These scenes have been excerpted from the first act of the play Life Worth Living. Modeled after a trauerspiel, or “mourning play,” it was first performed as a table read at Mouse Arts and Letters Club in Chicago in April.
●
SCENE ONE
Lights up on Stuart (late forties/fifties), who speaks directly to the audience.
STUART
Before I even knew what teaching was, I loved to teach. When I was a child, as soon as I left the crib—and oh, believe me, I wanted to leave that crib! ha ha—my mother would join me in my puny bed, the one that felt so vast at the time, and she would read aloud to me.
In the early days of those bedtime readings, Mother couldn’t wait to abandon the mind-numbing books she received at her baby shower and begin to share stories with me, real stories. From, well—life. And, though some of my colleagues on this very campus produce fine scholarship of them as a subject of study and research, those children’s picture books, to her and to me, never thrilled.
Sooner than I could comprehend them, Mother liked to read me those rare stories we might consider to have attained, somehow, the quality of the “mythic.” From all over the world—though, I’m now realizing, mostly Western cultures—Hans Christian Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Edith Hamilton’s interpretations of the Greeks… and the Bhagavad Gita, Sholem Aleichem’s playful, parable-like accounts of shtetl life…
How to pin down the kind of writing I liked then… I hesitate to use the word “fairy tale,” since some of these cultures consider holy scripture what we may call a “tale” or “fairylike”! But… it may give you a blurry idea.
My mother thought, like most mothers, that teleology was good for child-rearing, so she then tried sharing with me more iconic works of what they in books call “early readers”—but I never responded to these more long-form works, so eager to “connect” with my boyhood, to retrofit simple questions of growing up onto genre tropes like noir and romance. (Works that, if I’m being perfectly honest, more closely resemble the writing that I would, decades later, make a living from.)
Instead, though I could never have put it like this at that age, I think—if I had to describe it now…—I wanted language under pressure. I wanted short and compressed stories and situations that spoke both to a specific group of people anchored in a moment in time—but that also had a magic ability to peek out beyond those people and that time and that place towards a wider landscape of life. Works that were able to inhabit a kind of prophetic vision and distance.
Thinking back, I now wonder if my preference for this kind of writing was an early tell that I experienced youth as an obligation I had to get through, that life would really begin for me once I aged out of most of my milestones…
Silence.
Whenever she read to me, my mother, without thinking, would trace her index finger on each word. When my mother liked a particular story, she’d read it to me over and over. (That was an early lesson in the pleasures of letting a text and its rhythms get in, truly get in you. Which, like sex, requires repetition.)
After a while, I… Well, with her help, I taught myself how to read. She never said this is A, and this B, and so on, all the way to Z. One day, just shy of two years of age, I simply started to read the word her index finger was tracing back to her. I suppose if I think about it now, it is shocking. The idea that you, the parent, sit firm in your belief that you are spending time with your child performing some action that the child cannot, and bam, without warning, the child does that very same thing… Like if a baby bird decided it was its turn to regurgitate into its mother’s beak.
Silence.
Student… teacher… I never would have used these words, “teacher” and “student,” to describe what my mother and I were to each other, though I suppose they would, in a sense, among other words, be accurate.
Neither of us—well, mm, Mother’s long dead, so ah—I can’t remember which story it was that I first read back to her. At parties, regaling her guests of my excellence, she liked to say it was Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.” A pit in my stomach formed whenever she shared that title, my body telling me that the first I read back to her must have been a different story, but which…?
Anyway, between sips of wine, Mother would say: “Imagine this. I’m reading to my infant son about an impoverished couple in the Russian countryside. One day, the wife sends the husband to go fishing for dinner. He has bad luck—at first. He casts his net: mud. He casts the net again: seaweed. Then—and here my child interrupts me—‘he caught a t-t-t-talking go-o-o-o-lden fish.’ Ha ha ha!”
I hated when Mother told this story! As if the story of my learning to read could ever hold a candle to the wisdoms one could find in Pushkin’s tale in verse. Why waste your guests’ time? Why waste mine? Why flatten mysterious works of literature into a fucking, a pancake of parental pride in your child’s precocity?
In my body, at these parties, I wanted the story to continue as it did when she read it to me as an infant: Why stop there, Mother? Why not tell us about how the couple spared the fish because it could talk? What could that mean?
You know, about the food chain: which creatures we grant the right to live and why. In some translations, the husband tells the wife that the fish spoke “like a Christian.” And—and—and that the wife sent the husband back to ask the fish for a repaired washtub, which the fish granted. The wife, discovering the fish’s magic ability to grant wishes, then lets her requests spiral out of control, escalating to the point where, after the fish had already appointed the wife tsaritsa—of Russia!—the wife asks the fish for total supremacy over the fish’s domain: the kingdom of the sea! The fish then and only then—why not before?—teaches the wife about her greed, at the exact moment when she wants to control not just man but man and nature.
Of course, the fish reverses all of the wife’s wishes. Unlike the “fairy tales” that have lingered in our festering culture—I’m thinking of “The Princess and the Pea,” “Hansel and Gretel,” pieces of folklore that often grant their heroes a resolved, happy ending—“The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” is a different kind of fairy tale, one that punishes its heroes for the pursuit of their desires. This magic fish returns our heroic couple to their original state: horrible poverty. What?!?!
As I grew up—meaning, after I had had those first brushes with sex—Mother still held parties, and she still told this same story, a story which was not necessarily inaccurate so much as it was massaged to get what she believed to be the essential truth across: my extraordinary nature. But by then, Mother, I was a teenager, and I know some part of you knew as much as I: there was much more you could have told your guests, and it was all happening right under your nose.
