The Writing Life Page 7

  Learning to Teach Writing by Watching a Great Dance Teacher

  I HAVE BEEN DOWN on the Mississippi coast for six weeks helping out with six grandchildren who live down there.

  My two oldest granddaughters are deeply involved with a wonderful dance studio run by one of the best teachers I have ever watched work in any field. Her name is Donna Burke. She danced professionally and led a dance troupe that danced in Las Vegas thirty years ago. She was trained in classical ballet and teaches it the old-fashioned way.

  I discovered Donna ten years ago and flew down to the coast and enrolled my granddaughters in her school. Then I bought a condominium in the town where they live so I could be there to drive them to their classes. They longed to dance and I longed to help them do it. I had only sons. The chance to help my granddaughters learn to dance was too seductive to miss.

  My mother had enrolled me in dance classes several times but I didn’t have the right personality to put up with the discipline. Neither do my granddaughters really but, luckily, Donna’s School of Visual and Performing Arts is the main game in the small town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Most of the girls who get elected cheerleader or win the beauty contests or are on the homecoming court are Donna’s students. It’s a leg up in a tough, competitive world and my granddaughters knew it. Peer pressure was on my side and so for ten years I have had the pleasure and pain of watching Donna work on my hardheaded progeny.

  Donna takes no prisoners. She accepts no excuses. Being late to class or improperly dressed or missing a rehearsal is not an option. Praise is rare and hard-earned. Hard work earns you more hard work and higher expectations. The result is that her studio has won DANCEAMERICA national competitions three times and so many other trophies that the wall of shelves will not hold them all. They are piled on top of one another and covered with dust. There is no time for dusting trophies at Donna’s studio. Past accomplishments are nothing. The coming recital or competition is all. This seems very Zen to me. I can sit on the floor and watch Donna conduct rehearsals for hours.

  I know genius when I see it and I am thrilled to have been able to give my granddaughters a taste of it.

  This year, after ten years of work, they are on Donna’s competition team and rehearsing for their first competition in April. Besides the three regular two-hour classes they take after school on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, they have extra rehearsals on Saturday mornings and sometimes on Sunday afternoons.

  The results are high school dance teams that look like professional dancers. It is amazing what Donna and her helpers have done with small groups of girls on the Mississippi coast. If you ever wonder “why all those writers come from Mississippi,” just go and watch Donna’s dancers getting ready for a competition or a recital.

  What does all this have to do with my teaching creative writing? Well, this fall my students are going to profit from the hours I have spent watching Miss Donna rehearse the competition team. I have been too easy on my students these first two years of my apprenticeship. I have let them get away with sloppy manuscripts and delays and all sorts of things I would never put up with in my own work.

  My students have come to me to learn to become published writers. “What you do in practice you will do in performance,” I have heard Donna say a thousand times. The same is true in writing.

  “I want that revision tomorrow,” I’m going to start telling my students. “I didn’t spend my time editing that story to have you sit on it for weeks. Go home and fix it now.”

  This fall I am going to feel the spirit of Donna Burke’s consummate professionalism in me as I teach.

  I’m going to remember her courage and backbone and unrelenting drive to excellence and demand from my students what she demands from hers.

  Many of her students quit. Each year I have to drive my youngest granddaughter back into her classes and I don’t mean in my automobile. “Just one more year,” I tell her. “Just until Christmas. Just until you make the competition team. Just until you get your toe shoes. You don’t have to, of course, but how can you quit now?”

  The thing I need to learn from Donna is that I am the teacher. I’m not there to get the students to like me or think I’m nice. I’m there to show them what it takes to succeed.

  In a university that means you have to put up with them complaining to the head of the department or the dean and writing nasty things about you on the student evaluations at the end of the semester.

  I don’t know if I’m brave enough for this job but I’m going to pretend to be. Hold me to this if you are around next semester at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

  Crisis in the Creative Writing Program

  WE ARE LOOKING FOR A POET to take the place of a poet/novelist/teacher/founder of the program/defender of the program against all intruders, including the English department, the dean, and the university of which we are a part.

  The man we need to replace is named Jim Whitehead and he is the strongest man any of us has ever known. He is six feet, seven inches tall, has seven children, married the most beautiful woman in Mississippi, published a novel in his twenties, created this writing program, and has watched over it for forty years. He has fought for its independence from the English department, the dean, and all interference of any kind from the rest of the university.

  This is my first hiring experience as part of the creative writing faculty and I think it is worth including as part of this book. I don’t know how I thought such things were achieved. I suppose I thought you just found someone and asked them to come work with you.

