THOMAS LARSON

(Written July 1998)

The first class of my new semester begins Monday morning at eleven on the dot. English 51, Basic Writing, one hour three days a week for the next eighteen weeks. Big breath to calm myself, then entering with composure, distinction and, I hope, curiosity, walking the gauntlet between two long rows, a good forty-five students swarmed before me, some slouching, some sitting upright in the little brown desks of this unadorned beige-walled classroom.

I sit on the veneered metal desk, touch a finger to my lips. They hush; this is college. I don’t write my name on the board, but introduce myself and say, "I would like to get a sample of your writing ability, so if you would, please take out paper and pen and we’ll get started writing an essay."

"Man, I knew it! What I tell ya, man," from the back corner. A hand slaps another hand, a head exaggerates its frustration.

(First Published AWP Chronicle March/April 1998)

My "Creative Writing" class begins with the same assignment every semester, an idea I stole from the fiction writer and essayist, Carol Bly. Each student must write a ten-page autobiographical essay about a significant person, place, or phase in his or her life and finish it in one week. Raw is fine. First draft encouraged. I read the essays, meet privately with each student, then suggest revisions. I hope this task focuses students on one personal story, which most will produce anyway, and allow their imaginative pieces to emerge separately. Fact differentiated from fiction. A few years ago, when I began this assignment, I received one of the most brilliant and disturbing first drafts of my teaching career—a paramedic's nightmarish story of his worst shift ever on the job. His piece would change my thinking about the "creative writing" classroom forever.

(First Published Southwest Review Volume 83, Number 1, 1998)

1.

In Santa, Fe, New Mexico, I spent the summer of 1997 writing and, on several occasions, standing agog inside the new Georgia O’Keeffe Museum before some eighty selections of her sculptures, watercolors, drawings and those famous silky geometric images in oil: the floating pelvis, the blood clot, the lustrous orifice, the sky wedge, the eggy nutrient, the fetishized shell, the crucified sky, the lonely comic orb, the birth aesthetic, the pastel creation. I felt guiltily alone, an infidel at a church service who is happily seduced by the resplendent altars and rose windows, and forgets the presence of the word. And all the while, enjoying my O’Keeffe, I was buffeted from gallery to gallery by a procession of lovers: the turquoise matriarch, the bemused father, the ecstatic Spanish girl, the garrulous rodeo queen, the mute college boy and his shrieking girlfriend, the leering cleric, another writer (several other writers) eyeing me, the man with his hand over his mouth and the Japanese woman, her arms crossed, stroking her bare shoulders, crying.

(First Published the Anchor Essay Annual: Best of 1997 edited by Phillip Lopate)

That I was a severely bookish eighteen-year-old must have been fairly evident to my dormi­tory roommates at the University of Missouri, my freshman semester. The night before classes began, they tried to pry me away from my desk for a keg party to which I responded, “I can’t go. I need to finish studying the introductions to my textbooks.” I believed those small Roman-numerated pages would offer insight into the learning models that awaited me. In fact, so intent was I to begin my education that after saying goodbye to Mom and Dad a few days earlier I rushed out to purchase my course books and then, parked at my desk, nearly memorized the glossaries of each text. I wanted more than a head start; I wanted to achieve, as my dad sug­gested, the notice of those who mattered, the professors with whom I was soon to be engaged, and I hoped, enthralled. If called on in class, my responses would prove just how formidably prepared I was.

(First Published Inside English May 1996)

Some days I think that I might have been something other (I almost wrote more) than a writing teacher. What? A columnist, a novelist, a screenwriter, an editor, a publisher. Yet these fancies dissolve in a mist of maybes because for me there’s so much to like about teaching. Teaching—at least in college—is remarkably nourishing for student and instructor: Students who use the encouragement and structure a good teacher provides typically excel far more than they could on their own, and teachers who balance the autonomy and collegiality which the profession demands usually find their work very gratifying.

(Talk given at American Literature Association's "Symposium on American Autobiography" Cabo San Lucas, Mexico November 14, 1994)

Sometimes, listening to my 17-year-old son speak of his future, I find myself staring at him, seizing a moment I desperately hope to hold forever. How tall he is; how much his acne has receded; how soon he'll be gone to college. How bushy black his eyebrows have grown, reminding me of his mother's dark beauty. How happy he seems. How quickly I forget that less than a year ago he swallowed a bottle of antidepressant pills, trying to kill himself.

He has attempted suicide more than once during adolescence, that mire of alienation which he has, I hope, outlasted. Hesitation marks remain on his wrists, as do severe pangs of anxiety in his stomach. When the phone rings after ten p.m., I steel my fear, then exhale, dramatically. Yes, he and I have searched for answers together, alone and in therapy. And yes, some of his depression is due to my failures as a divorced father, my inability to understand and express how that has affected him.

(First Published Benicia Bay Review Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1994)

How many times have I rushed home to San Diego on a Sunday evening from a weekend off in the hinterlands of California? From Carmel, Idyllwild, Tecaté B.C., from hiking in Yosemite, the Lagunas, Anza-Borrego. The flying drive home inspires me with its geographical spectacle, and the contour of meaning I take from the land I navigate. I always arrive not tired, but ecstatic, aware of something new, something perhaps magical coming to my work and life. I think clearly in the dark at seventy-five miles an hour. One benefit of freeways.