Author’s Introduction (2024)
I graduated in the Spring of 2000 with a BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. At the time, BGSU offered one of the country's only Undergrad Workshop-based four-year degrees. It was hard work, and the entire BFA Program was designed to feed students into MFA Programs, which were very expensive relative to the earning potential for a short story writer who is really just another Professor of Writing Craft.
While preparing to read excerpts of my senior thesis from the podium of Prout Chapel in the quad, in front of my friends, colleagues, and parents, I concluded that if I were to write for a living, I would be broke for the rest of my life. That was a hard truth to swallow, but it went down.
It meant that writing as a vocation had to be put away on a shelf, especially if I wanted to raise a family and help provide for them. And so I went out and busted my ass for twenty years, sucking the shit pipe of Corporate America but loving the salary and benefits. It was the responsible choice.
When I read this story, I can feel the struggles I had with submitting to the tyranny of departmental politics and publishing anything they’d print to keep my job. I can also remember struggling with the challenge of being a privileged white man in an academic world that put its thumb on the scale for diversity (and this was 24 years ago). I had no idea how that perception would become weaponized by malicious billionaires and corrupted cynics. We needed more diversity in voices, but it’s a challenge to stare down the barrel of a gun and call the bullet pretty.
I often think about the version of me that said, “Fuck it. I’m going start writing now.” He went on to the MFA Program at Michigan or Iowa. And he fucking killed it there! He published a few books and thought he was hot shit. And now, he’s a fifty-year-old college Professor on the edge of tenure. But he’s still broke and probably divorced or never married.
He’s much like the character I wrote my final Fiction 404 Short Story about that Spring of 2000. Jack Stansfield was a warning to myself, and I’m glad I took it. But I wrote about him at the time with empathy and read about him now, 24 years later, with sympathy. I hope you will, too.
PS: Be gentle with the young man who wrote this. He was still learning his craft. Some terms are dated to the time this was written. I recommend reading in that context.
Jack Stansfield walks into his afternoon writing workshop with the space-measured pace of a marathon runner sacrificing distance for speed. He touches the knob of the old wooden door and draws back, like someone sneezed on it. The moment of revulsion passes into the annals of feelings past, and he grabs the wobbling knob and turns. He wipes his hand on the seat of his pleated khakis and walks into the classroom.
Earlier that day, Jack held his weekly house cleaning session consisting of collecting the piles of old clothes he never wore anymore (already stashed in various hiding spots around the house), unopened junk mail, empty boxes, and trash bags, throwing them all in a pile on his back deck because he didn’t feel like making the journey to the back alley to put it all in the dumpster. After the mock cleaning, he lounged on the couch and began reading the latest Martin Amis novel. He made it to page twenty-two when he realized that his creative writing class started in less than fifteen minutes. He sighed and bent the book so it lay open on the table. He had four shelves full of books, spines all broken under the will of a master reader. He put two gray socks on, his brown loafers, wrinkled khakis, and his traditional denim jacket. He stopped by the hallway mirror to fix his hair and thought better, preferring its unkept look. Lately, he felt that he must allow his exterior to decay to allow his interior to foster—like breaking the spines of books; his body would either fall in line or fall apart.
He had a five-minute walk from house to classroom and left with seven minutes till class time. He kicked cut grass from the sidewalk and crossed the street at the crosswalk that forced all oncoming traffic to yield to pedestrians of the college, the community’s major lifeblood of revenue. But this summer had been dedicated to letting him flower inside. He had sworn this after Andrea had left two months ago, as he was grading student finals—his busiest time of the year.
