Christopher Swann

(Thanks to friend and fellow author David Abrams (go read his book BRAVE DEEDS) for posting this piece I wrote on his blog The Quivering Pen.)

When I was an undergraduate student at Washington and Lee, the author Richard Ford visited campus. I had read his short story “Rock Springs” and his most recent novel at the time, The Sportswriter, and I vaguely understood that he was a Serious American Author, an up-and-coming big deal in the world of American literary fiction. One of my professors, Jim Warren, invited me and another creative writing student, Traci Lazenby, to dinner with Richard Ford. Moreover, we would each submit a piece of writing for Ford to read, and he would give us feedback in a subsequent one-on-one workshop with him the next day. 

We had dinner at one of the fancier restaurants in Lexington, Virginia, the kind of place you only went to when your parents were in town and could take you out to dinner. Richard Ford was wearing khakis and a white shirt and a dark tie and a lived-in blazer, the kind he probably wore when he sat down at his typewriter and pushed his sleeves back to the elbows before writing. I immediately regretted my own blazer, which had brass buttons and made me look, I was certain, like a little boy going to church for the first time. I remember Ford asked the waitress for a Bombay and tonic. This made an impression on me because my dad drank gin and tonics, and Bombay was his preferred gin. However, the waitress didn’t know what Bombay was, and Ford had to explain it to her. The waitress went to the bar but returned and said she was sorry, they didn’t have Bombay, but they had Tanqueray. Ford politely said that would be fine. I don’t remember much else about the dinner, except that Richard Ford epitomized East Coast cool while I mostly remained mute because I was afraid I’d make a fool of myself. 

The next day I met Richard Ford in an empty classroom in Payne Hall—the House of Payne, we called it. I was nervous because this was the first time an actual, serious author who was not my instructor was going to read and evaluate my writing.

I was also nervous because no one else had read what I had sent to the celebrated author for his feedback. It was the opening chapter to a novel I’d begun about a college student, a frat guy, who likes to party and cruises on his smarts but secretly wants to be a writer, except he’s afraid to admit it. There was a James Earl Jones-like instructor, Professor Worthington, and a beautiful girl, a poet in the same creative writing class as the protagonist. The title of this tour de force was Wasted Time. (No one is more certain of his own cleverness than a college undergraduate.) 

Richard Ford wore the same blazer he’d worn the night before, although he had shed the tie and, I assumed, was wearing a different shirt and khakis. He greeted me and shook my hand, but he seemed a little out of sorts as he sat there looking at me. He asked me which contemporary authors I liked to read. I froze. I was into Shakespeare and Chaucer and medieval literature. Contemporary? Every title of every contemporary novel I’d ever read vanished from my mind. Ford sat there patiently. If I said “Richard Ford,” I’d look like the worst kind of sycophant. Then a memory dropped like a bright penny: my high school English teacher had assigned Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, which I had liked, so I said that. Richard Ford raised his eyebrows in surprise, and we chatted about Bright Lights, Big City for a minute. “I can’t believe we’re talking about Jay’s book,” Richard Ford said.

Jay’s book, I thought. He was on a first-name basis with Jay McInerney. It was like a hidden door to the world of authors had been opened. This was the real deal. And I wanted in. I wanted to write novels and to wear a lived-in blazer and to be able to say casually, some day, to a would-be writer, “Oh, you read Richard Ford’s book? Yeah, Rick and I were tossing back Bombay and tonics just last weekend. I can’t believe we’re talking about old Rick’s book.” 

Then Richard Ford picked up the pages I had sent him to read and sort of looked at them, like there was something he wanted to say but he’d lost it in those pages. He leafed through them, then put the pages down and started talking. I don’t know what he said, because when he’d put the pages down, the last page was on top, and so I could read Richard Ford’s handwritten note on that last page. What he had written was, A really bad story. 

Ford continued to talk, and somehow, through my embarrassment and basement-level self-esteem, I understood that he was talking about why my short story wasn’t working. When he paused to take a breath, I rushed into the opening. “This isn’t a short story,” I said. 

“It’s not?” he said. 

“No, sir,” I said. “It’s meant to be the opening chapter of a novel.” 

