I had told the students in my undergraduate fiction workshop to write what they knew, and I was paying for it.
One fraternity boy submitted a long story about a fraternity boy who loses his girlfriend and spends the rest of the semester watching professional wrestling.
A girl brought a story about two girls shopping for shoes at a mall and getting in trouble with their parents for spending too much money.
Then a girl on the softball team came with a story about Billy the Baseball and Gary the Glove and Bobby the Bat and Ollie the Outfield. Billy and Gary and Bobby and Ollie were all good friends, friends for nine long innings. We never did find out who won the game.
At this point, the one non-traditional student in the class stood up and said she had something to say. She was a woman in her 40s who had worked as a waitress to put her husband through med school. Then her husband had run off with one of his nurses. I had a good idea what the story she would submit to workshop would be about.
But she wasn't talking about doctors and nurses.
"The trouble with you kids," she yelled, "is that you didn't have a Vietnam War."
There was a shocked silence, and then she said, "You've never had to take anything seriously. You've never lost anything. You've never had to face anything you didn't want to. No wonder you can't write."
Up to that point, I had planned on telling the fraternity boy that his story should be about a failed professional wrestler dumped by his girlfriend. He would get pierced and tattooed and inject steroids and he would moonlight for an escort service, which is how he would become the love-slave of Dame Judi Dench.
And the mall story might involve a shoe salesman with a serious patent-leather fetish, and the girls of the story might be undercover mall detectives who accept his invitation to go back with him to his apartment, where they discover thousands of stolen shoes and the mummified body of Imelda Marcos.
I was going to suggest that Bobby the Bat might have been corked and that Billy the Baseball was really Sammy the Spitball, and that Mr. Steinbrenner was selling them to his No. 1 fan, Fidel Castro, when the season was over.
But my non-traditional student changed all that. The classroom floor had opened up and we had all fallen into a deeper and darker place. It's mostly fortunate when that happens in a writing class.
"What do you think?" I asked the class. "Does loss make you a better writer?"
"I lost my Grandma," said a student.
"My dog died," said another.
"I broke up with my girlfriend," said the fraternity boy.
These people were over 18, but calling them boys and girls wasn't off the mark. If there was real grief in their lives, I decided, their relationship to it was suspect. Between them and grief lay self-pity.
"Why wish a war on these nice young people?" I asked the woman, who was still standing.
"I lost a brother in Vietnam," she said. "I've written a story about him. It's about how good he was and how it must have torn him apart to kill people and how much the world lost and our parents lost when he died. I'm sorry, but I don't think you kids can understand that story." She sat down.
If you can stand it, a good thing to do in a writing class is to let silence go on and on.
"Can you understand her story?" I finally asked.
"My father died in Vietnam," said a girl.
"My father came back, but Mom says he's never been the same," said the fraternity boy. "He's crawled into a bottle."
"My brother died in a car accident," said a girl. "My other brother was driving."
"My grandmother has Alzheimer's. My grandfather died trying to care for her."
There were other stories, some of them more tragic. Vietnam was there, in one form or another, in most of them. Self-pity wasn't. I decided that the unbearable mediocrity of most undergraduate workshop stories—and maybe the unbearable mediocrity of most American lives—was a defense against grief. If only, I thought, there was a defense against mediocrity.
"Bring your story in," I told the woman. "We'll come up with a war somehow."
John Rember
