by George Beahm
According to Hatlen, the special seminar courses were created to allow faculty members and students to plan classes outside the curriculum. And students needed to apply for admission. The Contemporary Poetry seminar was limited to twelve students and involved a “very intense discussion about poetics, how you write poetry, and so on.” Hatlen says that Steve “wasn’t very theoretical, but on the fringes.” Tabby King, who was then a sophomore, says she’ll never forgive Hatlen for not letting her in.
As a sophomore, King had taken Hatlen for Modern American Literature, and Hatlen feels that this course had a long-term influence on King, for it’s where he came into contact with Steinbeck and Faulkner (King now collects first editions of Faulkner).
Before the contemporary poetry seminar, Jim Bishop had King as a student in 1966 in freshman English, and he remembers “Steve’s big physical presence” and how King was “religious about writing.” He also remembers that King always had a paperback in his pocket and knew all these authors that nobody else ever heard of. “Steve was a nice kid, a good student, but never had a lot of social confidence,” Bishop says. “Even then, though, he saw himself as a famous writer and he thought he could make money at it. Steve was writing continuously, industriously, and diligently. He was amiable, resilient, and created his own world.”
In his introduction to Moth, a student literary magazine published in 1970, Jim Bishop wrote about that extraordinary poetry seminar: “From that seminar, which supposedly terminated in January 1969, came a half dozen or so energetic and highly individual young poets who have been rapping in hallways, in coffee shops, in front of Stevens Hall, or wherever any two of them chance to meet, ever since, and that original group has grown this year to a dozen, sometimes as many as twenty, who meet every other Friday in an informal workshop to read their poetry, alternatively to read and reassemble one another, and hopefully to emerge with a better understanding of themselves, their world, and their work. This anthology brings together selected works of that amazing group and marks perhaps the climax of an extraordinary phenomenon.”
Besides Stephen King, whose poems “The Dark Man,” “Donovan’s Brain,” and “Silence” were included in Moth, the anthology includes six poems by Tabby Spruce, as well as poems by Michael Alpert (‘72), a Bangor publisher, who has since collaborated with King on a fancy edition of The Eyes of the Dragon; by three of King’s best friends from college, Jim Smith (‘72), Dave Lyon (‘70), and Bruce Holsapple (‘73); by Diane McPherson (who designed the Moth cover); and by George MacLeod (‘72), King’s former roommate. The others who have work in Moth are Susan Lienhard (‘71), Stephen Black (‘70), Mike Gilleland (‘72), Sherry Dresser, and Jean Stewart.
The poetry workshop met frequently at the Maine Christian Association House on College Avenue, among other places, throughout King’s senior year. Jim Bishop was on leave from teaching that year and living at Pemaquid Point. But he still commuted to Orono for the meetings. Tom Bailey and Graham Adams of the English faculty presided, and it was Adams who allowed King to teach a course as a senior undergraduate. Adams served as the front person, because the university wouldn’t allow a student to teach a course. But King was, in reality, the teacher, and the course, naturally enough, was called Popular Literature in America.
King’s own thoughts about the poetry workshops and creative writing courses at Maine were recorded in interviews with the University of Southern Maine’s Presumscot in 1977, and with UM’s Ubris II in 1984. “I realized that what I had for those years I was involved with the writing seminar was a big blank,” King told Ubris II. “There were about forty to fifty poems, and two of them I’ve still got around. So for me, there was this tremendously exciting experience and nothing came of it. It was like being on a long drunk. But, on the other hand, I wasn’t typical. For a lot of people, good did come of it.”
When asked if he learned the craft of writing in college courses, King replied: “No, no, but I don’t think it was bad. The creative writing courses at the college level are very important, but I don’t think they’re necessary. It’s a supportive experience.… The best thing about it was that the art of writing was taken seriously, and that’s an awfully good thing.”
