

  I panicked. I hid the story at the end of the stack of stories and hastily prepared the papers for the secretary. I couldn’t wait to get the papers out of my possession. I ran from the building and got into my car and drove home. I had forgotten to write a letter to them this second year telling them that I couldn’t read that stuff.

  I had a bad night. But in the morning I put on my workout clothes and decided I was strong enough to face it. I’ll go to the university and get a copy of the worksheet, I decided. Then I’ll go to the health club and get on the treadmill and read the damn thing. I am strong. I am brave. I can do it. I’ll read it as quickly as I can and make some notes and forget it. If I don’t go on and read it I’ll think about it all week.

  The workshop only meets one night a week and I had five days to go. I had to bite the bullet. I had to soldier on. I had agreed to teach this class and I had to teach it. I was sixty-six years old and no one had ever abused me. I could take it. I could overpower my imagination with my reason. Maybe.

  It was Saturday morning and the health club was surrounded by a sea of policemen and yellow tape. The club was having its annual Kids Triathlon. Beautiful, wonderful, marvelous, divine little girls and boys were everywhere, in the pool, on their bikes, on the footpaths. Parents wearing official red shirts were writing down times and calling out warnings at the corners where the bikers had to take sharp turns. At least a hundred children were being adored and loved and fed potassium-laced drinks and health bars that contained more calories than most of the children in the world consume in a week.

  I was in the land of plenty with lucky children who are loved. I could do it. I could go inside and read the story. I saw the owner of the club near the bicycle stand, went to her and confided my situation. “Come find me on the treadmill,” I told her. “See if I’m strong enough to do this.”

  “I wouldn’t be,” she said. She’s one of my best friends. She knows how I feel about children. She knows I have twelve grandchildren.

  “I’ll come check on you when I can,” she added and gave me a hug and I went into the building and up the stairs and got a reading rack and climbed on a treadmill and put on my reading glasses and stuck the worksheet on the rack and turned the treadmill up to three point eight with an incline of five and started reading.

  IT WASN’T ABOUT CHILD ABUSE. Au con-traire. It was about a father making a three-year-old girl put on her robe and slippers and go out into the front yard and look up at her bedroom window so she could see that people could see into her room at night, so she should close the blinds or wear her robe.

  The young author thought this was a really mean thing that her father had done to her and probably accounted for her recent breakup with a controlling boyfriend.

  Jesus.

  Later, after I had done four miles on the treadmill and gone downstairs to watch the leaders come in from the twelve-year-old bicycle leg of the triathlon and gone home and eaten a huge breakfast, I got into the shower. While I was rubbing blonde conditioner on my hair I had an epiphany. I’m going to make a list of stories I want them to write to complement the ones they give me, I decided.

  “I’m Glad She Divorced Him”

  “It Was Nice of Them to Care What Happened to Me”

  “She Tricked Him into Marrying Her So What Did She Expect?”

  “My Mother-in-Law Was Only Trying to Help”

  “People Are Doing the Best They Can Based on the Information They Have Available at the Moment”

  “We Had a Constant Food Supply and a Warm House But We Sure Weren’t Satisfied With That”

  “I Just Wanted to Protect You From Strangers”

  FALL 2001

  My Third Year

  CLASSES HAVE BEEN GOING on for three weeks. I am learning their names and beginning to hear their stories. No wonder no one gets any writing done after they start teaching. The wonder and responsibility of the lives of young people. My students range in age from eighteen to past thirty. They are wonderful and I am beginning to love them.

