I tried to be a writer in high school. I joined a student writing group my sophomore year. There were, like, five of us in the group. We met in Mr. Beede's* room. He was the cool English teacher. He never used the overhead fluorescent lights; instead, he set up thrift store lamps, and in place of desks, his room had bean bags and couches, in egalitarian formation (choose your own image; it's probably accurate). He subjected us to the tyranny of discussions rather than lectures. Of course he did; he was the cool one.
He was always happy, which pissed me off. The good students, the ones he liked, called him "Donald," but I couldn't shed my conventional ways. The best I could do was to call him "Beede," though in moments of obeisance I may have added the "mister." I heard rumors after I'd graduated that he got fired for assigning a poem that offended a student, because it mentioned a vulva or something.
I wasn't a student of consequence, to Mr. Beede or any other teacher. I got D's in his classes. I took a Shakespeare class and a poetry class with him. I didn't get Shakespeare, and I didn't get poetry. I loved writing and reading but I couldn't think about books in the way I was supposed to. I got an A in word processing, and in my playwriting class, and in French, always, and I even got an A in economics. I wasn't supposed to be the kind of student who got D's in English.
Beede announced one day a great opportunity for aspiring writers...there was one slot left in a 10-week workshop at the Walker Art Center, taught by a writer from New York whose novel had been optioned for a movie. We could have our work critiqued by a real WRITER from NEW YORK CITY and the workshop would culminate in our writing being PUBLISHED in a MAGAZINE (to be distributed amongst ourselves). I had never heard of the writer, but it sounded like a step up from the student writing group. I approached Beede after class.
"Oh my god, I would love to be in this workshop! I love writing! I bet I would love this writer!"
"Uh....well, no one else has expressed an interest in it yet....So I guess I could sign you up." He seemed annoyed, and I got the impression he was signing me up only because no one else wanted to. "But you know, Katherine, this isn't just something you can not show up for." He was referring to my minuscule stint on the Speech team, of which he was the coach. I had underprepped for the first tournament, then overslept on the Saturday morning I was supposed to be in Eden Prairie competing and missed the whole thing. I made it to the second tournament, only to find myself exactly in last place with my reading of Allen Ginsberg's "America." The judges, it turned out, didn't like the Eff word. They liked my impoverished speaking skills even less. So Speech wasn't my thing. I'd already moved on to Debate, which I dropped a month later.
"No, I promise. This is really important to me."
So, every Monday for ten weeks, I took a bus up Hennepin to the Walker, and rode an elevator up to a mysterious room past the galleries, where I met with the NEW YORK WRITER and other students from around Minneapolis, ones who probably didn't get D's in Shakespeare, to share poetry and stories and critique each other. I developed a little crush on the WRITER. He wasn't an asshole New Yorker; he was from the Bronx, and easy to talk to, and he didn't seem to hold our Midwesternness against us. He smoked a lot of pot, he said. He wrote everything on a manual typewriter, and bragged about how he'd break computer keyboards from banging on them typewriter-style. (I, of course, got myself a typewriter at the earliest opportunity.) He had interesting and fervent ideas about writers I'd never heard of, and about potential designs for our magazine. I remember in particular his disdain for the magazine "Ray Gun," and since I found "Ray Gun" breathlessly cool, I found his disdain for it even breathlessly cooler. His ideas were so fervent that he had a falling-out with the director of the teen writing program over some minor issue or other, and left abruptly before final week of the workshop, whereupon my crush deepened.
He came back to Minneapolis the following month, to do a reading at Hungry Mind bookstore. I was elated that the WRITER treated me like an old friend after the reading, and signed my copy of his book with an exhortation to keep writing forever.
The magazine came out and I was horribly embarrassed to see my poems there, in print, alongside other teenagers' work that was way better than mine. My vocabulary was slight. My D in Shakespeare was evident. My failure on the speech team was a warning I hadn't heeded. Who the fuck was I? Beede was right to be annoyed by me. I was right to know that I hadn't earned the right to call him Donald.
The workshop done, my Debate days over, I tried out for "The Merchant of Venice." I didn't get a role. The following semester, I tried out for "Fiddler on the Roof." I got a part in the chorus. I spent the rehearsals stoned. Quite stoned. Theater, it turned out, wasn't my thing either. Pot was my thing, and writing, even though my heavy Royal typewriter inflicted welts on my fingers.
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Some years later, I emailed the WRITER. I reminded him who I was and told him how meaningful the workshop had been to me. "I think I remember you...." he wrote back. "Didn't you knit me a hat?"
I wrote back that I had not, in fact, knitted him a hat. I had never knitted in my life. I didn't hear from him after that. I still have the signed copy of his book, but no longer the manual typewriter.
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*Given the sensitive nature of being fired over poems about vulvae, I have taken the prudent step of changing the English teacher's name.
