Friday, January 21, 2011

Trifecta

I'm never asked much about my life, so, being a writer, I offer up slices of it, complete with utensils for consumption, when I blog. I figure this--write what interests me, because I don't have many seats in the wings filled, and I am constantly alienating people by asking for help.


Ok, maybe lied is too strong, but the favor requests haven't worked for me for the last two weeks, and I've been primarily told to face a wall and shut up by a whole slew of peers, so tonight I drift back into the past, where I have been transported this week, with my mentors that didn't insist on telling me to change but seemed delighted with my passion for writing and the writing of others.

Those three mentors were, in chronological order--Tim Friend, Michael Pulley, and Clark Closser.

Notice they are all men--so we can stop assuming that my default setting is Ani Difranco or Alanis Morrissette. And I had nothing against my female teachers--my high school history teacher stands out in my positive memory, and my Shakespeare professor at university was wonderful.

But we're talking writing here, dear reader. The thing I can't live without. So let's begin at the beginning.

TF
I had been in love with writing, but not so much reading, for 15 years when I met Mr. Friend. I would play with words, write a lot of poetry, and had signed up for journalism because I couldn't help myself--I wanted to write. Writing for the school newspaper was a joy on two levels--in the four years of this activity I learned how to write something compelling, and then shape the text to wrap into shapes on a page, like a snake. It was a hunger that made me even more hungry with consumption of the practice, and in my senior year of high school this mentor had me working on special study, where I met writers like Dorothy Parker. ("Dance with you? Dance with you? I'd just LOVE to dance with you...dance with you my eye...")

I was allowed to love to write. Selah.

MP
Two years after high school found me living in Southwest Missouri and visiting the College of the Ozarks library on my off time to study magazines I thought might be literary: Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. A boss of mine at the time saw this appetite and was taking a class with a professor of the name of Michael Pulley at Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Missouri. She suggested I audit his Introduction to Literature class. I started and was so engrossed with the text that I switched to credit for the class immediately. The grade wasn't the point, however--I was officially in love with literature by the time I finished. Stories like "Araby" by Joyce, "A Rose For Emily" by Faulkner, and "What I Have Been Doing Lately" by Kincaid ripped my soul loose and allowed it to soar. Mr. Pulley got me back in college and gave me enough momentum to get my Associate of Arts in what is considered on my resume to be general studies but was actually three years of literature and history with a few requirements thrown in.

I learned to love to read. Selah.

CC
After I got my Associate's I went home, thinking I could make life work there, but really found myself drowning. I went back to southwest Missouri, and continued the debt cycle by heading to university this time--what was Southwest Missouri State and which later became Missouri State University. There, in my first semester, I met Dr. Closser.

Dr. Closser had me hooked from the moment he took attendance in the first class--apparently my last name means "one who lives in a castle" and his last name means "one who lives in a hut," so he made the observation that I out-ranked him. He spent the next three years proving that statement wrong. Dr. Closser had one of those rare minds that could make literature not only digestible but intriguing to the common man without the saturation of "-isms" in his lectures like the other literary and history profs. He would simply open up the text at the beginning of class to a place he had marked with a shred of paper no bigger than a thumbnail and say in his deliberate Arkansas drawl, "Well, what did you think?" Or "On page such and such...wasn't that GOOD?" Or "Who does Wharton's protagonist remind you of?" No answer was too wild if you could show a link in your thought process. I wrote a paper for him once linking Camus's "The Plague" to a local labor union snafu that a friend of mine was fighting in--and he was blown away. He would offer a lot of "Well, if you liked this, then I highly recommend this title here," and I read much of those, too. He enjoyed my writing enough to ask me to write a recommendation for tenure to the dean of the English department for him--I never knew if he received tenure, but I was honored to write the letter. I loved his tests and essays, and I got the feeling from his comments he enjoyed reading my responses and assignments.

I was allowed a voice. Selah.

*****

This past week I was re-united with two of these gentlemen--one of whom is aware of my presence again and the other who is not. Thanks to the mixed blessings of Facebook I'm back in touch with the man who started me on journalism, and thanks to the possibilities of iTunes and iTunes U I am again in the classroom of "one who lives in a hut." Missouri State has a whole semester of him on video podcasts--he looks the same as I remember, he says much of the same things, and I'm back in love with literature, or, I should say, I'm allowed to be. Mr. Friend, Mr. Pulley, Dr. Closser, gentlemen all, here is my letter to you, memories which have rushed to the surface:

All of you gave me something in myself to trust and to shape, like iron or glass structures, and I thank you. All of you were from a time when my mother could hear of you, and when I could write without hesitation, and when I believed that whether or not I had something to say, I would still say it, because I loved to sing. Bless you. Thousands of miles have I come, and I've been shaped by so many ugly, opinionated, and cutting voices since I last saw you, and I have wandered so far off the path that I was built to take that I may die lost, but to paraphrase cummings: "I carry your [art] with me, I carry it in my [art], I am never without it." That is why I remember.

I'm sure there's not a soul on the planet who wasn't lit up by the beacon of a teacher. I was lucky. I had three who showed me my capacity on full beams. And they have shown me my capacity again. I mourned my lack of a support structure this week at work--and I shouldn't have. My work lies elsewhere, and therefore my support structure lies elsewhere, too.

"Dear God, I'm here!" - Alice Walker

Onward.

No comments:

Post a Comment