The first time he saw her, he knew she was too good for him, so he had to have her. She was standing at the bar, a college bar that looked the same as any other college bar. When he thinks back on those days compared to these days, the bars all seem to blend into the same background with different players and background music like a weekend satire television show. She was waiting in line for a drink, an empty beer bottle in one fist and a half-smoked Newport in the other. She blew out smoke and scanned the room with her eyes, her attention skipping over the crowd like wave crests. On the third time around the room and ever closer to the bartender, he caught her eye; she doubled back to him, and she was caught. There was so much sexual desire in the way he was looking at her that, at first, she was taken aback, but after letting her eyes wander his body, she found his posture relaxed and non-aggressive enough to encourage flirtation. Their gaze lock was broken by the bartender’s question, and through the transaction, she had completely forgotten about him, sitting alone in the corner, drinking a 7&7 and following her with his eyes as she walked away from the bar. She might have forgotten him, but he knew that for that one moment, he had her. There was a connection. He thought about getting up to follow her out but didn’t feel the strength to play the game of tempting her away from her friends for some one-on-one. He was pretty sure he could, but it didn’t feel right somehow. He let her dissolve back into the crowd. He finished his drink, left the glass on the table, slung his jacket over his arm, and sauntered into the north Ohio night. That was in winter.
The next time he saw her was in the spring. There was a campus concert, a festival dedicated to the students, or, as Jack believed at the time, the students who contributed most to the economics of the campus—the white males. At the time, it was a well-known truth that white males were the ones who pulled the crank that kept the madness of the modern world moving. This was after the civil rights movement and the door to hippie peace and freedom had been opened at Woodstock and slammed shut at Altamont, after the sugar and gas crises, after the embassy takeover, after the cyanide-filled aspirin craze, after the icy space shuttle O rings and the ‘one eye blew this way, the other that way’ jokes; their affair began during glasnost and shattered in the age of no controlling legal authority.
The biggest band on campus was playing, I’m Okay, You’re Okay was their name, and it was loud, and he was quite drunk. He stood in line for the portable toilets that smelled like urine baked inside a football helmet at 400 degrees for twelve hours. He looked over just as he was about to go in, and saw her. She was wearing a stone-washed denim coat. He was surprised to find her looking at him as well. He was probably about to say something stupid, one of those cheesy come-on lines that all the guys in his freshman dorm swore to if the girl was drunk enough. The ignorant phrase he was about to utter was cut short by a loud thunk, a sloppy sound, followed by high-pitched laughter. A pledge for a campus fraternity had gone into the portable toilet that Jack was about to enter, and some of the active members had snuck up behind it and overturned it with him inside. The door was face down, so the kid was trapped inside; a murky brown liquid seeped out the upper vents, and he could hear the kid’s wails of disgust from inside the plastic waste vessel. He laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was the kind of laughter that isn’t due to the act being cosmically funny but more a kind of better you than me laughter, the self-gratifying guffaw that only compassion with relief it’s not you can bring.
He had forgotten all about her, lost in personal hysterics, when his eyes went out, searching for someone to share the experience with now that it had been personally digested. Their eyes locked, and for just a moment, the laughter stopped inside him, and he imagined in her as well. Baby gaze, eye sex, and exchange of micro photons at invisible levels of hue. She giggled. He giggled. She laughed, holding her stomach. He closed one eye and convulsed in laughter. She pointed at the face-down portable toilet, and they both lost it. He wandered over to her as naturally as if they’d known each other for years, put his arm around her shoulder, and laughed together for a full minute. It was a laughter he had not experienced since branded with the humor of a satisfying moment draped in the wonder of newfound lust and mystery that only an open and attractive stranger can bring.
His mind returned to the task, the workshop—the only place where writers are taken seriously outside board meetings in publishing houses. “The workshop is the last bastion of free writing without marketing influence left in the modern age outside a private diary.” Jack expressed these sentiments in the foreword to his first book of poems, Touching the Surface Below: Poems for a Forgotten Generation. He thanked his students for “Keeping me on my toes and realizing that good writing is 99% revision and 1% inspiration.”
Simina’s story “Indian with A Dot, Not A Feather” is up today. I want to begin by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed this piece on an entertainment level. I like the main character, Raja. The brutality she was forced to use after her father’s death gives her a very nice source of conflict. But I found the reaction to her sister’s dead baby to be a bit extreme. Why would she commit suicide suddenly after finding the boy dead in his crib? This woman sacrificed her entire life to provide stability for her family; it doesn’t make sense to me. What do you guys think? Well, I agree with you about the extremity of her reaction, but I think that the situation of her nephew’s death is the right time to show some change. What kind of change do you see as appropriate here? Something smaller. It seems that in short stories, less is more. It’s the small changes that seem gargantuan. I remember one story by Raymond Carver about two couples sitting around a dinner table drinking. One husband continually gets jealous of his wife’s ex-husband the more he drinks. And that little change makes the story so believable and, in turn, affects the reader so much more.
