I have always wanted a mentor. What I mean to say by that is that I have always wanted someone, some writer, older and more accomplished than myself to take a real interest in my work and help me on my journey. It always felt like academia was the correct avenue to take to find this person. I figured that maybe I would have some professor that singled me out, saw something in me, and pushed me in the way I needed to be pushed. I felt like other people had this. And things I’ve read, introductions to novels by a former student of the author, people I’d talked to, these people had someone. They would go over to their mentor’s house for drinks and conversation, for private workshops or private group workshops for the initiated, have someone they could call on then or in the future if they had a question, needed an opinion, or just needed some encouraging words. Although I’ve definitely had people help me along the way, the whole mentor thing just never worked itself out for me. And now it feels like the moment to acquire that help, that idea, that feeling… it feels like that moment is forever lost.

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.

The Washington Post’s Ron Charles has presented us with his article, “On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats” (terrible title, I know) about how college kids, instead of reading the classics, literature, or radical texts, are reading that accursed “Twilight” series about histrionic vampire teenagers. From the article:

Professor Eric Williamson — a card-carrying liberal in full tweed glory — argues that “the entire culture has become narcotized.” An English teacher at the University of Texas-Pan American, he places the blame for students’ dim reading squarely on the unfettered expansion of capitalism. “I have stood before classes,” he tells me, “and seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn’t sell books. ‘Then why are we reading him if he wasn’t popular?’ ” Today’s graduate students were born when Ronald Reagan was elected, and their literary values, he claims, reflect our market economy. “There is nary a student in the classroom — and this goes for English majors, too — who wouldn’t pronounce Stephen King a better author than Donald Barthelme or William Vollmann. The students do not have any shame about reading inferior texts.”

Incredibly sad. The “Twilight” series is fine for kids who are just getting into reading; like “Harry Potter,” it might not be written well but at least kids are reading. But adults? Adults who are enrolled in higher education and trying to broaden their horizons? You’re reading Melville, moron, because “Moby Dick” is the pinnacle of American literature. I place the blame on high school English teachers. I’m sorry, but high school English teachers present reading like it’s a chore. Once these kids graduate and move on to college, they take with them the mentality that the only purpose of reading is to write the essay or take the test. I had some good high school English teachers, but I also had an extremely awful one who, being the senior-most English teacher at the school, taught the highest level classes and made class incredibly boring. Luckily I already enjoyed reading. I made it out of high school with my curiosity intact. Others, I’m sure, weren’t so lucky.

Ron Charles’ opinion is:

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

So true. But college is pretty worthless these days anyway. It’s just an extension of high school. When college enrollment became the norm, colleges learned they could charge more money because they are, at their core, for-profit businesses. Loan companies don’t even think twice about giving you money if you’re going to school (bad business: I should not have been given loan money to get my MFA because it’s ultimately a bad investment – who knows if they’ll ever see that money again). So now anybody can go to college and get a degree. Not a bad thing necessarily, but it’s about supply and demand. If everybody has a college degree it becomes meaningless. If everybody can go, you don’t get the best and brightest. So now everybody can get a degree, but they graduate and begin their lives in crushing debt and can’t find a job because the economy sucks and everybody has the same degree they have. Why would we think otherwise that this demographic would read “Twilight” instead of Melville? The article points out that in the past college students were more studious. Of course they were; there was a real reason people went to college and that reason was that they wanted to learn. Now a college degree is viewed as a work permit, which we’re beginning to realize it most certainly is not.

Still, I have hope. I have to. Otherwise, I am in the wrong business.