“Where I’m Likely to Find It” by Haruki Murakami

New Yorker fiction -- May 2, 2005 issue


(If you’re like me, you have a stack of partially read New Yorkers. I started thinking that I ostensibly subscribe mostly for the fiction, yet I only read the story sometimes. I hope this is the beginning of a weekly feature that will force me to read the story and respond to it. Maybe it will also spark discussion of current short stories. These are not meant to be reviews: there's no plot summary, and it’s assumed you have read the story and are ready to think about it. Don’t bother reading this until you read the story. I'm putting in stoplight icons, because not every story will be good ...)

Motifs:

• Breakfast food (pancakes, donuts)
• Gaining/losing weight (Mr. Kurumizawa)
• Stiletto heels (compared to weapons)
• Zen Buddhism (father-in-law, old man’s “reverse” Descartes [if you don’t think, you don’t exist] compared to Zen koan, investigator-narrator’s method of closing his eyes during which time disappears)

This odd, philosophical little unresolved mystery story reminded me of the tone of some of the recent Japanese horror movies. For a narrator, we have an unnamed Zen-like Joe Friday, or more precisely a kind of a Fox Mulder-san of missing persons, who investigates cases in which people disappear “in a certain way.” That is, into thin air. As he explains to the little girl -- the third in a trio (fairy-tale alert!) of building residents whom he questions while lounging on the couch at the 25th floor landing, “I’m looking for something ... I imagine it’s like a door.” This door, presumably, is the passageway whereby the disappearances take place.

Is the mirror the door? The little girl points out about the mirror that “of all the mirrors in the staircase, this one reflects the best. It’s not at all like the mirror in our apartment.” When the investigator looks, “sure enough, the image of me reflected in the mirror was a few degrees removed from what I was used to seeing. The me in the mirror looked plumper and happier. As if I’d just polished off a stack of hot pancakes.” Is this what Mr. Kurumizawa saw? Did he go through the mirror? He was gone for 20 days and lost 20 pounds. He uses the stairs instead of the elevator in the first place because he’s put on weight. So his disappearance achieves what the stairs didn’t?

The little girl says it might not be a door he’s looking for. It might be an umbrella. Umbrella ... recall that it was raining the night Kurumizawa’s father, the Buddhist priest, was killed by the streetcar (sparking the panic attacks in the priest’s wife), and it was raining the morning Kurumizawa vanished -- because of the rain, his golf game was cancelled and he went down to help his mother through the panic attack.

As for religion, the narrator says he has no interest, but the tone of the piece says otherwise, or at least that he’s interested in the mysterious and the philosophical. Is he hiding something? Why does he work for free? Does he work for himself or for an organization? Did he have someone in his life who disappeared, and is that why he does this? He says he’s not married. Anymore?

The old guy says he’s seen Mr. Kurumizawa “staring off into space” from the sofa. The investigator notes that directly across from the sofa is the mirror. The old man goes on to speculate, “contrary to Descartes ... sometimes we think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally actually have the opposite effect.” He also says, “...water always picks the shortest route to flow down. Sometimes, though, the shortest route is actually formed by the water. The human thought process is a lot like that.” So Kurumizawa may have thought himself out of existence? Is this what the narrator is trying to do when he closes his eyes and blanks out his mind? Is he looking for “the door” not so much to find missing people but so that he, too, can disappear? His ruminations to the ceiling at Kurumizawa’s return -- “Welcome back ... to the three sides of your beautiful triangular world --- your panic-attack-prone mother, your wife, with her icepick heels, and good old Merrill Lynch.” Stilletto heels related to those sharp pencils he’s so obsessed with?

And the pancakes and donuts. The stock broker husband called her on his way back up the stairs to ask that she get started on the pancakes he wanted, because he was hungry. He never got to eat those pancakes -- instead he disappeared for 20 days and lost 20 pounds. (It sure made the narrator want some pancakes, enough to consider walking to Denny’s (there’s a Denny’s in Tokyo?!) Stock broker’s memory gone. Does the narrator want to lose his memory? If so, I can find few clues to what is bothering him, if anything.