Anyway, back to when I was two or so: after the myths, taking a cue that I preferred short to long form, Mother began to share with me the prose stories she really loved—and, finally, lyric poetry. She loved to hear me read, but I strongly preferred when she read to me. As soon as she introduced verse into our reading diet, I couldn’t get enough. For whatever reason, I drifted towards the poets who reckoned with faith without mediation: Dante and Petrarch over Shakespeare, Donne and Hopkins (and of course Coleridge) over Wordsworth. When my mother read poems to me, her perfect scansion seemed it had a strange, impossible knack for matching the rhythm of my beating heart. After a while, a ratio had formed, one I did not like, one where I had to read a few poems to her in order for her to read just one to me.
Silence.
I remember around that age, once I first started going to preschool, I would carpool with a boy named Jack. I loved to read the street signs as they passed in the window. But with my reading, Jack’s mother worried that I held a mirror up to the mediocrity of her parenting. She pulled over the first time I read those street signs, and scrawled the word “stop” on a piece of paper, and asked me, “What does this say, Stuart?”—as if she couldn’t have just pointed at the red octagonal sign right over there and asked me to read it.
And also, the dolt, as if I hadn’t just been reading much more difficult words like “Stephens Lane” and “Mahogany Street”!—and “avenue”! “What does this say, Stuart?” Jack’s mother asked. Tch. “Stop,” I said. She gasped, and then when she dropped me off that day, Jack’s mother confronted mine.
“Are you enrolling your son in some sort of cruel program to get ahead?” Smiling, my mother replied: “Heavens, no! He taught himself.”
These are some of my happiest memories. Not just because they mark a rare uncomplicated closeness between me and my mother. But because this was my childhood christening itself, purpose coalescing: it is my duty to always be ahead. “Two-year-olds can’t read!” Well, there I was in carpool, on the way home from preschool, reading the street signs out loud to the horror of Jack ha ha ha, little, stupid Jack and his stricken mother. With each sign I read, I felt I took one step further ahead of Jack, who was of course, stuck behind.
I saw the delight this precocity brought my mother, how it wrested her up up up from the depths of her despair, and I thought hell, alright: getting ahead. If one wants to walk, one does not take one step and pause, one step and pause. One takes step after step after step. So. Here I live. Here I get ahead, pacing: i.e. reading, thinking, writing. In the house of literature. My name felt like destiny: Stuart. Stu-art. Student. Of art. Yes.
Of course—what with all that therapy!—I could say, “dialectically,” that this period also foreshadowed the problem that would haunt my twenties and thirties (and maybe even through to now): that grief, that feeling that, before I knew it, childhood left as soon as it came, just as I, for the first time, began to want it.
Silence.
And I have this student, Samuel is his name. He reminds me of my young self. I can see that fire behind his eyes. Samuel is throwing every stylistic technique he learns from the readings I assign to try and put language to that flame, I can tell. But he’s a bit too impressionable: If I assign Hemingway, his barely veiled accounts of his (evidently very difficult) life from that week have a funny way of being concise and prosaic. If I assign Lawrence or one of the Brontës, his writing takes on a more sweeping feeling, more social interest, where a character’s interiority spews onto a tapestry of human relation, and so on and so forth.
He’s… not very good. But ever since I first read his application to my class, I detected something… something about him, something about him that makes me lean in, makes me want to know more, spend more time with him.
And, well. I hate to say this. But he looks just like a, ahem… how to put it… he bears an uncanny resemblance to a very, erm, important teacher of mine from when I was in middle school. You know what kind of teacher I mean; we all have those who unmake our old world and construct a new one in its wake. So… wouldn’t you say it would be absurd if, if that resemblance to arguably the most world-making teacher I had didn’t provoke, if it uh, didn’t—didn’t prompt some sort of strong reaction, you know. I’m. I’m not sure what to call it but his face, how he looks at me: it’s, it’s provoking a certain… feeling in me. And… I’m terrified.
Lights up on SAMUEL (college-aged, flimsy masculinity). He speaks to the audience. He holds a printed copy of his writing for this week’s class.
SAMUEL
This is my best work yet. I’m unpublished—um, for now. But people like Stuart make me think that one day my pain—though sometimes I wish I called it original sin, it feels as though it was something I was born with—as though it were the cost of existing at all—that one day my pain will become the foundation on which I build my pleasant life. That the very feeling—or set of feelings—that makes me yearn for death will, like desublimating a gas into a solid, become the thing I can lean against to construct myself.
I’ve read lots of creative-writing manuals and several say that by the time you’re—I think it was—by the time you’re twelve, you’ve lived enough life to write forever. As in: from twelve on, right up until you croak, if you locked yourself in a room just type typing away, for the rest of your life, you could draw on those first twelve years and have enough material for book after book. Fiction, memoir, whatever. I’m not sure I agree—if I think about the “average” person living the “average” life, that is—but in my case, my life is far from average. I know I’ve withstood enough to write endlessly, to make writing into a life, a real body of work—I know it.
If I can get people like Stuart—I’ve been reading his work so long it still feels wrong to say his first name out loud, but that’s what he wants us to call him—if I can get Stuart to say my name in the right rooms populated with the right people, I’m set. He’s been showing me tough love all term. And I get it—he’s, you know—he’s trying to keep me humble, to knock me down a peg, and I—I get that, I know who I am, I’m that overambitious freshman, the one lucky enough to be let into the most competitive creative-writing class in all of the university—Advanced Fiction.
