I knew I wanted to write, so I joined journalism in high school. I hated all that late-night work on PageMaker and all that cutting and pasting over the light board. I hated all the phone calling and note taking and blah-blahs of the interviewees, the tedious work of winding film and the shaking of canisters and the smell of the darkroom like pee. Mr. Killough knew I wanted to write more than just news stories, so he let me write the personal column and the feature stories. He said I had to draw the reader in; he said I had to begin with explosions. He taught me how, through writing, I could make something exist that wasn’t in the world before.
In my literature book, I would read the poetry section over and over again, always stopping for a long time on Donald Justice’s “Poem to Be Read at 3 a.m.” I read the poetry section on my own because we were hardly ever assigned poems to read. I would think about who had the light on at 3 a.m. and how that poem was for them and how the poet and the person with the light on were probably both lonely and sad and I was lonely and sad and wanted to have a poem and give one too.
At fifteen, I took an introduction to literature class at the city university. My professor, Steven Kellman, made us read Heart of Darkness, The Dead, Oedipus Rex, King Lear, The Metamorphosis. He spoke about symbolism while I doodled flowers into my notebook. I remember him saying always, always saying, It’s as if he’s hitting the reader over the head; he’s taking a concrete slab and hitting the reader over the head. The next summer, I took his introduction to film class. We watched Jules and Jim, Citizen Kane, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Blue Angel, North by Northwest, The Bicycle Thieves. Those two summers, I felt as if I had left the light on at 3 a.m. and someone had also left it on for me.
When I found out that I could study creative writing in college, it became an obsession of mine to do just that. I chose Hollins in Roanoke, Virginia. An alum came to interview me in San Antonio. She was interviewing lots of applicants, I think. I didn’t know what to wear. She was doing the interviews from an expensive hotel downtown. I didn’t know how I would get there. I think my interview went well, because two weeks later, I was invited to campus to compete for a full scholarship, even though I did not have the minimum SAT score to compete for that scholarship. My father put my plane ticket on his credit card. Not knowing better, I didn’t pack a dress or anything other than jeans. I prepared nothing. Somehow, I was given a full scholarship, and that’s where I went to study poetry. I went to a small all-girls liberal arts school in the South to study literature, physics, and philosophy, and to take a creative writing workshop each and every semester.
When I got to college, I had so much catching up to do. I hadn’t ever been taught how to think critically. In high school, our homework consisted of copying answers to questions right out of the book. I didn’t know how to come up with my own answers. But I was always a fast learner, and so I learned. I began to tutor the girls in astrophysics, but they could never get it. Brenda was useless; she kept pointing to Gemini and saying, Oh, look there’s Gemini; I’m a Gemini. But later, she taught me how to cheat on my astronomy lab reports by drawing in the bodies of things that I hadn’t even seen.
Freshman year, I took an introduction to creative writing class. My professor gave me a bad grade on my paper on Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” She said that it wasn’t a wedding poem or about picking up the pieces after a failed marriage and my whole thesis and explication had therefore failed. She said it was about a shipwreck. I said the shipwreck was a metaphor for a personal wreck. Several English degrees later, I can still only read that poem as a poem about a failed marriage. She circled words on my poems and told me that I could never use those words in a poem because they were abstract.
I was an English major, then I chose to double major in English and physics. Then I changed the physics to philo-sophy my junior year.
When I went home for winter break, I explained Plato’s cave allegory to my then-boyfriend. He said, That’s stupid. Why do you want to think about things like that? I knew then that I’d have to break up with him.
Also during my junior year, I took a course in the eighteenth-century novel, and I read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. That book would change how I thought about books. I had my own reading in class, which my professor would ask me to explicate. It happened mainly because I kept misreading fortifications as fornications, and partially because I have always had a very dirty mind.
The writer-in-residence during my MA year at Hollins was Brendan Galvin, and he looked us all in the eyes