I don’t know if this story works only because it’s Japanese, and we forgive non-Western departure from our accustomed narrative conventions, or if it works at all, really. If it does, it’s because of some elusive fairy-tale, dream logic that involves fitting these motifs together in a way that I can’t quite manage but am enjoying trying to. Regardless of all this, I liked the story, but I think we need Freud -- or somebody besides Fox Mulder-san -- on this case.

The Confessions of Nat Turner

I just finished this profound, beautiful, satisfying novel by William Styron, which won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize. In 1831 Nat Turner, a Virginia slave and preacher, led the only sustained, effective slave revolt in American history, yet few records of the event offer much detail. The only one! After years of solemn, secret planning, into which the reader is methodically and eagerly enlisted, over the course of two days Nat and some 75 followers rampaged the countryside, laying waste to 55 white souls of all ages, including women and babies, before they were caught and, of course, hanged. Fifty-five cold-blooded murders plus dozens of wounded makes Charles Manson look like Ken Lay! Styron attempts to penetrate the mind of Turner to uncover his motive and psychology and succeeds to a considerable degree, in my opinion.

The book is told in first person, most of it directly by the chained Nat awaiting execution in his cold, dank cell, the rest of it summarized in dialogue with his lawyer, a neat way to get across a lot of plot points in a hurry while maintaining scene and drama. Story begins with a vision Nat has of an inscrutable, white building high on a sea cliff -- his version of freedom and glory (he has never seen the sea). Then back to the cell, and we get what happened in dialogue with his lawyer, a befuddled white man assigned to the case. The second part of the book retraces Nat's remarkable life story in recollections, slowly, gorgeously laying the groundwork for his religious convictions that lead to his plan to plunder the countryside that has served as the backdrop for the unspeakable horrors endured by his fellow slaves. Particularly effective is Styron's use of Old Testament martyrs and prophets who rose up against the Egyptians and whose fiery rhetoric lights a blaze in Nat's mind that cannot be put out. This leads right up to the climax, which the reader has been prepared for and can't wait to read, and the scene where he storms his master's bedroom does not disappoint. The deneoument brings us back to Nat's final meeting with his lawyer on the morning of his execution and his bidding goodbye to his last living comrade, led past Nat's cell, crying out that it will be all right, that it's "nuthin'!" The hangmen's call from behind the door to "Come!" becomes in Nat's mind the voice of the Lord at last, the Lord who has, for years, abandoned him and tested his will by His silence. Nat's vision of the mysterious white building on the hill becomes a metaphor for the peace of the finally imminent Afterlife.

Interesting is how Nat's retrospective first-person prose is simply scrumptious, lavish, almost insanely wonderful, but when he speaks, his words come out in the same impoverished dialect as the other slave characters. No excuse or explanation is given for this discrepancy -- a reminder of just how much you can get away with provided you set the standard from the get-go and never look back. Styron's prose, which I had only encountered once before, in his terrific novella The Long March, is what I would call transparent. Clear, perfect, to be devoured compulsively as you think "he can't possibly keep this up" and he does. When I read Styron's natural kinsmen such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Richard Yates, I think as I read, "Goodness gracious but this son of a bitch is freaking talented with words, and he clearly knows it," but when reading this book, I found myself thinking, "Goodness gracious but this son of a bitch is freaking talented with words, and he's sparing the reader the hint of his own swaggering ego to boot." Hence, tranparency. The lily rendered as it is, no gilding required. Hence, my excitement upon emerging from this book is partly the prospect of his other novels, waiting for me in used bookstores and eBay auctions and garage sales.