  I wake at four-thirty in the morning worrying about their lives. The boy who drinks too much and takes drugs, the girl who writes like an early Gwen Head, I overedited one of her poems, I have to fix that tomorrow. How? My favorite student, a six-foot, six-inch-tall genius who was my favorite undergraduate for two years and now is in the MFA program writing fiction and poetry. He is awaiting the birth of his second child. The moon is full, the due date was yesterday, they live in a cabin twenty miles from town, and they are going to deliver the baby themselves with only a nurse-midwife and a babysitter for the three-year-old to help. He delivered the first child, his father is a psychoanalyst an
d a physician, he says he can do it, the baby is in position, I am a nervous wreck over this. He has school insurance which would pay for the baby to be delivered in a hospital. Why do I think this is my responsibility? I wish I knew how to pray; still, I think that all will go well. He is a genius and his wife is almost as smart as he is.

  What else? Last week a tree fell on one of my undergraduates, a twenty-one-year-old girl who is five months pregnant with her first child. She and her husband were out camping in the woods in a tent. We have had a very dry summer and perhaps that is why a large tree fell in the middle of the night and pinned her to the ground. Her young husband screamed for help. Some campers who were nearby came to help. It took four men to lift the tree from her body. A medivac helicopter managed to land nearby and took her to the hospital. The baby is fine. She is scratched and has cuts on her head and face but was well enough to come to school on Monday and talk to her professors and make arrangements to study at home for the next week or so. My favorite student is delivering his second child in a cabin twenty miles from town!!! A tree fell on one of my undergraduates. Jake is drinking again and didn’t come to workshop. One of the professors in the department is depressed and won’t take his medication. Another has cancer. Our director is taking a leave of absence in the spring and leaving the graduate theses to Skip Hays and me. I overedited the undergraduates’ poetry last week. What do I think I’m doing? I am going to spend the morning writing a short story. I need refuge from all this reality.

  I am going to try to remember how to pray. I’m reading V. S. Naipaul’s correspondence with his father. It is so lovely. The deep love that passed between these two men is a joy to share. It is easy to see why the younger Naipaul became the great writer that he is. The nurturing letters from his overworked journalist father break my heart and fill me with a desire to be that sort of presence in my students’ lives—if not all of them, at least the ones with the talent and drive and will to write.

  SEPTEMBER 2002

  Worrying

  IN THE BEGINNING I was all hope and ego. What others had failed to do I would do. I would be generous, gracious, I would take their stories and make them better, I would be a great teacher and a great coach and a fabulous, unforgettable editor. I would not try to turn their stories into my own. I would let their own voices run down the wide unfolding paths of their imaginations. I would unleash their genius, give them hope, teach them to be professionals. Most of all I would not be jealous of them.

  Alas, there was nothing to be jealous of. As the months rolled on into November and Thanksgiving came and we all caught colds from one another, as our heads filled up with fluid and presidential politics invaded literature and took our brains away, I began to lose hope that the teacher evaluations would say BEST TEACHER I EVER HAD. I LOVE HER. HIRE HER AGAIN. WE CANT STAND TO LET HER GO.

  Miss Popularity in the creative writing staff of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Arkansas. Was that what I had been going for?

  There had been bright spots. Getting paid was nice. Talking about the students with other professors was fun, especially at the beginning when I thought things were going to start happening, when I believed the talented ones were going to break loose and write stories that would win contests. (Two years later they did. I didn’t know how long it was going to take.)

  There were other bright spots. If I have one thing to teach it is perseverance and hard work. I love to work. I love to write and I like to rewrite and I don’t care how long it takes to get something right. I like to sit down at a typewriter every morning and make something out of nothing. I can take it when half of what I write is not “any good,” i.e., publishable. I learn from writing. I feel good after I have been writing and I miss it like crazy when I don’t do it.

  At least one of the students actually began to believe what I said about writing every day and getting the work done. At the end of the semester she turned in two long stories and showed another one to one of the other teachers. That was the only time I got jealous of anything they did. I wondered why she didn’t show them all to me.

  Also, when I would look around the table during workshop I fancied I saw recognition of the intelligence of what I was trying to teach them in some of their faces. They were believing it even though they weren’t all ready to do it yet.

  I preached to them that WRITING IS REWRITING. I kept writing that on the blackboard as a joke. “Wait a minute,” I would exclaim in the middle of some entirely different matter. “I just thought of something.” Then I would run excitedly to the blackboard and write WRITING IS REWRITING.

