What I mean can be summed up, I think, in Michelle Latiolais’ introduction to John Williams’ recently reprinted (thanks to the New York Review of Books) novel Butcher’s Crossing. In her opening paragraph, she reflects on her meeting of Williams:

In 1981 I began my graduate studies with John Williams at the University of Denver, where he had taught since 1954. After my first workshop, he came to my office — almost completely obscured by the stack of books he carried; he was not at all a tall man — and he set them on my desk. “Ignore all of what you just heard and sat through. Read these authors. They will be your teachers. You’re a writer who can’t be taught, who has to figure it out on her own.”

She goes on to say, being dumbstruck by Williams’ move, “I was used to simpering in doorways during office hours until a professor deigned to look up from his papers and acknowledge me.” This was, despite Williams’ admission that Latiolais “couldn’t be taught” and should instead look to other authors for tutelage, was a mentor presenting himself. It was him bringing her in to some private circle, baptizing her with a certain friendship that many of us don’t get to experience. Many of us are, instead, those simpering in doorways waiting to be noticed but never truly acknowledged.

I’ve had some great teachers along the way, people I call my mentors but who never truly were that exactly. In my undergraduate studies I had Arthur Athanason, an animated and passionate man who loved literature and, particularly, theatre and playwriting. Often he would work himself up so thoroughly that he, despite his small stature, would get red in the face and scream at his enthralled audience; “People! It means she was fucking the aristocracy!” or “If you haven’t read it, people — please, treat yourself!” or he would simply jump on his desk and act out an equine orgasm from Peter Shaffer’s Equus. No one could simultaneously play both Stanley and Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire like him. He was not a professor you could fool, especially when it came to emotion, and he was never an easy ‘A’. I had Dr. Athanason for two courses, Introduction to Creative Writing and Playwriting; he was also my thesis advisor.

But despite the long hours of work I put in for him and the many hours I spent in his office talking about my writing, I never felt like he had a real interest in me. As soon as I left his office, it was over. I never felt a real kinship with him; after all, it was me who sought him out. He was an institution in himself, someone who you would definitely have heard of had you took the creative writing path at my alma mater. His classes were always full, always with a waiting list. But after I left my university, I never spoke to him again as it didn’t really feel like my place. He died a few years ago from pancreatic cancer and that was that. I wish I could have spoken to him before he died, or even attended his funeral, but then again… who was I?

I thought about Dr. Athanason recently because I’ve been thinking about this idea of having a mentor for a while. After a couple of drinks one night, I decided I would seek out his one book on Amazon: Endgame: The Ashbin Play. This book is a short thesis on Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, and since I’ve only just received it I have yet to read it. Flipping through the pages, however, it feels like it might just be a compulsory overview of the play with some analysis — the general academic treatment. But I hope against hope that it produces some nuggets of Athanason’s wisdom, his incredible emotional intelligence, and perhaps some of his verbal foibles imploring you to “treat yourself.”

In graduate school I worked closely with another professor, an accomplished author, Stephen Wright. Wright is the author of a number of “cult” books (meaning, although he’s incredibly talented, no one ever really noticed) including Meditations in Green, M31: A Family Romance, and The Amalgamation Polka. Here is another case in which I sought out the person who I felt might make a good mentor. Wright is a cool, counter-culture kind of aging-rebel; always clad in a leather biker jacket, tinted glasses, and a baseball cap, complete with hand tattoos and facial piercings. Picture this on a man who could be a grandfather. He always had disparaging things to say about the publishing industry or critics, not in a way demonstrating bitterness necessarily but more with a realist-cum-defeatist attitude. He was right about most stuff, unfortunately, and he turned me on to some really great authors. To say he didn’t have a huge effect on my writing would be a complete lie; without him, I wouldn’t be even close to what I am capable of today. However, it’s over now. Wright’s telephone number is in my contacts and has made the transition from three different phones. But I won’t ever call him. I just don’t feel like I should.

Dr. Athanason would probably say I’m in search of a father figure, of a literary father figure, and maybe he would be right. But it didn’t work out with him nor did it work out with Wright. There’s some disconnect with these people. Like my experience with Athanason, I had two classes with Wright and he was my thesis advisor. But after all was finished, after I matriculated, those relationships ended. I understand that teachers have a difficult time truly connecting with students, after all they have so many pass through them over the years. And maybe neither of these men saw the spark in me, or saw what they felt to be the spark, or maybe neither of them had the time, the energy, or the desire to pass anything on, to help be a part of the next generation. I wrote a one-act play once for Dr. Athanason saying all this, pitting a young writer against an aging professor who never really gave him notice. “Look at me now,” the young writer was eventually able to say, on the eve of his success. “You ignored me then but now you can’t possibly ignore me.” Athanason saw right through this, as I knew he would, and he said to me, “So did you say what you had to say to me?” I did; it still felt like it fell on deaf ears.

