How big would a room have to be to hold all of the Creative Writing students he had taught at Hellman? For lack of a better idea, he attempted to do the math.
For nine years, he had taught two sections of twelve students in the fall and spring. Add to that this tenth year with a reduced course load for NEPCAJE meetings. Double all of that to accommodate the twelve writers who turned up and took their places at the table at some point during the semester, displacing the students to the windowsills. And then he had to make space for himself and the Professor. He lost count while debating whether they should account for two seats in his vast classroom, or if he should furnish them with additional chairs to represent every iteration of the course.
Whose story was this? He could make Max the protagonist, which would make the empty chair Anton’s. If it was Rashid’s story, and Rashid was waiting for Charles to arrive and take a seat, the drama could turn on whether Charles appeared or whether Charles appeared as a he, she, or they. He imagined his way around the room, one potential protagonist at a time.
Mark still hadn’t written a word. He spent hours in his office, as he had spent ten years in the classroom, cultivating each of those twelve possibilities. Whoever’s story this was, Mark knew that the central character would not come from among those twelve writers at the table, who would soon find themselves at other tables acting as lawyers and singers and stepfathers and doctors, inhabiting roles that had once seemed unimaginable or unnerving or simply beyond their limits. The central character would not come from among the twelve students seated on the windowsills, watching and marveling at and worrying about what they were doing at the table. Those twelve static figures in the windows knew their limits—we all do—but they did not yet love them. In their lives, their limits had been humiliating or frustrating, frightening or depressing, defining what they could not do, encompassing all they would never be.
Mark knew neither he nor the Professor could be the central character. A genuine character would emerge from that indeterminate space between the chairs at the table and the windowsills, the breach between Mark and the Professor. This was not a place where people lived beyond or without limits. It was not even a habitable space. It was a moment. It was an opportunity available in the classroom to measure the distance between our intentions and our achievements, the chance to learn to love the lifelong work of mending that gap.
TECHNICAL EXERCISE 5: LAST CLASS
The rain had come suddenly and hard while the students were shouting their thanks and goodbyes, bemoaning Mark’s announcement that he would not be on campus for commencement, making promises to be in touch, and angling for leniency on their final grades, so it was not until they were all gone that Mark thought to close the wide-open windows. He pulled the last one down and watched the chaotic end of the semester on the Common, the students rushing around the pond, heads disappearing beneath hoods and umbrellas, their familiar shapes melting into the other bodies streaming across campus to freedom.
Mark was leaving tomorrow morning for a month in Rome, and as he had been sleeping at Paul’s place for the last several weeks to mitigate the distance between them, he had not been to Ipswich to locate a suitcase, never mind pack. Presently, though, he was waiting for the Professor to turn up. He and Mark always came together after the last class to assign a provisional grade for each student. It was reliably contentious, and often so unpleasant that they didn’t communicate for a week afterward, time enough for Mark to read the final portfolios—which the Professor considered an exercise in redundancy. As he liked to say, he didn’t believe in miracles. The Professor’s neglect of this duty gave Mark leverage, which he used to raise everybody’s official final grade.
He had an endless supply of As. Where else was he going to spend them?
As the rain obliterated his view of the campus, Mark retreated to his chair at the head of the room, set his bag on the Professor’s chair, as he did every day of every semester, and reached in for his notebook and a pen. The crowd streamed in, students from across the years arriving in waves, hoisting each other up onto each windowsill, a dozen at a time, and then the later waves took to the chairs until every seat was shared by four, with four more perched on every arm, and still dozens more were rolling in, shoving their way into the open space below and then on top of the table, closing up even that gap between the Professor’s chair and his.
Mark couldn’t imagine how the classroom could accommodate anyone else. He couldn’t even see the door. And yet, there would be another wave of students arriving in September, and more again rolling in next spring. Where was the Professor? He saw hundreds of faces turned to him, hopeful and anxious wide-eyed gazes fixed on the front of the room, and he couldn’t get a clear view of anything else, not even the chair next to his.
There was no Professor beside Mark. Every student could plainly see that there had never been a Professor besides Mark. Of course, the man they saw cared as much about their commas and conjunctions as he did about a catastrophic illness or their capacity for kindness. That was Creative Writing.
(499 words)
END
Acknowledgments
This book exists thanks to the faith and forbearance of my editor, Jack Shoemaker, and my agent, Gail Hochman; the great work done by Megan Fishmann, Jordan Koluch, Jennifer Alton, Yuki Tominaga, Denise Silva, and everyone at Counterpoint; the intelligence and indulgence of Mary Ann Matthews and Michelle Blake; the sustaining enthusiasm of Alexandra Zapruder, Henry Bolter, Marcia Folsom, Diana Shaw Clark, and Monica Klien; and, as ever, first and foremost, Peter Bryant. And the dumplings at Mary Chung.
© Frank Monkiewicz
MICHAEL DOWNING is the author of nine books, including the national bestseller Perfect Agreement; Breakfast with Scot, which was adapted as a feature film; Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center; and Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. A frequent commentator in the national media on Congress and the clocks, he teaches creative writing at Tufts University. Find more at michaeldowningbooks.com.
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