Styron took a lot of heat for his matter-of-fact treatment of Nat's character, mainly from black leaders who denounced it as perpetuating the stereotype of the sex-obsessed, violent black man. Maybe they had a point. It was 1968 after all. Then again, Nat's natural development, morally and sexually, was so warped and twisted by even the mundane practical restraints of slavery, as to supply reason enough for me. And the man presided over such unprecedented and widespread carnage -- it must be remembered that he was a mass murderer, no matter his skin color. Yet, amazingly, and probably significantly, Nat himself committed just a single murder -- that of a white girl whose beauty and sincere kindness toward him somehow overboiled his frustrated rage more than all the cruelty of his various masters and their surrogates. Finally, though, and most important to a writer, Nat is written with such humanity and compassion and courage and honesty and wit that, in the usual sense, it hardly matters what he did -- the reader is with him till the end. "Write unlikeable characters," Ethan told us. "The reader will always like them." James Baldwin had a different take on the book when it came out: "He [Styron] has begun the common history -- ours." Achieving a common history is something Jim McPherson often said should be our goal: "We must develop what Ralph Ellison called the omni-American sensibility." Jim also once said, "There should be no limits whatever to the writer's imagination." Amen!

Anyway, just wanted to sound off on yet another book from decades ago that was fresh as a new penny to me and inspiring as all get out.

Congrats to Christina

This from this morning's Publishers Lunch report:

Iowa MFA Cristina Henriquez's COME TOGETHER, FALL APART, a collectionof seven short stories and a novella that capture the rhythms of life in contemporary Panama, with a particular eye to the challenges faced by the country's young women, to Megan Lynch at Riverhead, by Kate Lee at ICM (world English).

Many congrats, Christina!

Barrelhouse, barrelhousing

For those who discovered a sense of passion over the high/low culture discussion we had a while back, check out this new literary journal of pop-culture-rich fiction, poetry and sundry journalism. Steve Almond and Class of '02 grad Dan Pope made appearances that I could see. The teasers on the web site alone are worth clicking.

El Gordo, this means you, dude.

Frank Conroy tribute

This remarkable and well-attended event in the MacBride Auditorium felt kind of a like a cross between the Academy Awards and a memorial service. I was woefully underdressed, a grave miscalculation that kept me shamed and skulking in the shadows, bejeansed and bright-striped, huddling close to Tracy -- and to my mother and aunt and their friend, huge Irving fans who had driven 325 miles to be there. All minds were on Frank as Chris Merrill began his first introduction, and it felt at times as if Frank's presence really were in the room, as if we had all summoned him from beyond to cast his boyish and appreciative grin upon our gathering. Chris mentioned that Frank's first piece of advice to him when he arrived was "Get yourself a Connie."

Tom Grimes read an earnest, heartfelt dedication, but the poor guy was victimized by speaking too close into a nonoptimal microphone, rendering some of what he said unintelligible. You could tell nevertheless quite clearly just how much his relationship with Frank has affected him. Marilynne Robinson then rose and delivered a beautiful articulation of what Frank had meant to her. Once she had told him that when she came here, she had thought Chicago was closer, and that it seemed light-years away. "Yeah," said Frank, "but it's still light." She developed this theme of Frank's ability to read and understand and go right to the heart of the matter better than anyone else with such fond eloquence that she herself welled up a bit and had to pause once or twice. Her remarks were powerful and affecting.

John Irving, looking "hot," as I heard more than a couple people remark, in a pink shirt and charcoal blazer, his tanned wrestler's face framed by that trademark, whirled-up white hair, then mounted the podium and, after telling us he has no plans to ever tell the story in public again, launched into a yarn of "Dickensian coincidence" involving his sons, his ex-wife and her boyfriend Henry, a wrestling mat, a swimming pool, a ceiling fan, and Frank Conroy that was one of the very greatest and most hilarious spells of storytelling I've ever been privileged to witness in person. Truly had the entire audience in the palm of his hand and calmly proceeded to bring down the house. Everything about the story -- the timing, the wry voice modulated according to which character was speaking (his Frank was dead-on), the pacing and length and appropriateness to the occasion, the way he came at the main moments indirectly, letting the listener put it together in his or her own head -- was utterly masterful and riveting. He read it from a notebook, having introduced the piece as a first draft and promising to read something "not a first draft" afterward, which turned out to be a snippet of his new, "longest" novel, called Until I Find You Again, I think. The novel's subject matter has to do with the art of tattooing, but then the short beginning he read was about a mother introducing her son to the girls' school he's about to enter. That first, hilarious piece was a vivid, almost stunning reminder of why this man was my favorite writer for years -- it made me vow to pick up something of his again, soon, and convinced me that he is still one of the shrewdest observers of the human situation. The second piece made me wonder if he doesn't maybe revise too much and focus too much on very long works, given the crackling, raw energy of the first piece. A new book of stories, perhaps? Or he probably has one, and I've just been too out of the Irving loop to have noticed.