In 1969–70, students from the workshop were involved with much more than poetry. George MacLeod, for instance, was one of the leaders of the student strike. Members of the group would often meet at the coffee shop that was part of the old bookstore in the Memorial Union.
Diane McPherson, who has a Ph.D. from Cornell, and who was a member of both the seminar and the workshop, shared tutorial writing sessions with King under Ted Holmes. “We wrote independently but then got together once a week, and it was great fun, often hilarious. I was the ideal audience for Steve’s wildly inventive fantasies. My thing then was to cut all the extraneous adverbs and adjectives. Steve was pretty pop. He was writing exciting stories, but with no control.”
McPherson also remembers King singing. “There was this coffeehouse on campus—the Ram’s Horn—and there would be these open sings, or open hoots. People brought their instruments, and Steve would always sing country and western songs about this terrible loser who never had any luck. I remember thinking at that time that Steve was singing about a version of himself that rang true.”
King is also remembered hanging out at the back booth of the Bear’s Den with fellow students Jim Tierney (‘69—later, Maine’s attorney general) and Steve Williams (‘70). And he was known to frequent the old Shamrock Bar across from Pat’s Pizza, where he would join friends and members of the more radical campus groups for folk music and beer.
At the end of the tutorial time with Professor Holmes, Ted sent McPherson’s and King’s stories to his agent, and soon after King had a story accepted by Cavalier. “He decided early what kind of writer he wanted to be, and he went and did it,” McPherson says. “He used to say, ‘I’m hoping to have my own career.’ Now and then I think how funny it is that I went to college with Stephen King.”
Everyone agrees that the first person to officially declare King a writer was Ted Holmes. In Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Winter writes that King, as a sophomore, showed Burt Hatlen the manuscript of a novel he had written his freshman year. Hatlen in turn handed the manuscript to Holmes, who, after reading it, said ecstatically, “I think we’ve got a writer.” “When Steve was a junior and senior,” Holmes says, “we had a lot of conferences over his work. He was a natural storyteller, of course, and his craftsmanship was always pretty good.”
One of King’s stories, “Night Surf,” eventually became The Stand. Other stories completed at UMaine were “Here There Be Tygers,” “Cain Rose Up,” “The Blue Air Compressor,” and “Heavy Metal.”
For most of the decade of the sixties, Ted Holmes was the sole creative writing teacher at Maine. Winthrop C. Libby, then president of the university, remembers a talk he once had with Holmes about King’s prospects as an important professional writer. “Ted was not especially complimentary on that point. He said, as I recall, that while Steve certainly had a knack for storytelling, he wished that Steve would write more than horror stories.”
Today, Holmes says of King’s career, “I’m very glad that he’s so successful. I respect his craftsmanship, but I haven’t read all his books.”
For his part, Libby remembers King as “essentially a very gentle person who acted the part of being a very wild man.” Libby said that he’d see King “hovering around in the background” of student affairs committee meetings (King was elected to the Student Senate by the largest vote ever cast up to that time). “I’d always stop and chat with him; and my wife and I went to his wedding in Old Town, which was rather strange, because the ceremony was at the Catholic church and the reception at the Methodist” (Steve was the Methodist; Tabitha the Catholic).
As a freshman, King lived at 203 Gannett Hall. But after that first year, he moved off campus. In his senior year, he remembers living alone in a “scuzzy riverside cabin not far from the university
.” In his junior year, King lived on North Main Street in Orono in a house that has since burned down. One of his roommates was George MacLeod, who now operates MacLeod’s Restaurant in Bucksport. There were two apartments for ten people, and MacLeod remembers King had a “whole regiment” of open beer bottles around his bed. He also remembers the future novelist’s avid reading habits. “Steve read like his life depended on it,” MacLeod says. “He was writing and reading all the time. Basically, he was an insecure kid who hid in books.” MacLeod remembers that a lot of energy from the poetry workshop went into politics, but he says that while King would make a lot of noise and contribute to the chaos of the times, he was not an effective leader for causes.