So… how can I convince Stuart to enact some sort of reversal? That he doesn’t need to “teach me a lesson,” to show me “tough love,” but that he needs to be curious about me and my, my… well, my beliefs! I watch as everyone in class slowly tries to write the same kind of book—and, to get ahead of things—I could see how you could consider this
(of his manuscript)
to be subject to the same criticism—but I promise it’s different. The others, they all creep towards Stuart house style, stories of one’s greatest pain told in plain language, with leaps in time, subject: structure bearing the thrust of the meaning-making as opposed to the language itself. Fiction written in the style of tell-all personal essay, or one of those memoirs by, probably, a French person, probably about childhood sexual abuse. Sure.
Fine—it works in Stuart’s books. And I like his books. As a matter of fact, his books, especially A Passage, helped me see flashes of specific insights I needed to get through some things with my father… But my books are not fated to be like his books, and he needs to see that.
He needs to set me on the best and steadiest path to writing my books. And, I hope, these pages will finally convince him to do just that.
Phew. Here goes nothing.
Samuel drops off his draft in Stuart’s faculty mailbox.
●
SCENE TWO
Stuart and Samuel at Stuart’s lovely office. Fall leaves of old, beautiful trees erupt in oranges and reds through Stuart’s window.
A slash (“/”) indicates overlapping dialogue.
SAMUEL
I don’t understand—
STUART
It’s—it’s simple. I / told you
SAMUEL
How can you even—it’s ridiculous, how can you—a grade, creative writing? I mean, a—a—a— / a—a—
STUART
Will you let me finish?
SAMUEL
A bad grade?
STUART
Will you please let me finish my thought.
Silence.
STUART
Thank you.
(clears throat. Then, slowly:)
I told you, the most important idea of my course is revision. Re-vision. Seeing the—apprehending, ah—understanding the familiar anew. Changing your mind. Think, Samuel, really think… you know what, let’s try something. Close your eyes. Picture your novel excerpt. Imagine you’re doing what many writers do at artists’ residencies: you print your entire work page by page and paste it to a white wall with tape. You take several steps back and reckon with the thing you’ve made, the whole thing. Do you—can you see it? In your mind? In your heart? Now picture the previous draft, on a different wall in the same room. Really picture it. Now look at one wall, then the other, then the first, and the second. Now. Answer me honestly. Did your piece really change?
SAMUEL
(eyes still closed)
That’s called Track Changes. They have it in the word processor I use, they call it Track Changes.
STUART
Alright.
SAMUEL
No, no—I’m, I’m trying to understand.
STUART
Are you? I’m talking about process. You refine things like sentences and word choice—using tools like “Track Changes” I suppose—once—and only once—the curds, the real stuff of literature, have been split from the whey of your drafty prose. You are not there. You have yet to find your cheesecloth, your tool that will separate your best, most prized impulses from your worst.
SAMUEL
Okay… but there is no cheese without whey.
STUART
Exactly! Now you’re getting somewhere. Exactly… I’m not saying that you’re wrong for having wrong impulses. Every writer does. I’m saying that that is the very nature of writing, the nature of drafting, to do what I say… you need to practice distinguishing between the curds and the whey. Otherwise it’s just milk.
SAMUEL
But wouldn’t that be vinegar or lemon, not cheesecloth—
STUART
Oh, same idea. Look: from this draft to the next, you moved some words around. I suppose that makes me vinegar, telling you, milk: get to work making the good cheese.
SAMUEL
But—
STUART
Don’t be dejected. You’re talented. Don’t worry: there’d be shocks of meaning, little bursts of emotion in my time with this piece. But followed always by bafflement at a choice you’d make in the next sentence, or even the next word. Style and structure are not so easily separable: your style—only when it is at its best—is telling you what your piece is, what it wants to be. How can you learn from the wisdom of your most refined style at the sentence or even phrasal level to discover—or sediment—well, that has to do more with minerals, and earlier I was talking about cheese—anyway…—curdle! that’s the word—the point is, when I feel that a chapter of mine isn’t working, instead of throwing everything away, I try to listen even more carefully to what that flawed chapter wants to be. And then I begin to throw large, large chunks of writing away: whey! Lots and lots of whey, I promise!
SAMUEL
Okay.
STUART
Don’t be disappointed! This is Advanced Fiction, after all. You signed up to be treated like a journeyman. These are the growing pains you should expect.
Silence.
SAMUEL
So… in that case…
STUART
Yes?
SAMUEL
Well, what do you think these pages “want to be”?
STUART
Great question! Great! Let me see…
Stuart flips through his heavily annotated copy of Samuel’s work.
STUART
Ah, yes. Here, on page seven. Your nameless narrator muses on what to include in his—her—their?—I suppose that’s interesting, the gender of this character does in this moment strike me as ambiguous—your narrator wonders what to include in his eulogy for his beloved grandfather.
SAMUEL
And what to exclude.
STUART
Right! Right. So this here is one of the more exciting passages. It captures a familiar problem, one I’ve faced: at a funeral, you might want to say something other than what you feel would be polite, or flow nicely with the mannered feelings of the evening; you don’t know what the eulogy before yours will be like, so what if you—bring down the mood! Or bring it up too much, somehow. What if your eulogy is less concerned with language but more with some kind of grief-roar? Would that really be so inappropriate? But then again, someone is dead! You, the mourner, might feel it would pay greater respects if your grief were less controlled instead of more, for tears to flow not when it makes sense to cry but when it doesn’t make sense! That our narrator obsesses so much over this idea, and for so many pages, while—what is he doing—
SAMUEL
Uh… page seven it was?… making tea, I think they make tea and clean their apartment.
