Writing Mentors

Just got in from shoveling snow and my fingers are finally thawing a bit. We got 7.4 inches which is a good amount for the city. If the storm had tracked a little further north we would be digging out from over a foot like they got in southern Minnesota. But it isn’t the amount of snow, that’s no big deal really. It’s the bitter cold and the howling wind that came with the snow. We are currently at 8 degrees F with the windchill taking us down to six below and it’s only the beginning of December! Brr.

This morning I had to take a new book with me for my commute and I stood staring at my pile and could not decide. In the end I took a book I am already in the middle of reading Mentors, Muses and Monsters, and had the pleasure of reading a couple of enjoyable essays.

One, “Annie Dillard and the Writing Life” by Alexander Chee was about how a semester-long class with Dillard at Wesleyan University in 1989 influenced his writing. On the first day of class she entered the classroom “with a cowgirl’s stride” and

from her bag withdrew her legal pad covered in notes, a thermos of coffee, and a bag of Brach’s singly wrapped caramels, and then sat down. She undid the top of the thermos with a swift twist, poured coffee into the cup that was also the thermos top, and sipped as she gave us a big smile and looked around the room.

As class wore on Brach’s candy papers would pile up on the corner of the desk, in danger of being blown to the floor as she whipped through the pages of notes on her legal pad. This happened every class meeting and I find such detail in this and other essays I’ve read in this book so wonderful and quirky. They are full of interesting insights into the people who are being written about. Again in the essay about Dillard, an aha! moment about Dillard’s writing philosophy:

If fiction provided the consolation of the mask, nonfiction provided per Annie’s idea of it, the knowledge that what was underneath the mask, your own individual sensibility, that was irreplaceable and potentially of value. The literary essay, as she saw it, was a moral exercise that involved direct engagement with the unknown, whether it was a foreign civilization or your mind, and what mattered in this was you.

An interesting approach to writing the literary essay, yes?

I also read an essay today by Mary Gordon who wrote about her two biggest influences, Janice Thaddeus and Elizabeth Hardwick. She describes Thaddeus as a pelican, a bird that in medieval legend plucks her breast and feeds her young with her blood. Hardwick she describes as a tiger, “brilliant, careless, destructive, and exciting, crashing through the underbrush heedless of the damage in her wake.”

Gordon tells a story about Hardwick that made me gasp. Hardwick apparently always picked a favorite in her writing classes and Gordon was her choice. She’d tell the class that Gordon was the only one who had written anything interesting that week. After Gordon graduated she kept in touch and she and Hardwick became friends. Even after Gordon’s work began being published, they never talked about it. After knowing each other for sixteen years they were both invited to the same writer’s conference. One night at dinner after Hardwick had had a lot to drink, she mentioned a writer whose work she liked. Gordon commented that she, “didn’t think her sentences are very interesting.” Hardwick’s response:

“What would you know about it?” she said to me. “You’ve never written an interesting sentence in your life.”

Gordon didn’t speak to Hardwick for 21 years after that. She looked her up again finally, afraid she would die before she saw her again and still appreciative of what Hardwick had done for her in the beginning of their friendship. Would you be surprised to know that Hardwick had no idea why they had had a falling out? Wouldn’t that make you want to scream?

I think I’ll be taking the book with me to work again tomorrow unless one of those books on my pile manages to jump into my bag before I walk out the door.