Marty’s Acknowledgements
I have my students make chapbooks of their work at the end of the semester, and they make a copy of their beautiful book for everyone in the class. I encourage them to get booky–I’ll write a blurb for anyone who asks (”it was luminous!” “Kruyf is Stephen King on Lorrie Moore!”). They make fake blurbs (”I couldn’t put it down. It was literally stuck to my hands…glued on! –Tom Stoppard on Isaac Droscha) and write dedications and this year Sarah1 did an index (boys on every page).
Marty’s acknowledgements caught my attention. In his thanks he writes to his parents, for telling him the way he wrote before this class is better, the best way, to keep writing the way he wants. To let nothing stop him from his dream. Marty, who was quite a bit older than the other students in the class, loved to write about interplanetary travel and science and helpful freaks. He had a lot of ideas.
At first, I was surprised, and then I felt bad. Had I failed Marty, trying to get him to examine why he chose adverbs, to consider other ways to see a thing than through abstraction or figurative langauge? Had he gone home to his family and told them this hideous class was breaking his soul?
Agh.
I’m not sure what we are supposed to do, really, in class. Most of the students, almost all, say at the end of the class they are thrilled that they write better, more easily, and they can’t believe how flat and plain and cliche their work from the early part of the term is. “I would never write that way now.”
I think part of my job is to figure out what each students wants, and help them to what they want to do. But when what they want to do (interplanetary travel) is so different from what I know how to do, what I value (travel in time, travel to the bad night that got worse, travel to the heart of hearts), what happens? Do we meet in the middle? Do I have to live with not being able to help? At all?
I wish Marty felt I was on his side. I wish he felt writing class held lessons that applied to him. But maybe this thing he is doing is glorious and perfect, and his parents are protecting him from something he should be protected from. He makes these dreamy structures. I want to change them into something else. I wonder what he wanted from the class, how he wanted it to be, what he wants to learn. I think he wants a space to write things how he wants to write them. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to make my class like that.
I wonder what my students think.
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I think your students trust you. We sit in class and listen intently because for the most part we don’t know anything. Empty pods. Even in 454. We rely on you to kick our asses, to push us, to teach us things we don’t and can’t know yet and that’s what makes us better. Because we don’t know what better means. If we did, we wouldn’t start out writing condensed novels and distant fiction. We would write waiting scenes, stories with one person walking around, or worse yet lines with crying and shrugging and emotional shorthand and think it’s okay and beautiful. We don’t walk away pissed off at a red light drawn at the bottom of our paper. We walk away hungry to do it again, to do it better, to write something that you would say is worth putting on the refrigerator.
I think your students strive for validation from you. You’re a sort of literary mother to us. We can’t trust our real mother’s the same way we trust you.
Mother’s teach what they know, what they know best. You don’t have the fortunate pleasure of just one or two or three kids. You have classrooms full. You do the best you can. You teach us what you know. And you help us. All of us. We know it. We can see it. And we’re better for it. Even Marty.
I’m not a writer, but you likely said it yourself “I think he wants a space to write things how he wants to write them”.
“Some people you just can’t reach” dialog of The Captain, from the movie Cool Hand Luke (1969).