What do you think? I’m not sure what kind of reaction this character warrants because I’d like to know more about her. We don’t get much of her feelings about her father. The control issue is the primary conflict with this character because she loses the illusion of control when her nephew dies. Still, the suicide is so over-exaggerated that it overshadows this realization and leaves the reader feeling cheated, but I like this character. And I think she should be worked with. Now see, I kinda disagree with you. I was left wondering what exactly the relationship with her nephew was based on because, on page three, it says she cares very deeply for this kid, but we don’t see it any time in the story. Just because the author says it, doesn’t mean it’s so. I mean, I hate to bring up that cliché phrase from our 200-level courses, but show us, don’t tell. And that’s just it, man. The whole thing was cliché to me. I’m so sick of reading stories about minorities like they’re still so challenged. I have no sympathy for this character at all. People die all the time. She’s a bitch to her family. She refuses to have sex with that guy on page seven. She wouldn’t even call him back after their date. It seems that the fact she was “Indian with a dot” was just thrown in there to give her some sympathy from the reader. I don’t buy it, and I’m sick of reading stories like it, no offense, Simina. It’s not your fault the literary community has fallen so in love with bullshit multicultural idealism that it’s forgotten about quality literature.
Jack takes control before Simina’s feelings get hurt. He has to separate the derogatory from the literary. Unfortunately for Simina, the class deflates into an exchange of views on multicultural literary theory, and her story fades into the background focus of the day’s discussion.
When Jack awakes after nine hours and twelve minutes of sleep, his hair is mussed and matted to the contours of a rented Serta mattress. After two cups of coffee and a stale cinnamon roll, he leaves for an English department meeting. He walks in late as usual and is greeted by his smiling comrades. Jack is the only committee member who has not yet received tenure but knows his time is approaching. This problem had been plaguing him for some time: how long to remain a mere lecturer without any stability. It has kept him awake at night, scratching the hives on his neck that come from worry and excess caffeine. He cares for his students, but he also has a publishing career to think about, and Andrea’s absence only serves as a catalyst for the outgrowth of misery the darkness under his eyes has become. Ballast shifts from one side to the other, and the line between work and writing grows as thin as the one separating Modern and Post-Modern art. They’re only a war apart.
Jack’s first poem was published in a magazine specializing in gay poetry. Jack had impure thoughts about a man once, his friend actually, during a late-night beer-drinking venture that led him to the edge of a blackout. But he is not gay. He remembers very little about the drunken fantasy. The poem has nothing to do with homosexuality; it is a five-line stanzaic celebrating the ending of an addiction. At the time, Jack had recently quit smoking, and his withdrawal had inspired him to write the poem. He owns only one copy of Quorum magazine, which lays dog-eared and mite-eaten in a box in the dank basement of his monthly rented home. The poem goes like this:
Moving Anthills
Nothing really matters
as much as when we drop
ground up ground onto the ground
and find progress bigger
piles of dirt to step over.
At the time, Jack was amazed a homosexual would find worth in his words; he was amazed that anyone did, for that matter. Sitting in the meeting, Jack felt like a skeleton from the anatomy lab hung on a wire and pulled from a higher position in the Administration building. Departmental notes were taken and Jack said yes and no and stated his opinion about mechanical things completely unrelated to the English language as it is experienced by those who grab it with both hands and yank until they’re sticky with viscous syllables.
Leaving the meeting, he felt like a man slipping away from the operating table, still under the effects of anesthesia. He tried to shake the bureaucratic load from his mind as he stood at the urinal outside his workshop. It was summer, and workshops ran every day for four weeks.
