Thanks, Bill

Mutts that most of us are, every writer still has a pedigree. Someone put the idea in our heads that we could be writers. Someone encouraged us. Someone planted that seed and nurtured it. We were guided by teachers who had teachers. If we had the time and inclination, we might trace our lineage back centuries. I’d rather spend the time writing, but I would like to go back a couple generations, anyway.

I trace my own lineage through William Allen, former director of the Ohio State University Creative Writing Program, best selling author, and my novelist-boot-camp drill sergeant. I took the last workshop he taught at OSU. I finished a draft of the novel I began shortly after his workshop and took him up on an invitation to his house in West Texas to re-write. The three months I spent there were, for me, a graduate program in fiction writing. A veteran editor and teacher, he tore the book apart. He watched over my shoulder as I rebuilt it into something finer. I would give him pages and he’d hand them back with more pencil marks than type. Sometimes he’d just ball up a page and toss it, insisting I should try again. I learned to trust that he meant it when he told me I’d written something good, because he had no qualms at all telling me when I’d written crap. He found everything from the smallest error in grammar to the largest story or structure problem.

Sometimes we’d bump into each other in the kitchen in the middle of the night, the seventy mile per hour winds that sometimes shook his Davis Mountains home making it hard to sleep. We had some of our best conversations then, about politics, mule deer, the ignominious fate of human kind and literature. He’d talk about his mentor, William Price Fox, who taught him at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early seventies. Bill’s tone of admiration and gratitude towards William Fox mirrored my own for him.

I’ve had other teachers. I took my first undergrad fiction class with graduate assistant Christine “Telene” Guerra at Ohio State. I don’t think she liked me much, but I don’t hold it against her. It’s not like that makes her part of a tiny group. Nor do I think she appreciated my subject matter. But she made no judgments in that regard. She gave honest criticism of my writing without criticizing me as a person. When you are a fragile new writer, it is easy to find reasons to quit. In eschewing the chance to be a roadblock, she did more for me than she realized.

My writers groups have included published poets Psyche North Torok, Diane Ferri and short story writer Amy Simonson. Diane has also published a novel. I have learned something from all of them and I hope they have learned from me.

Beyond my ambition of writing novels that people want to read, I’d like one day to be the kind of mentor I have in Bill Allen and he had in Bill Fox. I want to keep this lineage alive out of my love of fiction and my respect for people like Bill Allen and Bill Fox. They have modeled a generosity of spirit I hope to emulate.