I returned to Syracuse last week to read for SU’s Raymond Carver Reading Series. The series is part of the Living Writers class, which I took when I was an undergraduate and taught as a grad student. In the class, students read a book by a contemporary author one week and then the following week the author visits the campus for a Q&A and reading.
So it was a day of warmth and nostalgia, spending time with writers whose work I admire, who supported my writing early on. The best kinds of teachers: those who meet a writer where she’s at and steer her to more fully realize her vision. Is this what we talk about when we talk about voice? Sure. Yet I think it’s also the effect of living, learning, working, and writing in the orbit of people who are doing just that. A blend of instruction, modeling, and honesty that prepares writers for what could be ahead of us.
A friend arrived at the house to keep an eye on the pets that afternoon and evening. Dave and I got to Syracuse late afternoon. We parked and took a quick lap of Marshall Street, where Dave snapped a photo of me in front of the Pita Pit, site of my favorite long-ago late-night snack.
We took some photos of the Hall of Languages, where SU’s English and Creative Writing Departments live. The building resembles the Addams Family mansion. I was reminded of many between-class reading sessions curled up in a sofa nook on the first floor. Back in 2012, a wedding photographer trailed Dave and me up the sidewalk to the front steps, snapping engagement photos with the building towering behind us. Appropriate given that we’d met in the MFA program. At orientation, the two of us were among six or so writers who’d wandered into the wrong classroom in the Hall of Languages and finally figured out we were in the wrong place because we were the only ones there, no professors had shown up, and the donuts we’d been promised were not present.
We got to Gifford Auditorium and caught up with professors while we waited for the class to start. In some ways it felt like we hadn’t left at all, which is one way you know you’re in a place your heart calls a kind of home. I remembered being in the auditorium as a first-year undergraduate. The readers that semester were Lucille Clifton, George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, Nina Shope, Edward Hirsch, and Koren Zailckas. I think of the class as one of my earliest understandings of writing community: listening to someone talk about their work, sharing appreciation for it, asking questions, getting a book signed, meeting a writer. Supporting someone doing this simple yet also seemingly impossible thing. I remembered sitting in the back of the auditorium during my first two years in the MFA program, attending the group dinners afterwards. I remembered passing an attendance sheet around my section of the class when I taught it as a third-year grad student, glancing down the aisle to where Dave, then my fiancé, was herding his own students. He would look back and we’d smile at each other like, “We made it.”
The students had read and discussed Night Rooms in class, so that’s what we discussed during the Q&A. I’m pretty sure I only said the word “vibe” once, maybe twice, in my answers.
After a short break, it was time for the reading. I’d prepared to read from Night Rooms, some poetry, and an excerpt from my novel. Chris Kennedy—prose poet extraordinaire and the director of the MFA program when I was an undergrad and a grad student—gave a generous intro that made me a little weepy and emphasized just how “full circle” this moment really was. Chris advised my grad thesis in 2011/12. Before that, in 2005, the summer before leading up to my first year of undergrad studies, I’d been assigned to his freshmen forum class, a required seminar geared towards helping students acclimate to college life. The class read and discussed Isabel Allende’s Paula and ate Varsity pizza. During individual check-in’s, I shared with Chris that I wanted to be a writer and asked him if he would read a novel I’d written in high school. And he did, offering feedback and treating the work with the utmost seriousness, even if the writing was bad. This was the first glimpse of many I’d get of the faculty’s kindness and care, their devotion to stewarding creative souls and creating community. Someone over-enrolling a class so I could join their workshop. Someone reading my work and responding to it. Someone securing funding to Kinko’s-print a chapbook I created during an independent study. I was lucky to know their writing and simply floored that I got to learn from them.
I’d wondered how it might feel to read for the expected 30-40 minutes. It moved so fast, calm channeling through me as I glanced now and again at the general area of the auditorium where I sat nineteen years ago. I was reading to everyone in the room, but I know some part of me was reading to a younger self, quietly saying, Here you are. How’d I do?
My first memory of Syracuse University’s campus was accompanying my mother to work. Having recently divorced my father, she had taken a job at a sorority house. I can’t remember why or how it was that I went with her—on spring break?—but I remember stepping into this gorgeous old house and feeling sophisticated. It was lost on me that I was a guest perching in a window seat to read a book. I was a guest when the house chef fixed lunch for my sister and me and when the sorority sisters invited us to watch Days of Our Lives and Passions with them. I was a guest when the sisters moved out at the end of the year and my sister and I picked through the bags of clothes they’d left behind to be donated or thrown away.
I occasionally felt like a guest as an undergrad, among wealthy peers at a private university, but I found friends in workshops and while collaborating on the undergrad literary magazine. Meanwhile, I bankrolled my education on scholarships, loans, and various part-time jobs: a brief stint at a French restaurant downtown as a food runner, shuffling heavy trays from the kitchen to tables and polishing silverware in my down time; a few months at a campus call center where other students and I would call alumni to ask for donations to the university; working in the daycare and filing room of an outpatient recovery center.
And though any writer in an MFA program—or at a residency or in a class or working one-on-one with another writer—is technically a guest, the experience can be a safe harbor from all the other noise. (Here, we could also pause and reflect on how we’re all guests on this planet, and anything we try to do comes up against the temporary nature of our lives, but maybe that’s just my post-eclipse brain.) Those three years offered time to write, and opportunities to clarify what’s important to me and why. It was life-changing to write and read alongside artists who believe in language and storytelling, poems and the lyric moment, writers who were honest about the unique joys and challenges of this path.
After the reading, we went to dinner. I loved getting to catch up with professors and classmates who have since returned to teach at Syracuse. As we were heading out, Dave and I were introduced to a newly admitted student who had come to visit. (This is what Syracuse is like: You are a new admit who shows up and there’s a dinner? Surprise, you are going to that dinner!) I remember saying something about how even twelve years out I still come back to what I learned there, how the guidance—creative, practical, and professional—has carried me. All the advice and encouragement formed this wellspring in my mind I come back to again and again.
At times, I sense that a write-every-day schedule makes it easy for me to miss the big picture. I get so caught up in the noise and all the ways I believe I’m failing that I forget I’m actually doing what I wanted to be doing when I started and what I want to be doing now: writing. The external markers of success can be elusive, unpredictable, and rare, and that’s if you’re lucky. This was something I have dreamed of doing since 2005. I’ve been lucky/I am lucky. There I was/Here I am. What a sweet way to visit home.
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i knew you went to syracuse for your mfa, but didn't realize you also went there for undergrad. so did i :) so this was nice to read! had a similar experience of kindness from Arthur Flowers in an undergrad fiction workshop.
Pita Pit forever