1
I ask them what they think about. Truly, whatever’s on your mind. Write it down. Anonymously. The mundane. The trivial. The serious. The sublime.
Work, one writes. Sleep. Dexter. My best friend’s cystic fibrosis.
Stress, says another. Responsibility. Israel. Career.
Money, another says. Sandwiches. Parties. Girlfriends.
Being an asshole, someone writes, and following, in parentheses, (many regrets). There are a few specific examples, the student says. I wonder if it’s a he, a she, a they.
They are juniors and seniors, students at a small liberal arts college. We meet in a tiny room with arched windows in early afternoon light. It’s September in California. A heat wave is on. We sweat, then turn on the AC, then shout because its noise is too loud.
Soon it will be winter, rainy and cold. It’s my twelfth year of teaching here. Every year is different, every year the same.
We’ll talk about Joan Didion, what it’s like to be young, to eat that peach, to walk those streets of New York. We’ll talk about the deceptive dissolve of emotion and time. We’ll talk about real time. Structure. Scene. Movement. Form. We’ll talk about what they talk about in classes devoted to fiction. Character and conflict and how people change or barely change, how time is the great deliverer of plot for us all.
But there is something else.
Us—characters on the page and characters in the classroom.
2
Write down what you are thinking. You can make something out of this, I tell them. Your life. Your thoughts. Nothing is too random. Nothing is stray.
They are thinking of Santa Cruz.
What they are going to do after class.
What they are going to write about.
Cheese.
Terrorism.
Henry Ford.
About whether their boyfriend will be at their house tonight.
About their dog. Their paycheck. Their student loans.
They are thinking about moving into an apartment with their boyfriend.
They are thinking about buying weed.
They write on index cards that are yellow, pink, purple, blue—cards that remind me, I say, of elementary school. They’re a way to brainstorm ideas for what to write about, to practice before the real thing.
They are thinking about work, sex, lunch, planes.
Pumpkin spice lattes.
This terrible heat.
They are thinking about how profound the mundane can be. (This student writes in small, sturdy letters.)
What should I make for dinner tonight? another says. (This one’s handwriting is pained and pinched.)
They are thinking about getting wasted tomorrow. (The handwriting, no kidding, careens off the card.)
About marriage.
About sushi.
About grades.
And sex, always sex.
I’m never working a 4:00 to 11:00 p.m. shift on a school night ever again, one writes. I need a car, the same person says.
The eros of the classroom. The romance of the page. It’s simple, really. The surprise and pleasure of the intimacy of someone’s mind.
Kanye’s latest album—amazing, someone writes. And girls . . . always girls.
. . .
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