POSTS

(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.