On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner is a book I revisit every couple of years because it’s so powerful and speaks to who I feel I am as a writer. The introduction to this book was written by Raymond Carver, a writer who needs no introduction himself. One passage that strikes me, and easily accompanies the aforementioned connection Michelle Latiolais had with John Williams, is when Carver narrates his experience meeting and studying under Gardner:

Gardner had become aware of my difficulty in finding a place to work. He knew I had a young family and cramped quarters at home. He offered me the key to his office. I see that gift now as a turning point. It was a gift not made casually, and I took it, I think, as a kind of mandate — for that’s what it was.

Picturing this, Raymond Carver getting the key to John Gardner’s office, is almost heartbreaking. Did Gardner see something in Carver that Carver had yet to see in himself? Why Carver? This was, mind you, before Carver had really done anything — he was just starting out. What did Carver have or what did Gardner see that has always felt so distant from me?

Things are much different now. University English and writing programs are huge, there are so many of them, that the idea of a professor seeking out a student in need is diametrically opposed to what reality can offer. If you’ve yet to read it or it fell under your radar, take a look at the recent article We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities by Peter Conn in the Chronicle of Higher Education to see just how awfully unwieldy life has become in academia for the professor and student. While this article doesn’t touch on my subject necessarily, I think it paints a pretty good picture of why almost no professor in academia has time to really mentor any particular student anymore. And though academia probably won’t hurt the aspiring writer, it’s a much colder place overall than the previous examples I’ve given seem to convey of times past.

I’ve found my own way. I once thought I wanted the life of a professor in which maybe I could provide mentorship to a student and live the “easy” life of a college teacher. But if my time spent in academia has taught me anything, if Conn’s article has pointed out the realities, and if the frightening idea of the insulated academia-infused writer who writes only about being a writer hasn’t scared me away, I think it’s probably best for myself, and for my work, to stay away from that life, to live like one of the regulars, and to be true to myself. I can just be my own mentor.

Related posts:

1. Stoner by John Williams

I mention this idea of the Writer’s Ego having just finished reading John Fante’s Ask The Dusk. Our protagonist in this novel is Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer who has moved to Los Angeles to find his fame. What struck me as real, and very funny, is how full of himself Bandini is. In the preface to the edition I read (pictured above), Charles Bukowski, a writer obviously and admittedly inspired by Fante, states this very same amusement. When having a fight with his wife, Bukowski would summon Fante’s egotistical writer and scream, “Don’t call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!” Throughout the novel, Bandini speaks to himself of his own genius and talent, often referring to the one story he has published and how fantastic it is. “I wonder if he’s handsome, that Bandini fellow, author of that brilliant Little Dog Laughed.”

Bandini wavers at times, allowing his self-esteem to plummet when things don’t go precisely the way he hopes. But he always returns to a booming ego, talking himself up, praising himself to himself. It’s Bandini this, Bandini that… how could you treat Bandini like this, the Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed and the Long Lost Hills? At one point in the novel, after beating himself up over soiling the good morals of a woman (in his own mind at least) by sleeping with her, it happens that an earthquake strikes the city. In a lesser work, a character might simply take the earthquake as some sort of portent and reflect on life. But to Arturo Bandini, he himself is solely responsible for the earthquake and any death it causes.

Now there were screams. Then dust. Then crumbling and roaring. I turned round and round in a circle. I had done this. I had done this. I stood with my mouth open, paralyzed, looking about me. I ran a few steps toward the sea. Then I ran back.

You did it, Arturo. This is the wrath of God. You did it.

Fante has distilled the Writer’s Ego down to an extremely comical, yet entirely believable character with Arturo Bandini. While Bandini’s story is not without its sadness, throughout Ask The Dust we are shown the writer as center of the universe, the writer as arrogance personified. Even when Bandini puts himself down, or purports modesty or temperance, it is to feed the wild ego that exists at his very core. “How wonderful I really was! A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all things, men and beast alike.”

The writer develops such an ego, I believe, because writing itself is such a solitary exercise. When one spends so much time searching one’s own mind for clues about life’s truths, it’s only natural that they will start to believe all their answers are golden. And really, anybody who thinks that people will hungrily devour any words they put to a page must be suffused with ego. Why you? Why your words and not somebody else’s? It’s because you are Arturo Bandini, author of the Little Dog Laughed, great genius of our time, a writer for the ages! Being writers, we’ve all got a little bit of Arturo Bandini in us and there’s nothing wrong with that… you’ve got to be a little crazy, a little wild with ego, to succumb to being an artist of any stripe. A writer would suffer, I think, without such an ego; if you can’t stand behind your work, if you try to please everyone else over yourself, you’ll never find your voice. And maybe that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about a writer’s voice, the voice of their ego, and when we find it we have finally allowed our ego to surface with all the good and bad it brings. A writer’s true charge is to harness that ego, to allow it to flourish without thinking our actions caused a natural disaster, to know what it is that we do not know… and to find those answers. “Bandini, the idiot, the dog, the skunk, the fool. But I couldn’t help it.“

Universities are learning what a great money-maker the MFA is, which is why more and more MFA programs start up every year. Despite the economic issues we’re having right now, it’s still incredibly easy for students to get loan money. This is a recipe for financial ruin. What’s even worse is that the demand is there for the MFA; search the internet and you will find blogs dedicated to people applying for an MFA, complete with stories of a young writer not being accepted year after year but wanting so bad to get an MFA that he or she will continue applying every year until they are finally admitted. You don’t think universities notice this? If there is a student willing to take out some loans to go to school for a degree that confers on you almost nothing (in a job possibility sense), universities will create a program to cater to that student to increase their revenue. I’m not trying to paint universities as demons, they do indeed want you to learn and expand yourself, but they are businesses first. Don’t ever forget that.