“He’s a loose cannon as far as politics go,” MacLeod says. “He was a noisy radical opposed to Vietnam, and he did lead a group of students one night to President Libby’s house. He was kind of an odd person: on one hand very private and yet public in a loud way.”
Some of the political gains that resulted from what MacLeod terms a coalition of splinter groups from the SDS and other activist organizations were a program for independent study and having a pass/fail option instead of grades for students. “Steve was a figurehead for some radical efforts,” claims MacLeod, “but basically he was middle-of-the-road in most areas. However, he was always there with his pitchfork and torch when you needed him.”
MacLeod, who was a member of both the poetry seminar and workshop groups with King, also offered some insights into the popular novelist’s personality. “Steve is uncomfortable with certain people and with large groups,” he says. “He’s erratic because he’s nervous. He’s a figurehead with feet of clay, and essentially he hasn’t changed.”
Emily Woodcock Templeton (‘70), who audited the poetry workshop that Steve was in, has some clear memories of the late sixties at Maine. “You felt like you were part of a school that was on the vanguard of great change, a time of building,” she says. “People were working hard. Reading was something everyone was doing then. In contrast to today’s atmosphere, a lot of people were at college to just read and learn. It shouldn’t be forgotten that at Maine no one was looking down on the soldiers fighting in Vietnam, but we were against the war. The University of Maine was the only university in the U.S. at the time that held a blood drive for the soldiers. As for Steve King, he was one of the more committed people on campus, not a rabble-rouser, but he spoke out about what he thought.”
David Bright (‘70) was the editor of The Maine Campus when King began his Garbage Truck column in 1969. He remembers King coming to him and saying he’d like to write a column. “Steve named it Garbage Truck because you never know what you’re going to find in a garbage truck.”
Bright was amazed at how King would stroll in just before deadline, put the paper in the typewriter, crank out his column, and hand it to the editor. It would be “letter-perfect copy,” Bright remembers, that would fit the space to the inch. “This is a guy who has at least seven stories going on in his head at the same time,” Bright says.
Even after he graduated from Maine, when there was a summer Maine Campus edited by Bob Haskell, King wrote “Slade,” the story of a western gunfighter—the seed for King’s novel The Dark Tower (book 1).
In the afterword to The Dark Tower, King writes about how the conception for the story began to take shape in March 1970:
During that spring semester, a sort of hush fell over my previously busy creative life—not a writer’s block, but a sense that it was time to stop goofing around with a pick and shovel and get behind the controls of one big great God almighty steam shovel, a sense that it was time to try and dig something big out of the sand, even if the effort turned out to be an abysmal failure.
This statement indicates that King developed confidence in himself and his talent at quite an early age. David Bright attributes some of that development to the University of Maine.
“The University of Maine is a good place,” Bright says. “You can be just about anything you want to be here.” He added that he thought the times, the atmosphere, and the type of campus that Win Libby created all contributed to the development of Stephen King.
“The university served King well,” Bright wrote in an article in the Portland Monthly, “taking a rather shy but brilliant Maine boy and turning him into an outgoing, productive asset to the state, yet leaving intact his wit, character, and eye for observing the people around him.”
Bright claims that Steve would like to provide more opportunity for other potential writers to do what he did at the university. “King sees a need for a program to help new writers develop,” Bright says. “He envisions some sort of a foundation—supported artists’ guild, which would help writers move their families to Maine, pay their expenses, and find an environment in which to write.”2
Bright agrees with King that the university could do more for young writers. “The university did for King what it’s supposed to do for its citizens,” he says. “But the university has got to remember that some kids aren’t as motivated as Steve King was.”
A few years ago, King did want to endow a creative writing chair in the English department, but there were some disagreements over how the gift was to be used and the matter fell through.