STUART
Right! See that’s good too—this tidying action while he thinks sort of uncontainable thoughts—good friction—sorry, you used “they”?—should I, too—?
SAMUEL
Don’t worry about it—
STUART
Okay! So… what the book wants to be. Let’s think… Remember our unit on Crime and Punishment. Culturally, people think of it as this big intimidating book about a murderer; but no, before he murders, Raskolnikov is an out-of-work, impoverished former student of law with just a little more schooling left before he can earn a living as a lawyer, or a law professor.
In the throes of his depression, Raskolnikov begins to believe that the only way out of his poverty and its attendant emotional swamp is to murder his pawnbroker. He justifies this by saying that crime, even a serious one like murder, is necessary if it sets an “extraordinary man” on a path towards being able to do the most good he can: Raskolnikov, pursuing an “extraordinary” life of noble scholarship, or lawyering—he might have been picturing a life not so different from this life I live here—he just needed a little sum of money to get back on his feet. Yet after he murders his pawnbroker—about a tenth of the way through the, indeed, long book—he suffers neurosis after neurosis after, you could say, psychosis, for the rest of the brick of a novel. Nine-tenths! And character after character he encounters, from his doctor to his sister, to his bailiff to a drunk on the street, they all press on that psychic terror of his, and it thrills us through to the end.
This is why we read Crime and Punishment—in fiction, interiority should structure a story, not event. So when I then get this block-quoted eulogy a few pages later, it doesn’t feel like payoff from the setup of that wonderful, ruminative apartment scene. Instead, it feels redundant, it feels like work. After such lurid interiority, I anticipate the speech to go wrong, which would only add to the tension of the narrator; instead, it goes off without a hitch.
And the eulogy is so long that I wondered if you were down to the wire, worrying about page count—nothing like that to whisk me right out of my immersion.
Samuel hangs his head.
STUART
Is this not helping…?
SAMUEL
No, that’s not it… Things have just been, I don’t know…
STUART
…Look. I am not your life teacher. I am your writing teacher. I don’t know the string of words that will address the baggage you have that is getting in the way of writing the unsparing / truth unsparingly.
SAMUEL
Unsparing truth unsparingly
STUART
Right. If you want, instead, we can talk about, you know, all the shit everybody’s talking about in this hallway: do you like to write a little every day or do you like to write a lot all at once, in the morning or at night.
SAMUEL
(humiliated)
No, no—
STUART
Let me ask you this. Do you like writing? I mean do you—do you actually enjoy the act of sitting down and, and writing? Because if you did, I feel like you would eulogize your grandpa, and then, maybe the next day or—I don’t know—it wouldn’t be a big deal—and you’d sit down and get back to work on your novel. You know. Like a writer. You wouldn’t be so out of gas from the eulogy that you would need to copy-paste it into your book.
(then)
I know you’ve been wondering about your grade. Until you show me you are at least attempting to learn the lessons of the course—the lessons I’ve spelled out once again in these office hours—I’ll have no choice but to give you a B-minus.
Silence.
SAMUEL
(quietly)
I think…
STUART
Mm?
SAMUEL
(meek)
I think A Passage is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Samuel exits.
STUART
Thank you?
Silence. Then, to the audience:
STUART
All those who teach at the university level must hold office hours of some kind. But what meetings and contracts and the like fail to consider is the disparity of what office hours might look like in the humanities versus what they like to call “STEM”— science, technology, engineering and mathematics; I think this is an awfully sweet metaphor, as if each thought that a student of disciplines such as biology and computer science might have would feed the cells in the stem of a flower, that each struggle, each advancement within these fields is like the mitochondria of one big gorgeous, I don’t know, zinnia.
But even if students of “STEM” have deep, personal relationships with their professors, office hours, most of the time—and I’m talking about average office hours, not office hours worthy of some sort of, I don’t know, report that makes it to the desks of university bureaucrats, not that kind of office hours, but normal office hours—at their worst, “STEM” office hours rarely cover subject matter more taboo than, say, a bad grade on a test, or stress.
But in the humanities, and especially in creative writing, a given student might, say, write about a neglectful father. Say the short story is in the first person; as their teacher, a fellow writer, you can’t help but know that this student, a young person—clawing in the dark for signs of who they are—that this young person is getting some sort of thrill or a sharpening sense of self out of writing these sentences that begin with “I” and express what they express about that neglectful father, sentences that might otherwise stay unexpressed, without the emboldening privacy and safety of fiction.
You sit there in your chair reading student work and you know that it is your job to create an atmosphere where students both feel comfortable sharing such things—if they want to and only if they want to—and that you will, you know, putting the “human” in human-ities—ensure that you are human enough to discuss such things, to discuss what it feels like to write about such things. And so you must speak with lightness and with weight at once, to model good writerly behavior for your student, to show them that you can be your full self when writing about sorrowful or difficult subject matter, when writing about people going through certain hard experiences.
You don’t need to write only from the part that suffers—you shouldn’t. Knowing I have this conviction, even so, I can’t help but wonder, of brutal student work: Is this what you’re going through? And—because of my kindness, perhaps a joke I made, my receptivity—do you think I’ve gone through something like this too?
Art credit: Frank Kunert, Office Nap, 2010. Photograph of a miniature model. © Frank Kunert. Courtesy of the artist.