“Oh,” he said, then looked down at the comment he’d written on the back page, A really bad story. He picked up a pen and reached over and crossed out the word really. 

In the past, when I’ve shared this story, I’ve usually stopped there. I get to shrug and smile ruefully while my listeners laugh, and unlike real life that anecdote has a definitive zinger of an ending. 

What actually happened was that, after a moment or two of looking down at my pages while I tried not to die of mortification, Richard Ford reached over again with his pen and crossed out the entire comment. He looked relieved, although nowhere near as relieved as I felt. And then he talked with me about the difference between short stories and novels, how to lay out a long narrative and use the opening to set up characters and conflicts. 

I walked away from that meeting with a profound sense of relief that I had escaped unscathed. It was only much later that I came to appreciate what Richard Ford had done. He had shared his honest opinion of my writing, something all writers need to hear. When he learned that what I had written wasn’t a short story but the opening of a novel, he re-evaluated his opinion on the fly and offered his thoughts on how to approach writing novels. More than anything else, Richard Ford treated me seriously, as someone who wanted to write well and needed guidance on how to do so. He initiated me into the fellowship of writers. 

In my long career as a high school teacher, I have met several students who want to write, all of them eager and anxious, all of them wanting to know if they are any good. An unthoughtful critique or a dismissive word from a teacher could be devastating. Richard Ford was kind enough to be both honest and encouraging, and so I hope to be able to pay that forward, to offer candid and supportive feedback, to help a young would-be writer think that he or she just might be able to do this after all. 

(On Monday, August 5, 2019, I walked into the school where I have taught for nearly twenty-five years and had a moment of crisis. I wrote about it on my Facebook page, then had the great good fortune to get it published on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s “Get Schooled” blog. I’ve posted the piece below. If you like my essay, this one by high school student Emily Ross is even better.)

This morning, at 7:15, summer officially ended.

I walked up the stairs from the parking lot underneath my classroom building where I work. This will be my 24th year of teaching at this school, my 24th year of walking into an empty classroom, excited and nervous in anticipation of the students who will soon crowd the halls.

It was a beautiful morning in Atlanta, 72 degrees, slightly overcast, the humidity holding off for the moment. The sun was coming up, a rosy glow lighting the sky behind the Baptist church across the street. It’s a sight I have seen hundreds of times, and it usually steadies me, puts me in a good mood as I contemplate the lesson I’m going to teach or the colleagues and students I’m going to meet.

This morning was different. This morning, I didn’t see possibility, or potential, or promise.

This morning, I saw lines of fire.

I saw escape routes.

I saw targets.

Two mass shootings occurred within 13 hours of each other, one in El Paso, Texas, and one in Dayton, Ohio. This morning on NPR, David Greene was speaking with the mayor of El Paso, Dee Margo. Mayor Margo was plain-spoken with a Texas drawl, exactly like you’d expect a movie cowboy to sound. He spoke of resolve, but he also sounded at a bit of a loss. He didn’t know how he was going to prepare for the 22 funerals of shooting victims that would take place in the coming weeks.

When he spoke of meeting the 2-month-old child whose mother had died while reportedly shielding him from gunfire, and then added that this boy had also lost his father in the attack, I had to turn my radio off.

I walked up the stairs from the parking lot with tears in my eyes. And I looked at the space between two classroom buildings and saw it not as a place where students often congregate between classes, or a place I cross at least once a day to go get a cup of coffee or to check my faculty mailbox.

Instead, I saw it as a place where shooters could target students and teachers. Wide open. Vulnerable. I found myself almost unconsciously looking for where I could run, where I could try to hide in case someone opened fire.

Not half an hour earlier, I dropped my youngest son off at the school track for his first middle school cross country practice. “Wait,” he said as he got out of the car. “I don’t know where to go.”

“Go where you see other students,” I said. “A coach.”

He said okay and headed off, water bottle in hand.

What trust. How innocent. Go over with the other students, buddy. There’s a coach over there. It’s fine. You’re safe.

But he’s not.

We’re not.

Not completely.

I know not everyone is completely safe all the time from any possible harm.

But now every time I go to a public gathering, I look for the exits, not for the sake of convenience but because I want to know where I should go if someone starts shooting.