Back at home, Jack sat in his favorite chair and exchanged his loafers for plaid padded slippers while he cogitated the idea of his phantom ex-girlfriend. Everywhere he looked, some trinkets and knickknacks reminded him of Andrea. The Elvis ashtray that now holds peanut shells-had to have it. The Elton John flecked gold oversized sunglasses placed on the face of a ceramic Home Interiors basset hound; she had to have them both. All these were necessities she couldn’t live without but couldn’t take with her when she left seven months ago.
And when she finally left, he couldn’t remember why he loved her, only that he didn’t want her to go. He had forgotten the late-night after-shower phone calls where she lay wet and naked on her flannel sheets, letting the air dry her young female body as they talked holes in the night. He had forgotten the way she hid behind her hair when she was embarrassed, tousled brown strands hiding her emotions like a tightly beaded curtain hides a roomful of pot smokers, and how sexually inexperienced she was when they met. She had kissed two boys before him and wouldn’t let him proceed as fast as he would have liked to; he loved her even more for making it something special, something sacred. She had gotten an idea from medieval philosophy, an old romance story of King Arthur’s knights, that the sexual act was the sacramentalization of love. The first night he went past the kisses and covered her nippled breasts with saliva, she went home caked with his scent and told him later on the phone that she loved it, that she wished she could bottle it and wear it every day. And he loved her for that, too. But all that slipped away the day she said goodbye as she stood in her faded jeans with the knees ripped out and the Guess patch torn off the back right pocket. She had a gym bag strapped over her arm; it was small and couldn’t possibly hold all her belongings—just the sacred ones. He later realized that everything she left was somehow associated with him. Everything she took was hers alone: seventeen pairs of jeans, thirty-six shirts, nine sweaters, several pairs of socks, shoes, belts, jewelry, tampons, makeup, hair care products, smelly soap from the bath store, four purses, her tennis racket, workout video tapes, and inside that small gym bag she had a framed picture of her mother and father, her Bible, and a copy of twelfth-century romances with the story about the sacramentalization of love ripped out and left on the coffee table as the only reason why she was leaving.
Sometimes, Jack writes lines that make him think—what a good boy am I—but this self-praise always gives way to the fleeting reminder of his failure to please this one person who ever meant anything to him. It is a pain that fuels the pipe dream of touching masses through words because words are little masks that make him seem whole, connecting his pain with some human expression. And despite this vision of a spider web of syllables connecting the thoughts of every human being on the planet, he still lives with the fear that his words are nothing more than randomly arranged ink spots on bleached fiber. He has always needed an audience.
The human eye can see a candle flame from as far away as ten miles in complete darkness. Andrea was that flame, and his desire to reach masses of people through written words was the darkness that made her light visible from so far away. He pictured thousands of flames burning from exposure to his own. But he did not tend to her in this cerebral fire-burning ceremony, the only actual flame in his life. She stood in stasis, surrounded by blue flame, and the glass cover he held her in became thick with smoke until her vision was blotted out entirely, and only the darkness remained. Her wick nubbed, and the wax hardened over him where he remains to this day, preserved and protected until moments like this scratch away the wax and leave him open to his harsh inner feelings and inadequacies.
During the next few weeks, Jack Stansfield learned he was being considered for the Academic Advisor for Creative Writing position. In the fall, he would listen to scheduling problems and general complaints about the program. His workload would be increased tenfold, and tenure has still not been mentioned. Jack has put on five pounds in the last two weeks and is getting half as much sleep as usual. He hasn’t written a word since the beginning of the summer term. He is now standing in front of his favorite urinal with his spraying penis in one hand and the thumb and first finger of the other rubbing his eyelids. He hears a voice behind him, the head of the English Department, coming out of the stall. Jack I need to speak with you, can we meet sometime today?
Jack walks into the chair’s office and sits down. He sets his small Styrofoam cup of coffee on the desk and leans back into the chair. Jack, thanks for coming. I just wanted to let you know that the tenure board will meet in a couple of weeks to discuss your future here. And Jack, it’s come to our attention that you graduated with a Masters Degree from here in ’87. Now, there’s a policy at this university, Jack, that denies tenure to anyone graduating with a degree from this institution. Now you’ve got my vote. You know that. But the Provost is like a goddam rock regarding things like this. Would you like something to drink, Jack? Anyway, he’s a goddam bastard when it comes to things like this, just between you and me. He told me he’s not moving on with this issue. Not even for you. Just wanted to let you know. Word is another candidate being considered for the poetry position. He's an MFA from Georgetown and an Afro-American, Jack. You know we don't have one on staff, and the University requires…Well, I’m sure everything will turn out fine. Are you sure I can’t get you anything? No? Alright, Jack, I’ll have my secretary call you with any news.