  Another bright spot was a quiet young woman who turned in simple, hopeful stories that were easy to edit and who listened when I told her how to fix them. One of the stories was chosen to go to Intro, a publication of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which is a very nice coup for a young writer in one of the programs and sometimes even gains them notice from a publisher.

  I held on to the hope that they were learning what I was teaching them whether it showed in their stories yet or not. Most of them had been in many writing classes before and knew all the mantras about point of view and so forth. I couldn’t help remembering that William Shakespeare and William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov and Cervantes and Turgenev never went to writing classes or sat in workshops letting fourteen other people pick their creations into pieces.

  I tried to control the criticism and never let it go past the point where it might be helpful but I’m not sure I succeeded in that. After a few months I fell into the workshop mentality and stopped being careful enough with what I let happen.

  Also, I began to worry about how I would grade them. Because they had all had so many writing classes they were very good critics and editors of each other’s stories. They could pick stories apart with the best of them. They could talk critically about what was wrong with the stories better than I could because I had tried my best for twenty years to never read criticism or think of writing in the abstract. My modus operandi was just to read the best and most beautiful writing I could find and never read a line of bad writing if I could help it.

  But, as I said, I was getting paid so I read their stories with the best attention I could give them.

  At the very end of the semester we had a visiting writer. He was not a man whose writing I admired or could even force myself to read so I was dreading having to drive him around for four days. I have always been very careful not to have writer friends unless they are people whose work I really admire. I had asked Larry McMurtry to be our guest but he said he no longer gave advice to people. Then I asked a writer who I thought was a good technician if not a great writer but he didn’t want to do the huge amount of work required by the gig. For seven thousand dollars we needed someone to come to town, stay four days and have individual meetings with each of fifteen writers, plus give a public reading and attend my workshop. That’s a lot of work for seven thousand dollars in today’s creative writing gig market and you get what you pay for as my father knew.

  I spent a sleepless night the night before our visiting writer arrived trying to get myself up for entertaining him. I told myself his job was to talk to the students and give them a different perspective on their writings and I should be glad to have the help. I told myself that I would be nice to him and try to remember how weird it is to be in his position. I have been in that position although no amount of money would ever tempt me to read student papers back then.

  I tried not to resent the fact that besides being a writer whose work I thought was boring he was the new editor of an anthology and had removed one of my short stories from the new edition. Plus he had published his own story in the book so that was another thing I resented.

  RESENTED. Had one semester of teaching creative writing turned me into a RESENTER. Jesus Christ, I muttered. Let me out of here.

  The visiting writer arrived. He was a sweet, kind, ex-alcoholic who is part of the large group of teacher-writers who run the
writing programs around the United States and invite each other to lecture and seem to believe in what they are doing and work hard to do it well. He had been invited by another faculty member after I couldn’t find anyone I admired to accept the job. I should have been grateful that I had anyone to do the work but I kept thinking about the terrible writers who were brought in when I was a student and how cynical it made me when my professors pretended to admire their work. On top of resentment I was getting cynical. No wonder people stop writing when they start teaching, I decided, which dug my resentment grave deeper.

  My visitor had been on the wagon for a year. As soon as he arrived he fell off the wagon and started getting drunk every night with an emeritus professor he knew from his past. He met with the students, drank with some of them at lunch and with many of them at night, gave an embarrassing reading, was too hung over to stay at my workshop and told all the students they were wonderful writers.

  They loved him. I gave him his check for seven thousand dollars and put him on the plane back to California. So it goes.

  The best thing about his visit was knowing I didn’t have to have a visiting professor again for several years. I knew one thing for sure. Whoever I invite will be a sober person who would not go out and drink with my students. I am the Carrie Nation of the creative writing program and I intend to stay that way.

  Meanwhile, onward. I still believe that I am doing more good than harm.