Anyway.

I went into class Monday and asked who had read the only assignment for the day, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” One person out of thirty. I want to be clear about this: the story is barely two pages long. I moved my chair to the center in front, sat, and said, “Okay, let me get the straight:” I had Morgan Freeman’s voice in my head. “You graduated high school, applied to colleges, decided to come here, went through whatever financial mess you had to go through from parents to grants to loans, found out what classes you need, packed your life and moved here, came to class, found out what you needed to do, which, again, was to read a couple of pages, and just didn’t bother. Isn’t that a little like hitting a home run but after you round third, you think ‘Ah, screw it,” and you walk into the dugout without touching home plate?”

“You just got here, and you already gave up.”

I’m not making any of this up. One person out of thirty read a story that is about half the length of this blog post. What do you do with that? They’re nineteen years old, on their own for probably the first time in their lives, living with strangers, trying to figure out from everyone else what their lives will be about, and I asked them to read a story written more than a hundred years ago about a woman who’s glad her husband is dead. But they don’t know that because they haven’t read it. I talked about the symbolism, the setting, and the internal monologue. I sighed.

It already hadn’t been a good day. Or week. Or, well, weeks anyway. I’ve been deep in the rewrites of a manuscript which has been bleeding out of my right ear for more than forty years; I started the damn thing during the first Reagan administration. I’ve abandoned it, tackled it, trashed it, and started over, published portions and rewrote all of it a dozen or more times.

A month ago, just as the winter season had kicked in strong here along the bay and I could see the long, moody haul to next spring, which, for some comes with another set of issues, I knew that I wanted this manuscript, this “monster in a box” as Spading Grey once called a work of his, released into the wild. Hell, there are only two characters, so you’d think it wouldn’t be all the difficult.

I tell my writing students that if you have trouble writing something, write something else. I don’t believe in writer’s block; I think that is the result of trying to drain something of value from something that should be passed on altogether, or at the very least addressed some other time. Sometimes there is a piece missing and you simply don’t know it, so instead you blame “block” or distractions or the story itself for being lame. You have no way of knowing that what it needs has not been born to you yet and in time it will materialize. That has happened with this monster several times. No longer.

About three weeks ago when I had been lifting portions of an introduction from writing by Beryl Markam to use in this work, I realized that the narrative is not about either of the two characters: it’s about being nineteen years old. The one hundred pages turned into one fifty. Then two hundred. It is now roughly two hundred and twenty pages long. It’s not War and Peace, grant you. But it’s at least Peace.  

And I just received an endorsement for the manuscript from a very well-respected writer in Oklahoma.

And that’s where it’s at as I continue to tweak, manipulating the middle a bit after hearing back from my long-time writing muse in Ohio. She nailed what is missing in the exact spot something is missing but I couldn’t figure out what. Geez I love when that happens. Writing is decidedly not a solo sport.

So I went into the week feeling pretty good. I made a fun video about art of the renaissance for my art history course, and another about the art of the Islamic world. I had some good conversations with my senior creative writing students about their final projects before graduating, and I felt pretty damned good. Yep.

Then Kate Chopin happened. Mrs. Mallard shows up with her not-dead-after all husband and the joy that kills, only to be abandoned as if the story had never been written to begin with.

They’re nineteen, I reminded myself. You just spent a lot of time writing about how hard it is to be nineteen. Give them a break.

“Okay,” I asked, “You knew the assignment, yet you didn’t do it, so why?”

I got the usual responses.

“Okay,” I said. “How’s this”:  I mock-typed on a dead keyboard on the front desk, and said to everyone, “Dear Potential Employer, Graduate Director, Grant Reviewer: He can’t even read a two page story he had a week to complete. Nuff Said.”

Everyone laughed.

“My guess is if I had assigned a novel of some length, you’d have at least started it; but this was too easy to wrap your minds around as a collegiate assignment.”

One guy spoke. “I didn’t even look to know it was only two pages. I would have read it. I just assumed that it would be really freaking long.”

Fair point, I thought.

So I cut them some slack. I talked about the story. Symbolism, setting. We talked about Chopin. We just talked. I explained why I chose the story, and I tried to explain how it is relevant to us for knowing what to look for when we analyze something. I looked at the course outline and saw that they needed to read Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” in two days. Baldwin is one of my favorites.

“What do you guys read? I mean beyond TikTok.”

Crickets. I could hear my officemate on the next floor eating her lunch. They all checked out, mentally gone.

“When I was nineteen one of the books I had to read was All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the fall of Nixon and how two reporters from the Washington Post brought him down, exposed what we now know as Watergate. I was a journalism major, so I found it interesting, and it was easy reading, but something else was different when I was your age. What do you think it was?”

Same guy spoke up. “Your story wasn’t about a lady glad her husband is dead?” I suddenly liked this guy.

“It wasn’t, no. But I didn’t know that until I READ THE THING!” We laughed.

I told them:

No computers. No games. No phones, texting, TikTok, Instagram, Starbucks, Redbull, fast food joints everywhere, no fantasy sports, no Fortnight. No Cable TV.”

“Booorrrring.”

I laughed but this time to myself. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to continue to sound like an old geezer.

“Yeah, in parts. The whole thing was boring for some people. I think we had less anxiety than you do. Less pressure from all sides to keep up with the latest…”

I tried to think what we might have done when I was that age that we would need “the latest” version of. All I could come up with was music. And that really doesn’t bore many people.

“Okay, Professor,” a student asked. She plays for the basketball team and seems focused, listening to whatever I say. “So then when you were nineteen, what did you spend your time doing?”  

I checked out.

I thought of my monster. I remembered being that age and how I had infinitely more energy than could fit in chair long enough to read a two-page story about a wasn’t-on-the-train-after-all husband and the now-dead wife he oppressed.

“Get a reading group together.”

They stared at me.

“Get a group together to meet once or twice a week to read the story. Once the conflict kicks in on the longer ones, you’ll want to finish it. But then you have others to keep your attention instead of your mind wandering wondering what others are doing. And you can take turns reading the story out loud, be expressive.”

“Sound stupid,” said the one I liked briefly but no longer did.

“Yeah, it does, but just meet for an hour. That’s not long.” I replied, thinking of all the times I embarrassed the crap out of myself when I was young. “I’m just some old guy to you,” I said to the same one, laughing so he knew it was okay.

He laughed and said, “Yeah a bit,” and we all laughed.

“You know what?” I stood up, gathered my things, and I thought of the monster and of that time, back then, and what happened and how I carry it still, picture it still like it all happened last Tuesday instead of 1981, and I said, “I did nineteen really well. I was really good at being nineteen. Now I’m doing this age. You’ll get here if you’re lucky.” I looked at the kid. “How are you doing nineteen? Hmmm? You nailing it? or are you trying to slide through without having to do too much?”

After about sixty minutes of this, I left and walked to my car more convinced than ever that it is definitely time to let the monster go.