  We are supposed to fill Jim Whitehead’s shoes and the dean has only given us six months for the search. We are limping because we don’t have a poet. Our woman poet, Enid Shomer, is on medical leave and is in New York City fighting cancer and having back surgery. We don’t know when she can return. Our famous, founding poet, Miller Williams, is retiring but has agreed to stay one more year. Our third poet is on sabbatical and is in China. In the meantime our best young student poet has left the program and the rest of the poets are applying to other writing schools. Because I believe that poetry is the heart of language I am deep into the search even though I am not teaching this semester.

  Our first choice to fill Jim Whitehead’s shoes is a slight, quiet young man from Kentucky who is very different from Jim. His name is Davis McCombs. He spent the seven years after he graduated from Harvard being a park ranger in Mammoth Cave in eastern Kentucky. While there he wrote a book of poems about the cave, seen partly through his own eyes and partly through the eyes of a black slave who was the guide in the cave in the early years after its discovery. The book of poems is mysterious and wise and philosophical and tender. It is about wandering in the interior of the earth. There is no resentment in the book, only wonder and tenderness and love.

  Most of the manuscripts from our other candidates are about their own interior spaces. I will learn from this to demand from my students that they go out into the world and find something to write about besides their own problems.

  Meanwhile we have to hire a poet. My choice is Davis McCombs. He was a student of Seamus Heaney’s while at Harvard. Maybe that made the difference. Or maybe he is by nature a careful, thoughtful man who sees beyond himself and knows that life is mysterious and good.

  Postscript I

  It is two years since I wrote the beginning of this piece. Davis McCombs is part of our faculty and has been as wonderful in his quiet way as the fiery Jim Whitehead was in his. We have lucked up in the poet department, that’s for sure. Our best poet has returned to the program. Another poet won our second Wallace Stegner fellowship in as many years. Enid Shomer has survived her ordeal. Things are looking up. As a fiction and creative nonfiction teacher I need poets. I like to turn them into double agents if I can.

  Postscript II

  Jim Whitehead died two days ago. It was sudden, shocking. We are in mourning in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

  AUGUST 2003

  Everyone
Thinks They Are a Writer

  SINCE I BEGAN TEACHING I have begun to get telephone calls from people who are dear to me, mostly men and mostly lawyers, but a medical student also called, asking me questions about how to write short stories. “How long does one have to be?” the medical student asked, but it turned out what he really wanted to know was how many pages you needed altogether to make a book and get paid for it.

  It is as if, after years of being very close and secretive about my work, I have opened up to share what I know with the world and my close friends have sensed it is all right to ask me to tell them while I’m at it. It is very strange to feel this sea change in me, this unaccustomed unselfishness. All these years I have thought that other writers were competition and I wouldn’t go on the practice court with them because I might meet them in a slam and they’d know my moves. Now, because I am being paid for it and because it has turned out to be a joy, I am willing to train my competition, maybe even, someday rejoice if they best me.

  This opening up, this unselfishness, is very wonderful. I am naturally an unselfish person, but where my work was concerned I was as tight as my deepest Scot ancestor in his mountain hold.

  But it isn’t selfishness alone that makes me not want to talk about my work. It’s a kind of shyness, something I don’t really understand. My work is my refuge, my hideout. Occasionally I like to talk about it but mostly I don’t. Now, for some reason, I am becoming more open. A reporter described me recently as “an extroverted recluse.” I felt the description was apt. When I am working I am as disciplined and closed-up as a nun on a retreat. When I am finished for the day I like to dress up and go downtown and see what’s going on but I don’t go to my friends. I go to the mall and walk around and look at strangers or wander into toy stores and buy presents for my young grandchildren or go by the cosmetic counter and ask the Chanel representative about the new antiwrinkle compounds. I want to completely leave myself when I reenter the world and my friends would ask me questions about where I’ve been.

  I don’t want to answer questions about the strange, quiet place where I dream and write. “What are you writing now?” is a terrible question to me. I don’t want to talk about it while I’m doing it. That’s the end of that.

  When something comes up in a class that involves a student’s work and I can help the student by giving him or her an example from my own work, it is different. I initiated the revelation and since I am the teacher I can cut off the discussion if I don’t like where it’s going. Is this about power? If I like power it’s news to me but it could be true. I’ll be watching to find out.

  Why Is Rewriting So Hard?

  WHY IS REWRITING SO HARD? Why is it so hard to talk yourself into going back to a first draft and working on it? Why is it so hard to get started? Why do we procrastinate and procrastinate over this? I say WE on purpose because the main thing my students have taught me is that every writer seems to have the same problem. Here I am, twenty books and hundreds of magazine articles later, supposedly a grown woman, and when an editor sends me back a manuscript to have even small changes made, I go around in a huff for hours or maybe even days before I can sit down and get the work done. I would never rewrite anything unless I needed to make money.

  I have thought about this long and hard since I have been teaching. Why do the students get that expression on their faces when told something has to be CHANGED? Why do I feel such trepidation when I open an envelope containing a manuscript returned to me from a LOVING editor who has been WORKING ON IT?