These scenes have been excerpted from the first act of the play Life Worth Living. Modeled after a trauerspiel, or “mourning play,” it was first performed as a table read at Mouse Arts and Letters Club in Chicago in April.
●
SCENE ONE
Lights up on Stuart (late forties/fifties), who speaks directly to the audience.
STUART
Before I even knew what teaching was, I loved to teach. When I was a child, as soon as I left the crib—and oh, believe me, I wanted to leave that crib! ha ha—my mother would join me in my puny bed, the one that felt so vast at the time, and she would read aloud to me.
In the early days of those bedtime readings, Mother couldn’t wait to abandon the mind-numbing books she received at her baby shower and begin to share stories with me, real stories. From, well—life. And, though some of my colleagues on this very campus produce fine scholarship of them as a subject of study and research, those children’s picture books, to her and to me, never thrilled.
Sooner than I could comprehend them, Mother liked to read me those rare stories we might consider to have attained, somehow, the quality of the “mythic.” From all over the world—though, I’m now realizing, mostly Western cultures—Hans Christian Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Edith Hamilton’s interpretations of the Greeks… and the Bhagavad Gita, Sholem Aleichem’s playful, parable-like accounts of shtetl life…
How to pin down the kind of writing I liked then… I hesitate to use the word “fairy tale,” since some of these cultures consider holy scripture what we may call a “tale” or “fairylike”! But… it may give you a blurry idea.
My mother thought, like most mothers, that teleology was good for child-rearing, so she then tried sharing with me more iconic works of what they in books call “early readers”—but I never responded to these more long-form works, so eager to “connect” with my boyhood, to retrofit simple questions of growing up onto genre tropes like noir and romance. (Works that, if I’m being perfectly honest, more closely resemble the writing that I would, decades later, make a living from.)
Instead, though I could never have put it like this at that age, I think—if I had to describe it now…—I wanted language under pressure. I wanted short and compressed stories and situations that spoke both to a specific group of people anchored in a moment in time—but that also had a magic ability to peek out beyond those people and that time and that place towards a wider landscape of life. Works that were able to inhabit a kind of prophetic vision and distance.
Thinking back, I now wonder if my preference for this kind of writing was an early tell that I experienced youth as an obligation I had to get through, that life would really begin for me once I aged out of most of my milestones…
Silence.
Whenever she read to me, my mother, without thinking, would trace her index finger on each word. When my mother liked a particular story, she’d read it to me over and over. (That was an early lesson in the pleasures of letting a text and its rhythms get in, truly get in you. Which, like sex, requires repetition.)
After a while, I… Well, with her help, I taught myself how to read. She never said this is A, and this B, and so on, all the way to Z. One day, just shy of two years of age, I simply started to read the word her index finger was tracing back to her. I suppose if I think about it now, it is shocking. The idea that you, the parent, sit firm in your belief that you are spending time with your child performing some action that the child cannot, and bam, without warning, the child does that very same thing… Like if a baby bird decided it was its turn to regurgitate into its mother’s beak.
Silence.
Student… teacher… I never would have used these words, “teacher” and “student,” to describe what my mother and I were to each other, though I suppose they would, in a sense, among other words, be accurate.
Neither of us—well, mm, Mother’s long dead, so ah—I can’t remember which story it was that I first read back to her. At parties, regaling her guests of my excellence, she liked to say it was Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.” A pit in my stomach formed whenever she shared that title, my body telling me that the first I read back to her must have been a different story, but which…?
Anyway, between sips of wine, Mother would say: “Imagine this. I’m reading to my infant son about an impoverished couple in the Russian countryside. One day, the wife sends the husband to go fishing for dinner. He has bad luck—at first. He casts his net: mud. He casts the net again: seaweed. Then—and here my child interrupts me—‘he caught a t-t-t-talking go-o-o-o-lden fish.’ Ha ha ha!”
I hated when Mother told this story! As if the story of my learning to read could ever hold a candle to the wisdoms one could find in Pushkin’s tale in verse. Why waste your guests’ time? Why waste mine? Why flatten mysterious works of literature into a fucking, a pancake of parental pride in your child’s precocity?
In my body, at these parties, I wanted the story to continue as it did when she read it to me as an infant: Why stop there, Mother? Why not tell us about how the couple spared the fish because it could talk? What could that mean?
You know, about the food chain: which creatures we grant the right to live and why. In some translations, the husband tells the wife that the fish spoke “like a Christian.” And—and—and that the wife sent the husband back to ask the fish for a repaired washtub, which the fish granted. The wife, discovering the fish’s magic ability to grant wishes, then lets her requests spiral out of control, escalating to the point where, after the fish had already appointed the wife tsaritsa—of Russia!—the wife asks the fish for total supremacy over the fish’s domain: the kingdom of the sea! The fish then and only then—why not before?—teaches the wife about her greed, at the exact moment when she wants to control not just man but man and nature.
Of course, the fish reverses all of the wife’s wishes. Unlike the “fairy tales” that have lingered in our festering culture—I’m thinking of “The Princess and the Pea,” “Hansel and Gretel,” pieces of folklore that often grant their heroes a resolved, happy ending—“The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” is a different kind of fairy tale, one that punishes its heroes for the pursuit of their desires. This magic fish returns our heroic couple to their original state: horrible poverty. What?!?!
As I grew up—meaning, after I had had those first brushes with sex—Mother still held parties, and she still told this same story, a story which was not necessarily inaccurate so much as it was massaged to get what she believed to be the essential truth across: my extraordinary nature. But by then, Mother, I was a teenager, and I know some part of you knew as much as I: there was much more you could have told your guests, and it was all happening right under your nose.