In the following weeks, whiskey shots become beard stubble, and Jack misses two of his last three workshops. The students call and leave worried messages in the Creative Writing office. He sits at his computer for hours. He begins with the word processing screen and ends with the screen saver every time. He moves the mouse deliberately to cancel the moving space picture, only to return to a blank screen with a blinking cursor. The flashing vertical line is hypnotizing. It breaks him down with every pass. He looks at the invitation he received in the mail: Ecru Vellum Bristol with a gold foil sticker seal—Andrea’s wedding. After twelve years of marriageless monogamy, she found a job in another city and fell in love with a man on her lunch hour; a man who might wear Brooks Brothers suits and say things like, damn right on, and I’ll need that report by three, no excuses. Jack leaves his desk chair and doesn’t return.
He tries writing with a pen, pencil, marker and even stubs crayons until the tips rub raw, paper flaking off. Nothing works. He’s barren. The words have been squeezed from his brain and leaked out his ears onto the floor of the Chair’s office. They might still be in a puddle of dried ooze on the carpet that smells like a used-up dictionary.
Students and stories. Words and the mouths that speak them. In sleep, he sees dotted lines and a word processor with a white cotton sheet of paper, and his name, Jack Stansfield, is at the top—a clean sheet waiting to be rubbed with keystrokes. Foreign manuscripts with strange names are on the other side of the dotted lines. Stories that need his input. His advice. Students’ stories or Jack's stories. Andrea’s wedding or Jack’s stories. Andrea’s wedding or students’ stories. The choices are mesmerizing. He could sit all day and consider the options. He does.
Jack goes out of the house only to get the mail. He survives on the canned rations that have occupied the back of his food shelf for the last five years. Cream of celery, bacon bean, and Spam jelly are stuck to the kitchen sink. Bread crusts are lying under the trash bag in the garbage can. Jack cries during a Purina cat chow commercial because the people look so happy that feeling good is something tangible, something you can buy in a can. It is all too much. Jack has nothing left but sobs for his world.
After brooding in his misery for many days, Jack attempts to write about it. As a writer, he has trained his eyes and ears to search and hunt down any human activity that could provide nuggets and frameworks for stories and poems. More often than not, it was easier to train his academic eyes on someone else as a character study—but this time, he tried it on himself and came up with a void. He would sometimes open a file on a character and type the words: This character is the type of person that would: and fill in the blanks. He would do this for several pages until a character appeared with conflicts, problems, and always, always at the center a corpuscle of hope and compassion that united the character with the secret cause of universal suffering in the human reader. These words bounced against Jack’s brain like a racquetball tossed out of the past and volleyed back again. His professor in college spoke these exact words and attributed them to James Joyce, and Jack once believed they were divine, gold, and he also believed back then that at the rocky heart of every story, fiction or fanciful truth, is also a grain of true gold. He believed this for as long as he could keep it in mind. Still, eventually, it became buried under reject letters, canceled checks, shredded first drafts, empty roller fine ink pens, clipped fingernails stained black from shaking up inkjet cartridges to get that one last page out, and used ideas—useless to anyone but him and his ruminations about the world.
Here’s what Jack believes about the world and his place in it: the world is horrible. Life is something that should not have been. It hurts to watch cheetahs rip open the bellies of gazelles. It hurts to watch the nightly news with stories of teenage mothers who kill their babies and the rest of the horrors and wonders that come with the information age. There isn’t a place in this world for such a deep thinker as he; there is no place for such an aching heart and the blood it bleeds for the poor, the suffering, the wounded, and the misrepresented. He was going to reach them all with his words, his stories, and his simple philosophy of life, which is—worthless, he now thinks. Everything he’s ever written is meaningless in her absence. He feels like a hollowed-out pumpkin with fire-bright candles in his eyes, staring at the seedy-moss innards that have just been ripped out and set in front of him. Somewhere in that ganglion of failure are the words he needs to express this loss, but he can’t see past the bleeding flame to grasp their order, and the desire to do so echoes around his hollow head and submerges in the quicksand of his stomach; he’s staring at the pages of the ripped out twelfth-century novel she left when she left.
