Black Gate

About half of the students brought their awesomeness with them into the creative writing class. This is not to say they were all necessarily awesome at writing, just that they allowed whatever was delightful in them to show at a time when I happened to be there to see.

The other half of the students had registered in the mistaken belief that creative writing must be an easy A because there’s no right or wrong in creativity, and they tended to get angry when they discovered their error. Of those, only the plagiarist who handed in the lyrics to I’m My Own Grandpa for a poetry assignment stands out in memory.

Years later, it’s the awesome kids I still think about. I wonder what happened to the girl with the stutter who spoke clearly only in verse, who could recite long stretches of Shakespeare from memory. She wrote the most astonishing sonnets. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the boy whose work I keep watching for, who was too nervous for eye contact when he asked whether he could connect all his pieces for the course to a comic book project he was working on outside of class.

No one assignment he did was stellar. In part this was a result of the weird framework of the course that had been handed down by the mighty powers of the department — we had four weeks for fiction, four weeks for poetry, four weeks for drama — and I was not at liberty to turn this student loose to write in his own genre. In part, it was because he was thinking of himself as a writer, and thinking like a writer, for the first time, so he got to make his beginner mistakes on my watch. Fine with me, fine with him.

Here’s why I think he’s still out there writing comics somewhere: he was completely content to write about his superheroes in verse, in script format, in prose, because stretching himself that way allowed him to see new things about his characters. When I gave him feedback about his drafts, I took his work seriously enough to tell him what wasn’t working.

Unlike the students who were after easy A’s, this guy never complained about comments or grades. He took my suggestions and assessments under advisement, and got back to work. He had the personality and habits of a lifelong creator, and he had articulated to himself and others that he intended to be in it for the long haul.

The Internet hasn’t turned him up for me. His name is common, but I would think there can’t be so many African-American comic book artists creating African-American superheroes that he’d stay hard to find. Now that I’m writing occasional posts here about books I assigned in that old creative writing class, I wish I could ask him if anything from that semester was of long-term use to his work in comics–regardless of whether that work ever appeared in print.

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Sarah Avery’s short story “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” appeared in the last print issue of Black Gate. A related novella, “The Imlen Bastard,” is slated to appear in BG‘s new online incarnation. Her contemporary fantasy novella collection, Tales from Rugosa Coven, follows the adventures of some very modern Pagans in a supernatural version of New Jersey even weirder than the one you think you know. You can keep up with her at her website, sarahavery.com, and follow her on Twitter.

Here’s a classic set piece: a young writer of genre fiction arrives at college and finagles his way into a creative writing seminar, only to get stonewalled by the professor and most of his classmates because they’re allergic to genre fiction.

Any of several things can happen next. The student may find three likeminded young writers and a folding card table to meet at, and start her own seminar. The student may drop out of college, get a series of fascinating dead end jobs, and write his way to a workshop like Clarion or Odyssey. Maybe she gives up writing altogether. Maybe he stops showing his writing to others. Maybe she goes pro eventually despite it all, and has a chip on her shoulder about that confounded creative writing class for the rest of her days.

I was…what is the genre equivalent of ambidextrous? Ambigenrous will have to do for now. I snuck back into the creative writing seminars as a poet, and most people forgot I had wanted to write fantasy. For a while, I forgot it myself.

A fantasist can find useful tools in a creative writing classroom, even an inhospitable one. But since nobody wants to do time in an inhospitable classroom, and really nobody should have to, I’m going to write a few posts over the next few weeks about books on writing that I’ve found helpful in re-reinventing myself as a fantasy writer.

Back in 2005, when I was just starting my personal blog, Ask Dr. Pretentious, and had maybe six readers in the whole world, I wrote an essay on The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner that has held up so well, I’m giving it another chance at life here. Gardner was surprisingly hostile to fantastic fiction, considering that he was the guy who wrote that first-person retelling of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster. Why would I urge writers of genre fiction to devote many hours to learning from Gardner when he regards genre fiction as trash? Read on.

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For a week, I experienced the delightful illusion that I held the whole tradition of myth and mythic literature in my head at once. Gilgamesh to Gaiman, it floated in a perfect structure of interconnectedness. I could see through time. Then I wrote the final exam, and the illusion dissolved instantly.

I’ve had a weird week of synchronicity in which several people, none of whom could possibly know each other, have asked me what I miss about classroom teaching. The question has conjured up the best classroom teaching experience I ever had, in all its problematic glory. It began with a situation that reads like the set-up for an Amanda Cross murder mystery.

Back in the mid-1990’s, before some of my current students were born, I taught this Intro to Myth course that had its origins in a semi-scandalous departmental power grab–the oldest codgers in the English Department were trying to maneuver the university into abolishing the Comparative Literature Department. One of their moves was to offer a knock-off version of the one undergraduate class Comp Lit could always get full enrollment for–the course that made it possible for my Comp Lit grad student friends to pay their rent and eat. That’s not hyperbole. I had classmates who lived in their cars during the summer because without their school-year teaching paychecks they had to choose between food and shelter.

The codgers offered me a break from teaching endless sections of Freshman Composition. Come teach Intro to Mythology, they crooned, invent the whole syllabus to your own liking, set a precedent for how your fellow grad students will teach it here in English. All you have to do is take food from the mouths of your friends and help us destroy their department before it can confer their degrees.

If I had turned the codgers down, they’d have found some other grad student hungry enough to do it for them. So I made it my mission to give them a magnificent, kickass course of a kind they would never want to run again. They would look upon the precedent of my syllabus and shudder.

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