Burn All of Your College Writing
I was a creative writing major in college. I started out in business administration and couldn’t stand it. Maybe it was the stats class or maybe it was my desire to “stick it to the man,” but I bailed on business classes to write.
I thought it was cool because my first creative writing teacher was such a hoot. One day we were supposed to turn in a poem for class. My buddy sat down and realized that he had completely forgotten and had no poem. He pulled a disheveled piece of paper out of his back pack. It was a math quiz. He scribbled a bunch of garbage on the back and handed it in. Sure enough, later in the week when we all got our poems back, the professor had ignored the garbage poem and graded the math quiz instead. He wrote, “Very inventive. Never knew you had it in you. Keep experimenting. C-.”
I have to admit that I was hooked.
Somewhere around this time I started writing “serious” fiction. All of the stories were poorly conceived and lacked basic plotting. Kind of like this! (You’ll notice that I routinely break the exclamation point rule. A teacher once told me that everyone is issued two exclamation points at birth, and once they are used up, they are gone. That’s all you get.).
So I wrote this painfully contrived short story. The protagonist was a young city guy with a wife and kid. He traveled to the northern woods of Maine to reconnect with his father who had retreated to the woods after raising his children and his wife’s death.
The young man who had hated fishing as a child reconnected with his old man. They learned to understand each other, and all that bullshit. Hell, it was so sappy and condescending that they probably cried at sunset over a pitcher of Sangria.
So imagine me this summer. I’m swinging quietly in a hammock in the northern woods of Maine. I’ve just been to a large family reunion and I’m remembering this shit story.
How closely did that story track to real life? Well, first of all, my Mom isn’t dead. I don’t think she ever read that story and let’s not tell her about it.
I am married, but no kids. I took my wife to the last spot on Route 1 in Maine and she loved it. There is no television except by satellite and the only radio is in French. Tons of cousins and aunts and uncles were there. I hadn’t seen some of them since I was ten or eleven years old. We laughed our selves silly and fell asleep after late night bonfires with fresh trout, hotdogs, toasted marshmallows and sing-alongs. We couldn’t have had a better time if we tried.
But I still hate to fish.
My old man hates taking me fishing and I’m sure that we will never wade down a brook again together in our lives.
You know what? That’s just fine. As a condescending little turd in college I envisioned a time when I’d be too smart or too rich or ed-u-ma-cated for my family. I can’t stand that I ever thought that. Oh sure, I never said it. But I wrote it.
So, what happened? How come there has never been a need to “reconnect?” Why has every conversation with my dad been the same as always? Probably it was his patience with me. Probably it is because down deep I am proud of where I came from and how tough it is to scratch out a living there in the sticks.
Maybe I just grew the fuck up.
2:35:07 PM 
|
