Mentor: A Memoir (32 page)

Frank had dismissed my first offering as the worst kind of amateurish yearnings, so I wasn’t hopeful about the reception “Buckeye” would get. For the first fifteen minutes of class, Frank allowed my fellow writers to do what comes natural in a Workshop class—they tore the story to bits. Frank fidgeted, shook his head sadly, and finally, when he could take no more, held up his hands to halt the proceedings and announced that “Buckeye the Elder” was a perfect story, there was not a flaw or blemish in it, not even a comma out of place, and no amount of second-guessing and nit-picking would change that. Send this story off right away, he urged me, and it will certainly be published.

 

I was most haunted by the Workshop the year I graduated. Like the last guest at a party, I lingered in Iowa City. I hung out with the new crop of students, religiously attended readings, drifted around the cramped, smoky pall of the Foxhead. In the afternoons, light slanted dully through my apartment window while I labored to transform a short story into a novel, the one story that had earned a positive reaction from my classmates. Evenings, I applied for teaching jobs in the worst academic job market in decades.

 

I was numb. I’d come to Iowa to be elevated into a literary world I’d fantasized about since I’d first read
A Moveable Feast
. For two years, I brushed up against it—the heightened talk about fictional craft; the late nights drinking with famous writers; the odd rhythm of days liberated from having to make a living. Literary fame seemed plausible. Close. A visiting eminence would save me from the sorrow of an ordinary life.

 

But it hadn’t, and now I spent hours in Prairie Lights investigating dust jackets and
The Best American Short Stories
for evidence of other graduates’ success. One by one, friends went off to careers, marriages, other places. I spent more time alone. I went out of my way to avoid people I knew on the streets of Iowa City, even those who, like me, had been unable to let go of the dream. One day, I slipped into EPB, the building where our classes were held, and in a dark hall, listened to the articulate voices of a workshop in progress.

 

My apartment overlooked the Oakland Cemetery, and each day, long ruminative walks among the gravestones led me to the Black Angel, a life-sized statue memorializing an anonymous citizen. Legend had it that touching the Angel brings death; I stroked its outstretched palm and my novel died. I piled up draft after draft of the same two chapters—false starts, dead ends, revised revisions.

 

Eventually, I ran out of money. I took a part-time job teaching freshman composition to indifferent students at a local community college. I moved away from the graveyard and Iowa City. I boxed the novel and put away Workshop voices, and in time, the last of my illusions about the literary life faded. In a wet Iowa summer, I married the best person I’ve known and everything changed.

 

What did I learn? That life goes on with or without fiction. I work for a marketing firm these days and write fiction when I can steal the minutes. Under trying circumstances, sentence by sentence, I progress. And this is how it should be. As the first act in my writing life, the Workshop allowed me to confront my most destructive habit—getting lost in the lifestyle and not the work.

 

I have a photograph of us back in our heyday at the Mill, and whenever I look at it I feel lucky and blessed. On the long list of students who have attended the Workshop, many do not survive, their faith extinguished. Frank Conroy had said over and over that “the writing life is hard,” and I’d resented him for it. Now, I owe him a debt of gratitude and I think I understand him. How difficult it must be to pass judgment on so much hope.