Far too often, when I walk into work I wonder if today is the day some hateful man with a gun decides to vent his frustration and anger at my school.

Both I and my sons have experienced school lockdowns that were not drills. When I was on lockdown at my school with a room full of seniors and someone pounded on the door and tried to force it open, I thought for a handful of seconds that I would die in my classroom.

When my oldest son was on lockdown at his school, he texted me and my wife from where he and his classmates were hiding to tell us what was happening, and that he loved us.

This cannot stand.

We can’t allow it to stand.

We are better than this.

We are better than politics.

We defeated the Nazis and cured polio and sent men to the moon half a century ago. We can solve this.

Many of you will be tempted to argue about gun control, to say that the 2nd Amendment is sacrosanct, that it’s not guns that kill but people, that this or that measure wouldn’t have stopped a particular shooter or a specific instance of gun violence, that criminals won’t obey laws so laws about guns are useless. Or you might want to argue that this is about mental health, or violent video games, or a soul-sick society.

But the men who commit these acts of gun violence are not all mentally ill. They are filled with hate. Many are racist. Many express fear about immigrants, or non-whites, or non-Christians. And instead of just posting rants on 8chan or arguing online or attending white supremacist rallies, they buy easily obtainable firearms and set out to commit murder.

This has to stop.

Because we have done nothing substantive to stop it.

And some of our elected representatives have actively stood in the way of doing something substantive to stop it.

Running roughshod over Constitutional rights is not what I’m talking about.

But your individual right to purchase a firearm with little to no regulation should not override my individual right to exist in relative peace and safety.

Let’s talk about how to do this. Let’s talk about how to regulate firearms the way we regulate automobiles, for example. Let’s have our elected representatives actually debate this in public, commission the CDC or some other non-partisan group to study gun violence and ways to stem it.

This really isn’t political. Or it shouldn’t be.

It’s personal.

It’s because I don’t want to hear about thoughts and prayers offered up instead of concrete, deliberate action.

It’s because I don’t want to hear any more stories about shoppers being shot to death at Walmart, about people dying in a hail of bullets at a nightclub, about children being gunned down at school.

It’s because I no longer want to walk into my place of work, a place that I love, and imagine all the ways someone with a gun might kill me, or my students, or my own children.

This is not the America in which I want to live.

In April of 2018, I returned to Woodberry Forest School in Virginia for my thirtieth high-school reunion. I had some of the same feelings that I assume most people have when attending such a reunion: excitement, nostalgia, trepidation. My classmates had seen some of my best and worst moments in life; they literally saw me grow up from an awkward, metal-mouthed kid to a somewhat less-awkward young man. On top of that, we all lived with each other for nine months out of the year. Put 350 teenaged boys on a hill in rural Virginia and you’ll understand why Lord of the Flies could happen.

However, I was apprehensive about this particular reunion for a reason most people don’t have. The previous fall, I had published a novel set in a boarding school with more than a passing resemblance to Woodberry, with characters who bore the first or last names of some of my own classmates. Woodberry Forest had been very supportive of me and Shadow of the Lions, writing a nice article for their website and inviting me to participate in a panel discussion during my reunion visit. I had been contacted by classmates who praised the book and congratulated me.

But actually returning to Woodberry felt a bit like returning to the scene of a crime. The events in Shadow of the Lions are almost entirely fictionalized; I know of no crimes that took place during my time at Woodberry, and my roommate never disappeared as Fritz Davenport does in my novel. My novel is not an exposé of Woodberry. But it does draw on my experience of living and going to school at Woodberry for four of the most formative years of my life. How would my classmates and former teachers react?

Amazingly, it turned out.

The class of 1988 had a good turnout. The Friday we arrived, there was a reception for alumni under a tent behind the headmaster’s house. I greeted and was greeted by people I hadn’t seen since graduation. Everyone seemed to know about the novel, in part because my friend and Woodberry roommate for three years, Matthew Middelthon, had proudly told everyone about it. Everyone shook my hand and smiled and clapped me on the shoulder and said they’d loved the book or they hadn’t read it yet but planned to.