T.C. Boyle then read a story "about loss," vis a vis a couple who, after some drinks, a joint, and preparatory play involving the wife's new slinky lingerie, receive The Dreaded Call: Their daughter's been in a wreck, come to the hospital. The story was interspersed with abrupt reflections on cataclysmic collisions between the earth and celestial objects, such as the Tunguska object and the one that killed off the dinosaurs and 70% of life on earth, which lent the story its title but which escapes me at the moment. It was entertaining and well-rendered in language, if maybe a bit stretched out and belaboring its metaphor. I thought the bullet-dodging but still cautionary ending struck just the right tone.

President Skorton wrapped things up by addressing Frank directly, his eyes rolled up to Heaven "even though," as he said, "I don't believe in things like that," and was only "doing it for effect." He talked about Frank's jazz playing, and how Frank had gently convinced Skorton to trade in the tenor sax for an alto because his "range was okay in the middle, but the notes at the top and bottom are just not there." Frank "always spoke truth to power," said Skorton, who later took up the flute and once jumped in with it as Frank played. Frank put up with this for a bit and then said, "Why don't you just listen." The event ended with Skorton eschewing the "applause I am used to and so richly deserve" to ask that we remain quiet in our seats as a bit of Frank's music played. I didn't catch the name of the first tune, but it was a light blues ditty featuring a lot of jazzy riffing and playful ivory-tickling from Frank. The second tune served as the soundtrack to our departure. It was a fitting segue into the reception.

Which was held in the Natural History Museum downstairs, a delightfully surreal setting for milling about. There's TC Boyle sipping water and nodding in front of the Giant Sloth. There's John Irving strolling alone beside the Squaw and Her Husband. There's SER passing along the word that our next destination would be the Mill. And there was President Skorton with his sax, filling the air with jazz along with the rest of the band he and Frank had started. And the doors opened on a beautiful day, a far cry from the cold drizzle that had moistened the journey to the auditorium. All in all, it was a wonderful and stirring tribute to our late hero, which had begun, host Chris Merrill reminded us, as a celebration planned by Connie for Frank himself to enjoy in person, but turned into a remembrance. I don't know about anybody else, but it seemed to me that Frank managed to be there with us anyway.

Whenever I'm Sad, I will Think of This

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Send in the SWAT monkey.
It's not an order police commanders are accustomed to giving, but that could change if an Arizona police department follows through on a proposal to train a capuchin monkey for high-risk police operations.
A Special Weapons and Tactics veteran from Mesa, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, has researched the possibility of landing a $100,000 federal grant to fund a pilot program to train one monkey.
"Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it," Sean Truelove told the East Valley Tribune, a local newspaper. "It could change the way we do business."
Major city police departments in the United States use paramilitary SWAT teams for hostage situations and in situations involving heavily armed criminals.
Truelove, who declined an interview request from Reuters, told the newspaper that the idea came to him in a dream about 18 months ago.
The test monkey could be trained to unlock doors and search buildings for police on command, Truelove was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
The capuchin monkey is considered one of the smartest primates, known by many for its decades-long association with organ grinders. The monkeys weigh three to eight pounds (1.3 kg to 3.5 kg) and live for 15 to 20 years.
Capuchin monkeys, native to southern central America, have been used to help disabled people, and are able to perform such tasks as retrieving items, serving food and opening and closing doors.
The Mesa, Arizona police department issued a statement saying: "We have always encouraged our department members to seek creative and innovative ways to improve public safety in our community."
But the department also said the idea of training a capuchin SWAT monkey had not been cleared by the department's executive ranks.
A representative from the nation's largest association of SWAT officers also could not resist poking a little fun at the proposal.
"I've always heard you can train a monkey to do anything," said Steve Smith, a board member of the National Tactical Officers Association when reached at a convention in Nashville. "Does this mean he's going to have on little black fatigues?"