Anyway, back to when I was two or so: after the myths, taking a cue that I preferred short to long form, Mother began to share with me the prose stories she really loved—and, finally, lyric poetry. She loved to hear me read, but I strongly preferred when she read to me. As soon as she introduced verse into our reading diet, I couldn’t get enough. For whatever reason, I drifted towards the poets who reckoned with faith without mediation: Dante and Petrarch over Shakespeare, Donne and Hopkins (and of course Coleridge) over Wordsworth. When my mother read poems to me, her perfect scansion seemed it had a strange, impossible knack for matching the rhythm of my beating heart. After a while, a ratio had formed, one I did not like, one where I had to read a few poems to her in order for her to read just one to me.
Silence.
I remember around that age, once I first started going to preschool, I would carpool with a boy named Jack. I loved to read the street signs as they passed in the window. But with my reading, Jack’s mother worried that I held a mirror up to the mediocrity of her parenting. She pulled over the first time I read those street signs, and scrawled the word “stop” on a piece of paper, and asked me, “What does this say, Stuart?”—as if she couldn’t have just pointed at the red octagonal sign right over there and asked me to read it.
And also, the dolt, as if I hadn’t just been reading much more difficult words like “Stephens Lane” and “Mahogany Street”!—and “avenue”! “What does this say, Stuart?” Jack’s mother asked. Tch. “Stop,” I said. She gasped, and then when she dropped me off that day, Jack’s mother confronted mine.
“Are you enrolling your son in some sort of cruel program to get ahead?” Smiling, my mother replied: “Heavens, no! He taught himself.”
These are some of my happiest memories. Not just because they mark a rare uncomplicated closeness between me and my mother. But because this was my childhood christening itself, purpose coalescing: it is my duty to always be ahead. “Two-year-olds can’t read!” Well, there I was in carpool, on the way home from preschool, reading the street signs out loud to the horror of Jack ha ha ha, little, stupid Jack and his stricken mother. With each sign I read, I felt I took one step further ahead of Jack, who was of course, stuck behind.
I saw the delight this precocity brought my mother, how it wrested her up up up from the depths of her despair, and I thought hell, alright: getting ahead. If one wants to walk, one does not take one step and pause, one step and pause. One takes step after step after step. So. Here I live. Here I get ahead, pacing: i.e. reading, thinking, writing. In the house of literature. My name felt like destiny: Stuart. Stu-art. Student. Of art. Yes.
Of course—what with all that therapy!—I could say, “dialectically,” that this period also foreshadowed the problem that would haunt my twenties and thirties (and maybe even through to now): that grief, that feeling that, before I knew it, childhood left as soon as it came, just as I, for the first time, began to want it.
Silence.
And I have this student, Samuel is his name. He reminds me of my young self. I can see that fire behind his eyes. Samuel is throwing every stylistic technique he learns from the readings I assign to try and put language to that flame, I can tell. But he’s a bit too impressionable: If I assign Hemingway, his barely veiled accounts of his (evidently very difficult) life from that week have a funny way of being concise and prosaic. If I assign Lawrence or one of the Brontës, his writing takes on a more sweeping feeling, more social interest, where a character’s interiority spews onto a tapestry of human relation, and so on and so forth.
He’s… not very good. But ever since I first read his application to my class, I detected something… something about him, something about him that makes me lean in, makes me want to know more, spend more time with him.
And, well. I hate to say this. But he looks just like a, ahem… how to put it… he bears an uncanny resemblance to a very, erm, important teacher of mine from when I was in middle school. You know what kind of teacher I mean; we all have those who unmake our old world and construct a new one in its wake. So… wouldn’t you say it would be absurd if, if that resemblance to arguably the most world-making teacher I had didn’t provoke, if it uh, didn’t—didn’t prompt some sort of strong reaction, you know. I’m. I’m not sure what to call it but his face, how he looks at me: it’s, it’s provoking a certain… feeling in me. And… I’m terrified.
Lights up on SAMUEL (college-aged, flimsy masculinity). He speaks to the audience. He holds a printed copy of his writing for this week’s class.
SAMUEL
This is my best work yet. I’m unpublished—um, for now. But people like Stuart make me think that one day my pain—though sometimes I wish I called it original sin, it feels as though it was something I was born with—as though it were the cost of existing at all—that one day my pain will become the foundation on which I build my pleasant life. That the very feeling—or set of feelings—that makes me yearn for death will, like desublimating a gas into a solid, become the thing I can lean against to construct myself.
I’ve read lots of creative-writing manuals and several say that by the time you’re—I think it was—by the time you’re twelve, you’ve lived enough life to write forever. As in: from twelve on, right up until you croak, if you locked yourself in a room just type typing away, for the rest of your life, you could draw on those first twelve years and have enough material for book after book. Fiction, memoir, whatever. I’m not sure I agree—if I think about the “average” person living the “average” life, that is—but in my case, my life is far from average. I know I’ve withstood enough to write endlessly, to make writing into a life, a real body of work—I know it.
If I can get people like Stuart—I’ve been reading his work so long it still feels wrong to say his first name out loud, but that’s what he wants us to call him—if I can get Stuart to say my name in the right rooms populated with the right people, I’m set. He’s been showing me tough love all term. And I get it—he’s, you know—he’s trying to keep me humble, to knock me down a peg, and I—I get that, I know who I am, I’m that overambitious freshman, the one lucky enough to be let into the most competitive creative-writing class in all of the university—Advanced Fiction.