Very few writers actually make good money; writing should be about the words, not about any financial reward that comes from it. If you get into writing thinking you’ll earn a livable wage from it, enough to support a family and buy a house and have all the conveniences of modern life, you will be in for a surprise. Many people do make money from writing, but they are still a small percentage of the total pool of writers in existence who make nothing. Being successful in writing is hard enough, so don’t purposefully put another roadblock in your way in the form of debt. If I learned anything from my time in an MFA program it’s that your writing, the way you approach it and the places it can lead you, are wholly up to you. You don’t need to drop loads of cash that you don’t have to buy the time to write — you have that time to write right now.

I’m lucky. I have abilities outside of writing that allow me to earn a good living and as such I am taking an aggressive stance on repaying my student loans. I’ve reached a point where I just hate that I’m in debt, it makes me feel trapped, and I want to pay it off sooner than later. When I finally claw myself out of the hole that debt is, I know the air will be much cleaner and I will feel much more liberated. Why? Because I will have far fewer monthly bills, allowing me to instead spend that money on something worthwhile… like life.

This talk of Writer’s Poverty reminded me of Jessi’s post from a few months back questioning why aspiring writers don’t read more literary journals. This was quite a popular essay and even got us linked on the Huffington Post. In her entry Jessi speaks to the contradiction that literary journals want you to read their publications before submitting, but if a writer were to subscribe to all the journals to which he or she might want to submit they would go broke in the process. There is no possible way that every writer who submits to a journal could actually afford to read that journal.

I used to subscribe to a handful of journals, most notably the Paris Review and Zoetrope: All-Story. I ended my subscriptions because, essentially, the work they printed bored me. That’s not to say I was completely unimpressed by anything published in these magazines; I was, however, more often than not nonplussed about each issue as a whole. But I’m willing to give the whole thing another shot.

So I think I’m going to subscribe to some literary journals. I have, for a few years now, wanted to subscribe to The Sun. Every opportunity I’ve had to read one of their publications left me happy I had cracked their covers. It’s also a boon to their journal that they publish monthly and are completely ad-free. But beyond that, I’m not sure to which journals I want to subscribe. Ultimately, I’m looking for some cutting edge work that actually excites me. I’m fatigued by the “me-me-me” writing style about privileged and disaffected youth that seems to permeate the world of the modern short story, so any journal that publishes that kind of stuff is out. I’m also not a big fan of a magazine like the New Yorker… granted, they publish some really great journalism but I, however, am more interested in fiction. I think the New Yorker publishes very safe fiction. But I also don’t want to read stories aping some sort of post-modernist style that don’t really have anything to say; that screams to me safe masquerading as rebellious. So where, dear reader, should I look?

I’ve been dissatisfied with the novels I’ve been reading lately (Nightwood by Djuna Barnes and I’ve Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina for two) and literary journals could be the perfect thing to read on my daily commute. I’m thinking of subscribing to maybe five different journals. Let’s count the Sun as number one. Four more to figure out.

Related posts:

1. Why Don't Aspiring Writers Read More Literary Magazines?
2. So You're Thinking About Getting Your MFA in Writing?
3. To Publish in Print or Online

Edit: There’s been some skepticism about the authenticity of this recording around the internet. Some argue that it doesn’t exactly sound like a phone recording would and that Thompson’s voice was a little bit deeper than what the recording purports; maybe these people have accepted Johnny Depp’s Thompson as the truth? Still, the attitude is there and the flow of thought sounds, to me at least, to be authentic. The way he moves from one thought to another, how he speaks to someone in the room with him, how he gets flustered as his anger leads him places… What do you think?

Thanks to Gizmodo.

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering what kind of craziness is going to ensue from this. If you remember, Salinger hasn’t published anything since the 60s. But that doesn’t mean he had stopped writing. With the dubious stuff his children have done in the past (“Dream Catcher,” anyone?), I’m sure we’re going to see the floodgates open up and a deluge of previously unpublished work come out. Think of all the money a lot of people stand to make off this sad news.

For now, though, as we wait to see what happens next… check out my previous feature about my own personal Salinger Library including links to places on the internet where you can read his entire (published and uncollected) oeuvre.

Related posts:

1. My Salinger Library
2. 10 Literary One-Hit Wonders — Refuted
3. How to Act Well Read