Fiction Workshop Winter Quarter 1998

I had to fight to take the class because I hadn’t completed the prereqs, and it was a 400 level class. I don’t think I knew I was pregnant yet; midterm was in late October, and I got pregnant the Monday after the Fleetwood Mac concert in Atlanta. The two friends I went with were my daughter’s godmothers at her Christening, but we fell out of touch, and neither are part of either of our lives anymore. It was also the Monday before Thanksgiving, which is another story for another day.

So I was in my advisor’s office, and I told him that I wanted to take his Fiction Workshop Winter Quarter. He said no, I didn’t have the prereqs. I remember standing there in his office, barefoot, in a Soul Bar t-shirt and 501 cutoffs, looking at his books. The shelves were floor to ceiling, covering two walls completely. It was beautiful.

I argued that I was well-read, 25 years old with life experience, and that I had earned an A in both Paul’s and Tony’s lower level creative writing courses, respectively Creative Writing and Sandhills, which was attached to the Sandhills writers conference, not Sand Hills, the student lit mag, which I ended up editing for the next two years, until I graduated.

Edward Albee was the keynote when I took Tony’s class in 1993, before I took a break from school to wait tables and party. Each student in the class had to help with the conference by picking up the visiting authors from the airport and driving them around while they were in town. We all wanted Albee, don’t remember who got hom other than not me. Keith and I got W.P. Kinsella, who took us to dinner at Luigi’s on the department’s dime and almost bought a condo at Port Royal, but the receptionist wasn’t impressed by his appearance, talked down to him like he was a bum off the street instead of the dude who wrote Shoeless Joe, the novel Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come,” was based on, so he didn’t pull out his checkbook. We kept in touch after the conference as pen pals for years.

Great party at Tony’s after the conference.

So Dr. Evans, my advisor and also Jack’s dad (we’ll get to that later) says he’ll take it across the hall to the department head. This was in Butler Hall, which no longer exists. He comes right back and says that Lillie says no.

I say what if I promise to get an A?

He said let’s both go across the hall, literally like two steps.

Lillie looks amused. Dr. Evans tells me to tell her what I told him, and I do. The two of them look at each other around my head, and then Llille tells me that I don’t know what I’m saying. Oh, Fiction Workshop was known on campus as the hardest writing course, and Dr. Evans had a reputation as a destroyer of egos; students cried after his class. Paul and Tony blew sunshine up everyone’s ass and were soft graders. Like super soft, gave out grades like Mardi Gras beads.

I looked Lillie dead in the eye and told her I knew exactly what I was saying.

She agreed to let me take it—as a 200 level independent study but I was to be in class and not treat it as an IS. That was all I wanted—to take the toughest creative writing class in the department. Paul’s and Tony’s classes had been incredible fun, but I was starved for a challenge.

The prereq was the first of three Humanities courses. Dr. Evans was the chair of the Humanities minor program, and he taught the literature section of the first course, so I would be in class with him from 5-7 and 7-9 Monday and Wednesday evenings. It was the best winter of my life.