With thanks to Brian.

Think of the possibilities here -- we could get a Workshop Monkey -- deliver stories, make coffee, bar tend, buy cigarettes, hold our hands when we've had a bad workshop, drive us home from The Foxhead, listen to our rambling psychological problems, etc. He could wear a little ascot and pince-nez.

If I ever have any money, I pledge to make the Workshop Monkey a reality.

Come back, Oprah

There's a new effort afoot to get Oprah to bring back her (contemporary) book club. Thanks to the Happy Booker for the head's-up.

Several of our teachers and fellow former students have signed up. What do you think, Goats--good idea, bad idea, other?

Prank paper accepted for conference

In case you missed this story, some M.I.T. students wrote a computer program that generated meaningless scientific papers, submitted them to conferences, and one of them, "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy," was accepted. If you guys who are going to AWP next year get in a pinch, you might contact these students for some last-minute help.

Foetry Goes Down

Today's NYT details the fall of Foetry, a place of some discussion on this site.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/books/21poet.html

Questions for Greeneophiles

I'm given to believe that there are several Graham Greene fans around here, and I'm looking for a few recommendations - the first, just your favorite Greene titles, since I feel like adding him to my summer reading list. All I've read thus far is The Comedians. Second, any Greene titles you think might be good for an online upper level community college modern Brit lit class. Any and all input is mightily appreciated.

Sam in Times

Times article about our new honcho. Interesting to note that she wants to raise money to fund all students fully.

http://nytimes.com/2005/04/18/books/18chan.html

mustache?

strange drawings, strange poems, much joy: http://mustachioed.com/

The Long Excerpt

An excerpt from a wholly alarmist but very intriguing book, one of the conclusions of which seems to be that Iowa City may be a good place to be in the long run.

Happy Birthday, Dunkeys!

I had forgotten we had the same birthday until you posted. Goats, go forth and have a drink in his honor.

Happy Birthday, TLB!

Hey, here's a great idea for a show: pole dancing meets Prairie Lights!

I was spending my usual Wednesday reading The Onion when I saw an ad for a new Pamela Anderson show called Stacked. The title alone should tell you it's on Fox. Anyway, Stripperella was lounging on a bunch of books, and the copy read "you can't judge a bookstore by its cover girl." How could I not click?

Now, TLB knows that I am a superstitious man. And with the Red Sox winning the World Series, the Pope dying, and Brad and Jen splitting up, I've been in the watchtower looking for the last Horseman. Well, I think I spotted his hoof dust.

You see, Pamela plays a woman named Sklyer who tires of making amateur porn videos with drummers and has run out of pieces of her body to replace with foam rubber. So she does what any starlet in need of a change of pace would do: start working at a bookstore. The bookstore is run by two brothers who (wait for it...) couldn't be more different. One is the highbrow pole-up-the-ass closet case (aka every character ever played by David Hyde Pierce). The other is the fun-loving Joey Bagadonuts brother who wants to have sex with her because she looks like a stripper (aka Kelsey Grammer's love life). Are you ready to laugh? Don't do it just yet, there's more.

See, there's another woman who works behind the espresso bar at the bookstore. She's the wisecracking, sarcastic female foil who we know isn't desirable because a) she's a brunette and b) her nipples are not pumped full of argon. The cherry on top of this shit sunday is Christopher Lloyd, playing the steady customer who's a retired rocket scientist. No word on whether he drives a fusion-powered DeLorean.

After I got done throwing up in my mouth, I thought about the whole death-of-reading argument. I realized that the problem isn't that people don't want to read or that too many books are being published or that the Attorney General has outlawed literature. It's that bookstores need gianormous pairs of fake tits to attract customers. (That would spice up LFPR a bit, though, wouldn't it?)

I can't believe SER and I didn't even make the cut in the Bravo sitcom contest yet this piece of baboon-scripted comedy anti-matter is on TV. Silly me, if I had just whacked myself in the head with a shovel a few dozen times before writing my script, I probably would be working at Fox right now.

