Son of On Teachers
My high school English teacher, Liz Thornton visited me along with her husband while I was at Clarion West. They came to the sorority house where I and my classmates were holed up, trying to produce a story draft every week. I hadn’t seen Liz since leaving Tunis in the summer of 1998, and she and her husband seemed like part of another world. Before I went to Clarion, I’d spent five years in Olympia, WA, about sixty miles south, wrestling with myself, wondering whether I had what it took to become a writer, and trying to navigate the minefield of my early twenties. I greeted Liz, calling her Mrs. Thornton, and she shut that right down. “You’ll call me Liz,” she said. “You’re not my student anymore.” It felt strange calling her by her first name, but we had a fantastic afternoon together.
Those in the know say that during the six weeks of Clarion West, students experience two full years of their careers as SF writers. Digesting all of the information gifted by each of the instructors—not to mention the countless conversations at parties with SF luminaries—made me feel like a garter snake trying to swallow an ostrich egg. A lot of that training took quite a while to sink in, but it wasn’t just the experience of Clarion West that made me feel that way—it was the reordering of my personal life, and my goals as a person. That afternoon with Liz Thornton doesn’t just mark the beginning of my SF career, it’s also when I decided to become a teacher myself. I didn’t realize it at the time, though. All I knew was that I couldn’t go back to school at Evergreen, and that my life was about to turn a corner. I left Clarion West a newly minted college drop-out.
In my twenties, I knew two things for certain: that I wanted to be a writer, and that I didn’t want to be a teacher. This wasn’t because I held the profession in contempt. It was for the opposite: I saw the way teachers constantly had their work devalued and undermined by parents, by the government, and sometimes by students themselves. It broke my heart, and I decided I just wasn’t altruistic enough to go into teaching myself. Still, I took every opportunity I could to work as a tutor, to workshop writing or anything related to language. I spoke with my sister Lisa’s classes any chance I got, and when I could, I took off, along with my brother, for New Orleans. Once I came here, I worked as a short-order cook, a data entry clerk, a technical writer, a nonprofit fundraiser, all while writing as much as I could, and publishing short fiction every so often.
When the economy imploded and the nonprofit I worked for disbanded, I realized that I had sunk so much of my effort into making things work as “Deputy of Special Projects,” that I’d as much as stopped writing. My brother had moved to Georgia, and I’d stayed behind, convinced that I was in New Orleans for a reason. My girlfriend at the time suggested I finish my undergrad degree. That former girlfriend has written a lot about our time together. She’s said more than once that our relationship was her first. I’ve had little to say about it publicly, but I’ll say this: that was also my first serious relationship. My first time, truly cohabiting with a lover and trying to build and maintain a household together. If it hadn’t been for Cate, I might still have stayed in New Orleans. I might even have gotten around to going back to college, but being with her for the few years we were together taught me some overdue lessons about life in general. It taught me that it is possible to know for certain that someone loves you, and that knowing as much is not necessarily the solution to all problems. That relationship also forced me to revise my notions of what was possible in life. What it meant to be connected to another person, what it meant to inhabit my own body, what it meant to conduct knowledge and information the way copper conducts electricity. I don’t regret our split. It needed to happen.
At UNO, I lucked into more great instructors. Dr. David Rutledge, Dr. Doll, Dr. Gonzales, Dr. Jennifer Kuchta. I know I’m forgetting some. For most of my adult years, I’d been working and re-working the same novel as I learned to write. It was at UNO that I let go of that, and seized on a new project. I would draft a sort of blaxploitation Pippi Longstocking novel, set in a version of New Orleans. I’d be able to finish it quickly, since children’s literature was never really my bag. It turned out that novel took me more than ten years to write, that it is the most heart-felt—and probably the best—thing I’ve ever written, and it’s for my father, who taught me to love Fantasy, how to live, and how to be a man.
Looks like this one got away from me, so I’ll have to put together On Teachers Part 3, sometime next week.