The Women in the Back of the Room

One of the colleges that sometimes hires me to teach, a for-profit private university, requires its students to take a 6-week introductory course that covers such practical essentials as university policies, how to read a syllabus, and how to use the school's online library. In the course students are also introduced to working in a team environment, writing papers, preparing oral presentations, and performing academic research. I used to teach this course a lot, and I rather enjoyed working with the new, nervous students, which often entailed much babysitting though the majority of students were well into adulthood.

Several years ago one of my students showed up for the first 3 weeks, then disappeared. If he was not straight off the bus from Mexico, he hadn't been in California for long, and though his spoken English was passable, his writing was not so good and I told him that it was something we could work on, something that he would have to spend a lot of time working on himself. He worked as a landscaper during the day, but on class night he was clean and well dressed, and he took notes in a very nice hard-cover book of notepaper. I appreciated his obvious if somewhat reserved enthusiasm, his eagerness.

I never learned why he did not return for the 4th night, though I heard from other students that there was some problem with financial aid. Maybe so. The university is a for-profit institution, and much of its profit comes from financial aid its students obtain.

For several reasons I teach at that university less often than I used to, partially because I now teach at a local community college where the nights are shorter, the academic freedom is greater...and I can sometimes where jeans if I'm feeling particularly sloppy. For the most part, the experience is rewarding; because my classes are at night, many of my students are working adults who take their education seriously enough to show up, to take notes, to do the work, to ask questions. Often, though, there are the students I am suffering now: the young women in the back of the room who giggle, who "talk about girl things" when I am talking, who lean against the wall with their heads in their slender hands and who must wish their parents were not "making them go to school." (Yes, they said that.)

I do not begrudge these women for being in my class, and I am hopeful that they will learn how going to college because someone tells them to might not be the best reason for their presence. I know they are young and I am old, and that they see me as old. If I had started college when I was their age, I probably would have behaved as they do. But I wish I could introduce them to the man who landscaped all day and then spent 4 hours a night with me, because I really liked that guy--respected him. And, too, I wish I had had a chance to tell him how I felt, that he even now personifies the reasons I continue to slog through the papers, the quizzes, the readings, the hours of drudgery I forget every time I encounter someone like him.

A Supposedly Fun Thing He'll Never Do Again

I've read more about David Foster Wallace than I have read his writings themselves. I have one of his works on my bookshelf (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), but over the years I've read snippets of his stuff here and there. Whether familiar with his works or not, though, I was nevertheless surprised when I read in today's newspaper that Wallace is dead, apparently accomplished through self-inflicted hanging at home in southern California.

Far be it for me to question a person's reasoning for suicide, but even in my amateur status as a scribe, I become somewhat nervous whenever I learn of a professional, famous writer deciding to see what dreams may come. Even those of us in the minor leagues, after all, usually cheer those who have made it to The Show, despite our petty jealousies.

After finishing the paper, I slid Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing from its place between Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect and Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, and I thumbed through its pages to see what I could see. On page 4 I found this: "In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from [Illinois] farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore." I like that quote, for it reminds me of the first time my father took me to play tennis on similar courts. Later in the book though, is this:

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.

But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out...,whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers and starers.

The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people's attention. Dislike being watched.

There is more, but I think the point is well made. And, just to delve deeper into writing-type things, I opened John Gardner's classic On Becoming a Novelist, and found this in the preface:

The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he's fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow--long, careful studies of the hopes, joys, and disasters of creatures who, strictly speaking, do not exist. The writer may be undermined by creeping misanthropy, while the writer's wife, or husband, is growing sulky and embarrassed.

I certainly do not know if Wallace suffered from such frustration, but I do understand how any writer might suffer in such a way. Gardner also writes that while people will encourage others to be doctors and business executives and housewives, those same people will openly point out the lack of opportunities for dreamy eyed and idealistic writers. (When I was 13 or 14, my Aunt Wanda said this when I told her I wanted to be a writer: "Why?!" If I had said that I dreamed of being a brick-layer, she might have applauded.)

Hemingway, too, has something to say about writers, and I found this in his On Writing:

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Hemingway, like Wallace, offed himself, though he opted for a double-barrelled shotgun instead of a noose.

It is unfair, however, to say that writers either have or deserve extra helpings of angst, anxiety, and self-pity; they are, in fact, as a group, probably more prone to whining than are other professions. Often as I stroll through Sears or Target and see a man my age selling vacuum cleaners or plasma TVs, I try to imagine what his dreams are: is that what he envisioned for himself when he was 13 or 14?

Wallace, for whatever of his reasons, is dead, and I do not feel the same sense of loss I did upon learning that Raymond Carver was dead. People are killed or kill themselves every day, and I don't believe that a dead writer necessarily deserves more attention than anyone else. But I do think I might have missed something in Wallace's works, something I now might need to discover.

Commuting Home and Wishing I...

Words and ideas, as of late, have been like rain in Sacramento's August: rare as a good steak. (Note: beware of pseudo-writers bearing weak similes as gifts.) Perhaps happy with the completion of a short story, I've found comfort nesting in my laurels. I do have an idea of another short story, the genesis of which occurred last year. The premise has been fermenting in the back of my fat head for awhile, and now it seems to be moving forward a bit, its parts congealing. The working title is "Sixes and Eights," but the plot and characters still need to sort themselves out.

Part of the overall problem, certainly, is the unknown audience: the few friends who have professed to occasionally stopping in here are, it seems, occupied with life's business, and there is nothing quite so futile as writing for nobody. From talking now and then to other writers, however, the hope that someone is out there reading is good enough--and it often works for me. The Internet is a grand thing, and there is always a chance that someone will stop by. It is (sticking with weak similes) like fishing: you cast the bait into the water and hope a fish is hungry. I certainly imagine some people reading; in fact, I imagine specific people, whether they like it or not. Oddly enough, there is no attempt to publicize anything here, so if there are no readers, who is to blame?

Quite often, the ideas for writing come from visiting the past. At least, from visiting the past--locations, people. The past is a dangerous place and time to visit, however, for a person can get stuck there and accomplish nothing of value. This, I think, in some ways makes writers of science fiction superior to the rest of us: if they are good, they do not suffer the past, are not burdened by it. Perhaps they carry their own brand of pessimism, however, in that they often imagine a burdensome future.

When I teach college composition classes, I impress upon my students the importance of knowing their audience; I have not, however, learned to apply that to my creative writing. I wonder if I even want to know much about whatever audience is out there, for if I did, I might try to be too specific, too particular. Perhaps not having a defined, static audience should make writing easier; who knows? When asked if he had an audience in mind when he wrote, the poet William Stafford answered, "No, it's just for myself. I'm very indulgent at the time of writing. I'll accept anything, any old trash; it can never be low enough to keep me from writing it." That's a good approach, isn't it?