My musical OCD confession

Lately -- okay, for the last several years -- throughout the day and night, I will be found beebopping or doo-de-doo-ing a song, the melody of any catchy song, not the words, internally or, if alone, out loud, and at the end of any verse or chorus, at a time of my choosing, I suddenly finish it off with a terrible, cartoony ending-flourish, a scale-sliding, skibby-doo-wah, razzmatazz-mammy finale -- like, if I were on stage I'd wind up on one knee, whipping off my hat to the audience. Then immediately, keeping up whatever rhythm the "root" song happened to be in, I launch straight into my own, heavily mutated, elaborate version of "Mrs. Robinson" in the same style and the same key. What I'm saying is, every stray song in my head ends up, at some personally delicious moment, morph-medleying into my sick and very private "Mrs. Robinson." I mean all the time. It's just part of me, of whom I have become. It makes me a little nauseated and anxious to contemplate the time and energy I waste on this habit. And hating myself slightly for it only seems to amplify the perverse pleasure. My other musical tic is to doo-de-doo "Lady Madonna" when I walk anywhere. My natural walking pace is precisely the tempo of that song. They just go together and that's that.

Does anyone else do stuff like this?

Calling All Earth Goats

Your suggestions on the future of the Workshop are encouraged - nay, demanded - over at Babies Are Fireproof. No idea is too large or too small, too foolish or too complex. Come one, come all. Etc.

Notes from Jim McPherson's seminars

While I'm cleaning out my desk... I took two seminars from Jim: "Humor" and "Mythology." I'm going to stack these things that came out of his mouth as they appear in my notebook, randomly, and see what happens. Half of these came from the weeks and months before and after 9/11.

Replace life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with immortality, freewill, and access to grace.
The universe is always being created by abrupt surprises and jolts from crisis to crisis.
Calamity is permanent.
Antigone symbolizes the remnant of the Mother Goddess. Sitting Bull, white squaw, Eileen Pollack, Gish Jen.
Transcending of tragedy makes for metaphorical meaning.
Novella is like a drop of water holding its shape. A novel loses its form.
Uniqueness of American culture means unique humor. We're all outsiders. If humor fails here, it really fails. The only model for real multiculture.
Old cultures live on cyclical time. No escape from history.
Before the nation-state there were the sect nations. Bin Laden is resurrecting the sect nation.
Corporation state: Writers must either join in or imagine beyond.
Macedonia was more like Cleveland than Greece. But Alexander slept every night with his copy of The Iliad.
Myth is a narrative linked to a rite.
Romantic love will kill the West.
Men and women lived in different camps. To get a wife, cross the river and steal a virgin.
Look for ritual in modern life.
Involuntary Creation, Indian myth of origin. Vishnu, Shiva, Brahman.
Old Testament has a bias toward chaos.
Ritual dance of aggression on Indian-Pakistani border.
Hesiod: First god was chaos, then Gaia.
5 sheaths of human, from outside to inside: Food (body), Breath (air), Mental, Wisdom (genetics), Bliss.
We join the dragon.
Ghandi was a high-class lawyer who worked for a white government. Read his autobiography.
We had no moral code, so we imported the Victorian one.
We worship the cult of the Ideal.
American humor comes from a synthesis of its various vernacular styles.
America has no tragedy. Though African-Americans and Indians do. The Romans also did not develop tragedy. Maybe it's because our roots are in the future -- you can always pull up stakes and move, change everything. We are not fixed.
Vitality in this country stopped in 1976. There was the Patty Hearst hideout massacre, and from then on the white kids never made a peep.
Did you hear about the old lady put off the plane with her knitting needle? Said she was going to knit an afghan.
Lowering the basement floor: "We were so poor..."
Baltimore dope dealers now selling flags.
We laugh when the mechanical meets the organic.
"I happened to stumble across a case of bourbon and went right on stumbling for several days thereafter." -- W.C. Fields
She's so fat, when she wears high heels she strikes oil.
"I bought a used car and my wife's dress was in the back seat. Was in a hotel that was so bad, they stole my towel." -- Rodney Dangerfield
He's a drunk - they found an olive in his urine specimen.
She's so ugly, when she walks in a room the mice jump on chairs.
She's been picked up so many times, she's starting to grow handles.
"Stay out of the Bushes" -- Jesse Jackson. "Same to you, fella." -- George W. Bush
We must develop what Ralph Ellison called the omni-American sensibility.
Affirmative action has become a product. It should be a process.
Laughter is a corrective.
"America never looks back until there's a crisis." -- Constance Roarke
An old man once told me to "play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself."