King’s former teachers at Maine disagree somewhat on his stature as a writer, but all seem to think highly of him as both a student and a person. Robert Hunting was chairman of the English department and had King as a student in an English drama course. “Steve and I are good friends but I don’t really read much of him,” Hunting says. “I’ve read a couple of his books, but I like him better as a person than a writer. He’s a very successful pop cult figure, and I’m a square. I have to remind myself, though, that Mozart also was a pop cult figure. Some of them become classics and some are forgotten. “Steve was in my class as a senior,” Hunting continued. “I was brand new here then. He was a very good student and helped me with the class. And I read his column with interest. Actually, I got to know him better when he was coming back after graduation. He was always very generous with his time. He talked to the students in many classes. Then for one year, he was my colleague.”
Hunting is referring to 1978, when King taught creative writing at Maine. Ulrich Wicks, the man who hired him, remembers King as a popular and effective teacher.
“Steve was very much liked and very good with students,” agrees Hunting. “He had all of these creative types. He was true and candid with them, but very kind also. I remember his saying to some very noisy young fellow that he’d have more of a chance with editors if he’d pay more attention to the nuts and bolts. He said they’d like it better if he’d spell better and if he’d write grammatical sentences. The student left happy.”
Hunting says he has always been fond of Steve as a person and in later years as a public-spirited citizen. “I like the positions he takes, even if I’m not his most admiring reader. I don’t think he’d mind me saying that, for I do admire him in so many ways.”
One of the students Steve had in 1978 in his creative writing course was the novelist Margaret Dickson, who admits she didn’t even know who he was. She says he was a good teacher because he was interested in all of his students and cared about them. “I found Steve a very generous, widely read, and interesting teacher,” she says.
King helped start Dickson on her way as a novelist, as he had done with Michael Kimball and Rick Hautala.
Although Robert Hunting has not read many of King’s books, other veterans of the English department do keep up with their most famous student’s works.
Burt Hatlen thinks King is one of the most serious writers working today. And creative writing teacher Connie Hunting brushes off the criticism that King’s works are shallow. “They’re always saying that Steve doesn’t say anything,” she says, “but The Stand says something.”
Professor Carroll Terrell says he quit the Maine Council of English and Language Arts a couple of years ago over King. “I stopped going there because t
hey had such awful opinions of him,” he says. “And these opinions were based on not having read anything of his at all.”
There does seem to be a group of people who refuse to read King—probably the same folks who make a big thing out of not watching TV or not listening to popular music.
Christopher Spruce, King’s brother-in-law and the former manager of King’s WZON radio station in Bangor, says this argument over whether King is an artist or just a good, entertaining storyteller is never-ending:
I can tell you that people should read his work seriously, because I believe he is a serious writer. He’s not just out for a fast buck—why should he be at this point? There’s a deep investment in his being the best writer he can be.
Connie Hunting says that although Stephen King has great influence on current writing students, they often pick up his tricks but not his deeper philosophical stances. “A novel like The Stand is not just a collection of horror—it’s saying something very clearly. But the students only pick up on the exaggerated style and write stuff like ‘the road regurgitated in front of us.’ What they get is only the glitz.”
Talking about her own friendship with Stephen King, Connie Hunting says, “People have very warm feelings about Steve—it’s not just that he’s the world’s best-selling novelist. It’s because he’s Steve and we know him, okay? It’s not that we’ve got a stake in him. He’s the neighborhood. He’s the Maine neighborhood.”
It is clear that King’s four years at the University of Maine were a time of tremendous growth. No, UM didn’t make Stephen King into the world’s bestselling author—it didn’t create that horrific and prolific imagination. But it did give him a solid foundation in literature and it did provide him with an environment where writing—most especially his own writing—was taken seriously. And more important, it gave him the freedom to explore, to be accepted for who he was, and to “act the part of a wild man,” as Winthrop Libby said. By his own account, as well as that of friends and faculty members, Stephen King left Maine with self-confidence and craftsmanship. Not a bad accomplishment for any college graduate.