So… how can I convince Stuart to enact some sort of reversal? That he doesn’t need to “teach me a lesson,” to show me “tough love,” but that he needs to be curious about me and my, my… well, my beliefs! I watch as everyone in class slowly tries to write the same kind of book—and, to get ahead of things—I could see how you could consider this
(of his manuscript)
to be subject to the same criticism—but I promise it’s different. The others, they all creep towards Stuart house style, stories of one’s greatest pain told in plain language, with leaps in time, subject: structure bearing the thrust of the meaning-making as opposed to the language itself. Fiction written in the style of tell-all personal essay, or one of those memoirs by, probably, a French person, probably about childhood sexual abuse. Sure.
Fine—it works in Stuart’s books. And I like his books. As a matter of fact, his books, especially A Passage, helped me see flashes of specific insights I needed to get through some things with my father… But my books are not fated to be like his books, and he needs to see that.
He needs to set me on the best and steadiest path to writing my books. And, I hope, these pages will finally convince him to do just that.
Phew. Here goes nothing.
Samuel drops off his draft in Stuart’s faculty mailbox.
●
SCENE TWO
Stuart and Samuel at Stuart’s lovely office. Fall leaves of old, beautiful trees erupt in oranges and reds through Stuart’s window.
A slash (“/”) indicates overlapping dialogue.
SAMUEL
I don’t understand—
STUART
It’s—it’s simple. I / told you
SAMUEL
How can you even—it’s ridiculous, how can you—a grade, creative writing? I mean, a—a—a— / a—a—
STUART
Will you let me finish?
SAMUEL
A bad grade?
STUART
Will you please let me finish my thought.
Silence.
STUART
Thank you.
(clears throat. Then, slowly:)
I told you, the most important idea of my course is revision. Re-vision. Seeing the—apprehending, ah—understanding the familiar anew. Changing your mind. Think, Samuel, really think… you know what, let’s try something. Close your eyes. Picture your novel excerpt. Imagine you’re doing what many writers do at artists’ residencies: you print your entire work page by page and paste it to a white wall with tape. You take several steps back and reckon with the thing you’ve made, the whole thing. Do you—can you see it? In your mind? In your heart? Now picture the previous draft, on a different wall in the same room. Really picture it. Now look at one wall, then the other, then the first, and the second. Now. Answer me honestly. Did your piece really change?
SAMUEL
(eyes still closed)
That’s called Track Changes. They have it in the word processor I use, they call it Track Changes.
STUART
Alright.
SAMUEL
No, no—I’m, I’m trying to understand.
STUART
Are you? I’m talking about process. You refine things like sentences and word choice—using tools like “Track Changes” I suppose—once—and only once—the curds, the real stuff of literature, have been split from the whey of your drafty prose. You are not there. You have yet to find your cheesecloth, your tool that will separate your best, most prized impulses from your worst.
SAMUEL
Okay… but there is no cheese without whey.
STUART
Exactly! Now you’re getting somewhere. Exactly… I’m not saying that you’re wrong for having wrong impulses. Every writer does. I’m saying that that is the very nature of writing, the nature of drafting, to do what I say… you need to practice distinguishing between the curds and the whey. Otherwise it’s just milk.
SAMUEL
But wouldn’t that be vinegar or lemon, not cheesecloth—
STUART
Oh, same idea. Look: from this draft to the next, you moved some words around. I suppose that makes me vinegar, telling you, milk: get to work making the good cheese.
SAMUEL
But—
STUART
Don’t be dejected. You’re talented. Don’t worry: there’d be shocks of meaning, little bursts of emotion in my time with this piece. But followed always by bafflement at a choice you’d make in the next sentence, or even the next word. Style and structure are not so easily separable: your style—only when it is at its best—is telling you what your piece is, what it wants to be. How can you learn from the wisdom of your most refined style at the sentence or even phrasal level to discover—or sediment—well, that has to do more with minerals, and earlier I was talking about cheese—anyway…—curdle! that’s the word—the point is, when I feel that a chapter of mine isn’t working, instead of throwing everything away, I try to listen even more carefully to what that flawed chapter wants to be. And then I begin to throw large, large chunks of writing away: whey! Lots and lots of whey, I promise!
SAMUEL
Okay.
STUART
Don’t be disappointed! This is Advanced Fiction, after all. You signed up to be treated like a journeyman. These are the growing pains you should expect.
Silence.
SAMUEL
So… in that case…
STUART
Yes?
SAMUEL
Well, what do you think these pages “want to be”?
STUART
Great question! Great! Let me see…
Stuart flips through his heavily annotated copy of Samuel’s work.
STUART
Ah, yes. Here, on page seven. Your nameless narrator muses on what to include in his—her—their?—I suppose that’s interesting, the gender of this character does in this moment strike me as ambiguous—your narrator wonders what to include in his eulogy for his beloved grandfather.
SAMUEL
And what to exclude.
STUART
Right! Right. So this here is one of the more exciting passages. It captures a familiar problem, one I’ve faced: at a funeral, you might want to say something other than what you feel would be polite, or flow nicely with the mannered feelings of the evening; you don’t know what the eulogy before yours will be like, so what if you—bring down the mood! Or bring it up too much, somehow. What if your eulogy is less concerned with language but more with some kind of grief-roar? Would that really be so inappropriate? But then again, someone is dead! You, the mourner, might feel it would pay greater respects if your grief were less controlled instead of more, for tears to flow not when it makes sense to cry but when it doesn’t make sense! That our narrator obsesses so much over this idea, and for so many pages, while—what is he doing—
SAMUEL
Uh… page seven it was?… making tea, I think they make tea and clean their apartment.