Memories of Sam Chang's workshop

I had Sam first semester, first year. I picked her because she was young and would only be there a year and I had liked her stories in Hunger. She was a very calm and soothing presence in the classroom. She had us move our chairs in a tight circle and spoke in a subdued, informal way that put everyone at ease. She explained how the workshop would work, that we couldn't talk while our work was "up," and that prior to the class we would compose a letter to the writer whose work we were discussing. She put up on the board Frank's famous pyramid, which was my first encounter with that. Meaning, sense, and clarity. I was dazzled.

But when she asked for volunteers to go first, as in submit for the following week, I made the mistake of raising my hand. Further, I asked if it was okay to put up a story I had applied with. She said yes, though that wasn't normally done. That's okay, I thought. The piece is so good they'll all have nothing but praise. I believe Dunkeys was the other guinea pig that kicked things off (is that right? Who else was in there? TLB, cek, Kate...).

Needless to say, my story ran into trouble. Students were saying it was cliche, juvenile, they'd read this stuff before, and Sam backed them up without seeming dismissive or mean. All of what they said was true. This was my first workshop revelation about writing: you don't simply repeat the kind of thing others have already done better. I really didn't know that.

In her two pages of written comments, Sam praised my humor and tone, saying that those are hard to achieve, and then pointed out other stuff. The discrepancy between the "humorous" tone and the "traumatic" events happening to our narrator. Being more "ruthless" about scene selection and blend of scene and narrative. She suggesting thinking of a story as a play. When do the characters enter and exit the stage? Why did this one character exit right before the climax? She also talked about structure and pacing: "A linear narrative with a traditional structure of conflict, climax, resolution requires each scene leading toward the climax to increase the reader's anticipation." She finally warned me about too many adverbs and connecting too many sentences with "and" and including too many extraneous details and useless actions (walking out of a room, closing a door, how she folded her hands, etc.) -- Frank's abject naturalism.

My overall feeling as I left the class that day was a mixture of crushing disappointment and revelation. Disappointment in the ego sense, that not everyone thought I was the hotshot I thought I was. Revelation in that writing is not a talent that drops into your lap from the sky, that it must be hammered and hammered -- forever maybe -- and that this process was going to be a long, hard slog, that it was a craft I would have to learn from the beginning, and the only way to learn it was by doing it -- a lot -- and reading what other people were doing, and absorbing lessons from what other readers found in my work, as opposed to what I thought they should find.

In my next stories (somehow I got in three that semester), Sam actually drew graphs that related the forward timeline to the emotional high points -- a kind of Excel chart of my writing. This was fascinating. I copied the technique for use in workshopping other people's stuff and for when I taught undergrad creative writing. It had never occurred to me that a story could be visually represented in such a way that structural things could be immediately seen that couldn't be from just reading the pages. I still do that.

Sam's a great one for handouts and pulling out an essay or three that illuminates the topic of the day. In her seminar on "Length," I collected a good dozen of these pieces by writers such as Charles Baxter, Jane Smiley, and Elizabeth Bowen. Still have 'em. She passed out a terrific interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez that was all underlined and starred in the parts she thought were most important. She's amazing at analysis and can nimbly compare what you are probably trying to do with numerous examples of where that's been done successfully.

If she can apply this broad-based storehouse of writing knowledge with her talent for seeing the structure in things and being able to tell whether it's working -- and bring these to bear at the workshop as an institution, as well as in her teaching and workshopping -- the workshop will no doubt benefit. Yet I love that she is a product of that institution and that she clearly holds Frank up as her model. That bodes well for continuity.