He lies in bed for a day. He lies on the couch for two. He musters the courage to step outside and finds it a pleasant day. The words have stopped coming. Phil Ochs shot himself because the words stopped coming. He walks to his mailbox. No mail. It's only 9:30 in the morning. He lightly kicks a milkweed by the steps with his padded slipper. He thinks about his life. He compares it to his neighbor's garden hose, which is full of holes but wound up and still hanging around. He remembers his first workshop, the faces of new writers—not new but open; they were open to things that weren’t right in front of their faces or inside their own heads. He was going to be great, but he wasn’t. He would be the model teacher who inspired greatness with respect instead of mediocre reactions bred of pity. He was supposed to sound his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world instead of whispering it to drunken bums asleep beside dumpsters filled with library books. He wanted to be the Everyman; the HE referred to on daytime talk shows, congressional hearings, faculty lunchrooms, and benefit dinners. And the classes never really mattered to him—at all. The students’ stories were never quite good enough for him to read; his written comments generally rambled into an obscure diatribe on aesthetics and left the bolts of the story completely. In his mind, as the milkweed waved an obscene salutation, he was an utter failure in every sense of the word. He had failed as a writer; his book wasn’t even in the top thousand. He had failed as a teacher; none of his students went beyond filling in the alphabet bubbles on semester evaluations with written words of praise. And he had failed as a lover; his one light having left and a binding apathy prevented him from asking the question that might have made her stop before she opened that car door and was sucked into that familiar black hole that so many bar stool residents have preached about over a hundred dollar liquor tab. And now he feels like discharged semen in a wad of toilet paper, something that could have been but never was.
Jack Stansfield walks into his last 4:30 workshop with the discombobulated stagger of a town drunk on the run from Child Support. He has no folders, papers, pens, or preconceived notions about what he will say to his five students. He only feels the enormous weight of burnt wax and bookbinding leaking from the holes in his shredded shoulders. He is less than a man. He is a kite on a string released from the Creative Writing office window. He is everyone at one point or another.
These are things he wishes he could say. Sometimes, the narrator breaks down. Sometimes, past and future tenses mingle in a story, which doesn’t mean anything more than the author forgetting the original plan. Sometimes, characters don't speak with perfect quotation marks inside white bubbles surrounded by black lines that hold the words close in. Sometimes, targets get switched in mid-firing, and the shooter can only watch the bullet go the wrong way. Sometimes, the person in front of the room only hides behind a podium. Sometimes they’re only dipshits in penny loafers, but sometimes they are human beings that have been up all night crying. Sometimes, they miss the people they pushed away. Sometimes, a story doesn't come together in the end. Sometimes fiction doesn't mean lying, and sometimes people typing words into keyboards or putting ink on a page only talk to themselves. Sometimes, what we wish to become is less than what we already are.
Jack Stansfield leaves his last workshop with the glass that held the melting wax in shards. That crystal harp meant to sound the strings of redemption shattered, and the little heart rock is exposed to the harsh open air. He pays no attention to his surroundings. He doesn’t look back; if he did, he might see a wax trail, shredded bookbindings blowing across the cactus green campus lawn. He thinks about the return address on the Ecru announcement on his desk at home. The rock almost glitters in the bare Ohio atmosphere. Two things are dancing in his mind and drilling at his rocky heart, and in the end, they are both the same thing—Pyrite—Fool’s Gold.
Written in Bowling Green, Ohio (April 2000)
Pyrite. You reminded me of a rap a wrote a long time ago for national talk like a pirate day. I put the lyrics into Suno...
https://suno.com/song/37db802a-1eec-457a-92f7-46078c5834f5