STUART
Right! See that’s good too—this tidying action while he thinks sort of uncontainable thoughts—good friction—sorry, you used “they”?—should I, too—?
SAMUEL
Don’t worry about it—
STUART
Okay! So… what the book wants to be. Let’s think… Remember our unit on Crime and Punishment. Culturally, people think of it as this big intimidating book about a murderer; but no, before he murders, Raskolnikov is an out-of-work, impoverished former student of law with just a little more schooling left before he can earn a living as a lawyer, or a law professor.
In the throes of his depression, Raskolnikov begins to believe that the only way out of his poverty and its attendant emotional swamp is to murder his pawnbroker. He justifies this by saying that crime, even a serious one like murder, is necessary if it sets an “extraordinary man” on a path towards being able to do the most good he can: Raskolnikov, pursuing an “extraordinary” life of noble scholarship, or lawyering—he might have been picturing a life not so different from this life I live here—he just needed a little sum of money to get back on his feet. Yet after he murders his pawnbroker—about a tenth of the way through the, indeed, long book—he suffers neurosis after neurosis after, you could say, psychosis, for the rest of the brick of a novel. Nine-tenths! And character after character he encounters, from his doctor to his sister, to his bailiff to a drunk on the street, they all press on that psychic terror of his, and it thrills us through to the end.
This is why we read Crime and Punishment—in fiction, interiority should structure a story, not event. So when I then get this block-quoted eulogy a few pages later, it doesn’t feel like payoff from the setup of that wonderful, ruminative apartment scene. Instead, it feels redundant, it feels like work. After such lurid interiority, I anticipate the speech to go wrong, which would only add to the tension of the narrator; instead, it goes off without a hitch.
And the eulogy is so long that I wondered if you were down to the wire, worrying about page count—nothing like that to whisk me right out of my immersion.
Samuel hangs his head.
STUART
Is this not helping…?
SAMUEL
No, that’s not it… Things have just been, I don’t know…
STUART
…Look. I am not your life teacher. I am your writing teacher. I don’t know the string of words that will address the baggage you have that is getting in the way of writing the unsparing / truth unsparingly.
SAMUEL
Unsparing truth unsparingly
STUART
Right. If you want, instead, we can talk about, you know, all the shit everybody’s talking about in this hallway: do you like to write a little every day or do you like to write a lot all at once, in the morning or at night.
SAMUEL
(humiliated)
No, no—
STUART
Let me ask you this. Do you like writing? I mean do you—do you actually enjoy the act of sitting down and, and writing? Because if you did, I feel like you would eulogize your grandpa, and then, maybe the next day or—I don’t know—it wouldn’t be a big deal—and you’d sit down and get back to work on your novel. You know. Like a writer. You wouldn’t be so out of gas from the eulogy that you would need to copy-paste it into your book.
(then)
I know you’ve been wondering about your grade. Until you show me you are at least attempting to learn the lessons of the course—the lessons I’ve spelled out once again in these office hours—I’ll have no choice but to give you a B-minus.
Silence.
SAMUEL
(quietly)
I think…
STUART
Mm?
SAMUEL
(meek)
I think A Passage is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Samuel exits.
STUART
Thank you?
Silence. Then, to the audience:
STUART
All those who teach at the university level must hold office hours of some kind. But what meetings and contracts and the like fail to consider is the disparity of what office hours might look like in the humanities versus what they like to call “STEM”— science, technology, engineering and mathematics; I think this is an awfully sweet metaphor, as if each thought that a student of disciplines such as biology and computer science might have would feed the cells in the stem of a flower, that each struggle, each advancement within these fields is like the mitochondria of one big gorgeous, I don’t know, zinnia.
But even if students of “STEM” have deep, personal relationships with their professors, office hours, most of the time—and I’m talking about average office hours, not office hours worthy of some sort of, I don’t know, report that makes it to the desks of university bureaucrats, not that kind of office hours, but normal office hours—at their worst, “STEM” office hours rarely cover subject matter more taboo than, say, a bad grade on a test, or stress.
But in the humanities, and especially in creative writing, a given student might, say, write about a neglectful father. Say the short story is in the first person; as their teacher, a fellow writer, you can’t help but know that this student, a young person—clawing in the dark for signs of who they are—that this young person is getting some sort of thrill or a sharpening sense of self out of writing these sentences that begin with “I” and express what they express about that neglectful father, sentences that might otherwise stay unexpressed, without the emboldening privacy and safety of fiction.
You sit there in your chair reading student work and you know that it is your job to create an atmosphere where students both feel comfortable sharing such things—if they want to and only if they want to—and that you will, you know, putting the “human” in human-ities—ensure that you are human enough to discuss such things, to discuss what it feels like to write about such things. And so you must speak with lightness and with weight at once, to model good writerly behavior for your student, to show them that you can be your full self when writing about sorrowful or difficult subject matter, when writing about people going through certain hard experiences.
You don’t need to write only from the part that suffers—you shouldn’t. Knowing I have this conviction, even so, I can’t help but wonder, of brutal student work: Is this what you’re going through? And—because of my kindness, perhaps a joke I made, my receptivity—do you think I’ve gone through something like this too?
Art credit: Frank Kunert, Office Nap, 2010. Photograph of a miniature model. © Frank Kunert. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.