  There is only one explanation that seems possible to me. We are all perfectionists and we can’t stand to think we did something wrong EVEN IF WE KNOW HOW TO FIX IT AND DO IT RIGHT THE SECOND TIME. This is so childish. The expression on my students’ faces when they don’t want to go back to work is childish. My huffiness over editing is childish. It must be our parents’ fault. Off with their heads.

  Metaphorically we do have to assassinate the parents within us, whatever nasty, complaining, correcting voices we hear. When we let another person read a manuscript we want complete and instant praise. The artist is a two-year-old child. She does not want to be criticized in any way. That’s what you have to deal with to be a writer. You have to love and nourish the child within who writes the stuff. You have to give the little witch chocolate candy and feed her nasty little ego and then you have to get tough and tell her to sit down at the desk and act like a man or there won’t be any money for next month’s trip to the mall.

  Except the students don’t get money or publications and threatening to give them bad grades just makes the problem worse. Publish anywhere you can, I tell them. Get your name in print. Show the publications to your family and friends. Don’t be a would-be author. It’s too sad. Write things, rewrite them, get published anywhere. Or else, find something else to do. Don’t pretend you are a writer. Be a writer.

  Then I give them On Writing, a collection of small bits of advice by Ernest Hemingway. Once I copied a piece of it and put it on the first page of the worksheet. This is hard talk about a difficult profession but I thought they needed to hear it.

  First there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.

  — ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  Sunday Morning

  TEACHING IS MAKING ME examine my work habits, the obsessive-compulsive patterns that I create or fall into.

  Take this morning for example. I rose with the sun as always, made coffee, folded some laundry, made the bed, and then started into my workroom to reread parts of this book that I have already written.

  I didn’t make it to the workroom for another half hour. First I began to think about my father’s Auburn class ring and how it became too large for him when he was old. My onyx class ring is getting too large for me. I have always worn it on my left hand as it helps me tell my left from my right. Now I keep taking it off and putting it down in odd places where I will sooner or later probably lose it.

  Then I began to think about my mother, bedridden in a nursing home in Jackson, Mississippi, and still an angel in every way. Then I stood at a window for a long time looking at the trees just putting out their first spring buds. How beautiful the world is this morning. I wanted to be out taking a long walk in its awakening beauty but I had sworn to get seriously back to work.

  Then I started thinking about the Episcopal Church and how much I missed the liturgy and the music and the strange ritual of early morning communion, the taste of wine and the beautiful language written in the time of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. I got out a phone book and looked to see what time early communion begins at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, which is a few blocks from my house. The minister there is John Grisham’s first cousin and is much beloved in this town. Many of my friends have joined or returned to the church because of him.

  I definitely decided to put on a suit and go down and take communion in honor of my father and my mother and to see if it still gives me the peace and good feeling it did when I was young. The wonderful thing about early communion is that there is no sermon, nothing human to stand in the way of the gorgeous language of the King James version of the Bible.

  So I may leave my work and go to church instead of rereading my essays. Why don’t I want to work this morning? I think it is because I’m not certain the book will ever be published. I am accustomed to having advances for books, being paid for the work before the work is done. If I want that for this book I must show part of it to a publisher and see if they want to buy it. “You consign the pot to the fire and you accept the judgment of the fire,” pot
ters say. It is true of writing also.

  I must remember to tell my students about this morning. The self-doubt and then finding something to blame and then, luckily, coming to my senses and going back to work. I love the Episcopal Church and honor the work they do for children and homeless people but I don’t believe the theology. I am acting when I take communion. I don’t believe the wine and bread represent anything but wine and bread. My allegiance is to the work at hand.

  It is a crapshoot to write and that is that. I will probably get a contract for this book and be paid a reasonable advance but I haven’t gotten it yet because I haven’t done enough work to merit it. This is the truth of my profession. You have to create something out of nothing and hope someone will pay you to keep doing it so you can pay the rent. I never encourage anyone to be a writer except the students who have already committed themselves to this craziness. Many members of my family have the verbal skills and creative imagination that have made me a writer but I never encourage them to do it. “Never tell anyone to be a writer,” Eudora Welty once said. “It’s too hard to do.”

  My younger brother put it best. I was answering his questions about how a writer is paid and how much they earn and so forth. He is a businessman and was checking to find out if I was okay. After I answered all his questions he sighed and shook his head. “That’s a tough racket you’re in, honey. Are you sure you want to do that for a living?”

  The way I talked myself into going back to work that Sunday morning was poetry. The real reason I gave up the idea of going to church was remembering Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning.” “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?/…. Shall she not find in comforts of the sun/In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else/In any balm and beauty of the earth,/Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?”