The night was cool but clear, and I stood under the tent with a beer in my hand, looking at the strung lights and knots of people at the hors-d’oeuvres table or the bar. I was struck then by the oddest sense of déjà-vu: near the end of Shadow of the Lions, the protagonist Matthias Glass attends his tenth-year reunion at Blackburne, under a tent strung with lights. A classmate saw me staring around the tent and asked if I was okay. I waved an arm at the scene in front of me, trying to encompass everything, and gave him a goofy smile. “It’s just . . . this is just like a scene in my book,” I said. He grinned and clinked his beer bottle against mine.

The next day, Saturday, was pleasantly surreal. A few weeks earlier, my AP English teacher from Woodberry, Ted Blain, had e-mailed me with a special request. His fifth-form or junior students were reading Shadow of the Lions for his class, he told me, and they were about two-thirds of the way through. They were enjoying it and wanted to talk with the author and ask me some questions. The problem was that they did not meet as a class on Saturdays, but Mr. Blain had worked out a half-hour block of time when the majority of his students would be free. Would that work?

Let me get this straight, I thought. My former English teacher, a role model for me in my own career as a high-school teacher, is teaching my novel to his current students, and they’d like to meet with me to talk about the book and ask me some questions. Yeah, I think I could swing that. That’s not what I wrote Mr. Blain in response–I basically said yes, thank you, that would be wonderful–but I think he understood.

So I met with several junior boys at 11am on Saturday morning in my old English classroom, with my former English teacher looking on. My friend Matthew insisted on coming and sat in the corner. The half hour stretched to forty-five minutes or so, and it was delightful. The students were polite and insightful and asked all kinds of good questions, and I can only hope my answers didn’t sound canned or pompous.

That afternoon, Woodberry scheduled an author round table discussion with myself; Jon Buchan ’68, author of Code of the Forest; and Mr. Blain, who had written two murder mysteries. After having gone on the road to support my novel, I knew that any sort of public reading or discussion was a “fingers-crossed” event, where the attendance might be fifty people, or five, or two. Most of my classmates showed up, along with some of Jon’s as well and a few Woodberry staff members.

Boarding school was not easy. I did relatively well in school and enjoyed the academic challenge, most of the time, and I made some good lifelong friends. But I was a dorky teenager and not very good at the give-and-take verbal banter that is the daily bread-and-butter of teenage life. I was always thinking of great responses five minutes later. I was friendly with most of my fellow students, but I only had a few friends I would call close. Boarding school was an amazing and formative experience, but it was not always pleasant, and I cried my share of frustrated tears, wondering why some of my classmates seemed to tease me mercilessly. Looking back on those years, I can see that it wasn’t much more than the usual kind of sparring that teenagers have engaged in since teenagers were invented, but at the time it just felt cruel.

Sitting at that author round table and looking out at my classmates, who all had other things they could have been doing on a sunny Saturday afternoon at their high school reunion, I felt like, after a long absence, I had just come home. They asked questions and clapped and cheered, and then they brought me copies of my book to sign for them. One classmate said he loved the Easter eggs I had sprinkled throughout the novel, referencing people and places my classmates all recognized. Another asked if he was in the book, and if so, what happened to him. People often talk about the bonds formed among boarding school classmates, and all I can say is that, for me, those bonds are real.

But my favorite question of the afternoon was from a classmate I hadn’t seen for thirty years.

In Shadow of the Lions, the opening scene takes place at the front entrance to Blackburne, where the drive is flanked by two brick columns, each topped by a stone lion, the school mascot. Those stone lions are referenced throughout the novel.

This classmate of mine plunked down a copy of Shadow of the Lions for me to sign. As I started to sign it for him, he said, “Hey, Swanny, I have a question. Where are the lions?”

I looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

“The lions,” he said. “The stone lions, you know? I’ve been looking for them.”

“The ones in my book?”

“Yeah,” he said. “What happened to them? Did they take them out or what?”

Finally I understood. He had been looking around Woodberry’s campus for the stone lions. “Dude, I made them up,” I said. “We’re the Woodberry Tigers. There aren’t any lions.”

He looked surprised, then irritated, and then he burst into laughter. “That’s a good one,” he said, like I’d just played a trick on him and he admired how I’d done it.

That might be the best review my novel has received.