Yes. I took his undergraduate creative writing course twice when I was at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n
Professor Michaels passed away last year. I\u2019d always planned to go find him again once the book was on the shelves\u2014but since I had every reason to believe he\u2019d hate it, I didn\u2019t keep an eye on him. So I didn\u2019t know he had lymphoma last year, and didn\u2019t know he died until about a week ago, when I went to check and see if he was still around. I figured he either would be, or I\u2019d have missed him by about a decade\u2014probably the latter.<\/p>\n
It was only when I saw the memorial page that I realized that in my heart of hearts, I\u2019d figured he was going to outlive\u00a0me<\/em>.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n Just barely out of high school. Young. Dumb. When I was a freshman, I\u2019d found out I wasn\u2019t nearly as good at math as I thought I was. Having failed to\u00a0generalize<\/em>\u00a0the lesson, I figured I\u2019d take a creative writing course. Not quite having realized that UCB had low tolerance for people meandering through their academic careers, I also figured the English department would let anyone who wanted to take creative writing do so.<\/p>\n But UCB has tens of thousands of undergraduates, and \u201ccreative writing\u201d is a luxury. They offered one creative writing course a semester. Maximum attendance: 25 people. \u201cSpecial course prerequisites; check with department,\u201d the catalog said.<\/p>\n As it happened, I had a writing sample ready\u2014a short story I\u2019d done in high school. I turned it in before the deadline; checked the appropriate place at the appropriate time to see if I\u2019d gotten in. I had.<\/p>\n The first day of class, the 25 people on the list showed up. Along with about 75 others who just\u00a0knew<\/em>\u00a0that they were number 26 on the list, and one of the 25 was going to fail to show up. Many of the 75 were easy to spot; they were reassuring each other that\u00a0of course<\/em>\u00a0a little more room could be made for the Truly Deserving. Often loudly. In a rare display of common sense, I kept my damn yap shut.<\/p>\n Ten minutes after the nominal beginning of the course, Leonard Michaels walked in. \u201cIf you\u2019re on the list, you\u2019re in the class,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re not on the list, you\u2019re not in the class. People on the list, I\u2019ll see you in two days. People not on the list, I\u2019m sorry; try again next semester.\u201d And he walked out again. Trailed by slightly less than 75 people saying, \u201cBut\u2026 but\u2026 but\u2026\u201d I don\u2019t know what he did after that, but I always imagined him sprinting for his office, slamming the door, and pushing a filing cabinet up against it.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n The first\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0day of class, Michaels explained what he was going to do. It took a while, but it boiled down to, \u201cI\u2019m going to read out loud something one of you have written; I\u2019ll read as much as I think is necessary. Then we\u2019ll discuss it. This is the lower division version of the class, so I won\u2019t be naming any names. Ready?\u201d And he pulled a paper out of the stack at his side, and started reading.<\/p>\n 25 people listened. He stopped after the third paragraph, and said, \u201cWell?\u201d<\/p>\n 25 people metamorphosed into Great White Sharks. We tore that thing apart. We found six hundred things wrong with the first VOWEL.<\/p>\n Those of you who are good at math may be wondering\u2014if 25 people turned into sharks and attacked,\u00a0who had written the text<\/em>? My friends, if you\u2019re sitting in a room with 24 Great White Sharks,\u00a0you go and get you a Great White Shark mask<\/em>. To this\u00a0day<\/em>\u00a0I don\u2019t know which one of us wrote that first paper.<\/p>\n And then he did it again, and did it again.<\/p>\n By around the time we got to the fourth paper, our jaws were tired. So we started actually\u00a0thinking<\/em>\u00a0about whether what we were going to say was really going to contribute to efficiently Crushing the Soul of the Enemy. We calmed down a little more\u2026 and eventually got to the point that we were applying all the literary criticism stuff we\u2019d already learned through a lifetime of reading and trying to write. Suggestions started to appear\u2014\u201cThat could be a lot better, if\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Being a hyperintelligent being, I saw what Michaels was doing. \u201cThis guy\u2019s just a coordinator,\u201d I said to myself. \u201cHe\u2019s having us do all the work. That\u2019s not\u00a0valueless<\/em>, of course, but geez.\u201d I was very proud of myself for having spotted the man behind the curtain.<\/p>\n By about the third week, we were no longer in feeding frenzy mode. People with something insightful to say would say it, and everyone else would shut up. This made things a lot easier on the authors of the day; they could just feign disinterest, instead of having to put on a shark mask. And right around then, I started noticing which of the comments Michaels was listening to and expanding on, and which ones he\u2019d cut off and say, \u201cYes, yes. But\u00a0what else<\/em>\u00a0is wrong with this piece?\u00a0How else<\/em>\u00a0could it be improved?\u201d<\/p>\n The light finally dawned. \u201cOops,\u201d I said to myself. \u201cThat guy standing behind the curtain wasn\u2019t the great and powerful Oz, either\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n It was about a third of the way through the course that my turn in the barrel came up. I heard Michaels start reading my words; I put on an expression of feigned disinterest and sat back, smug in the knowledge that there wasn\u2019t going to be a damn thing these kids could say about the piece I\u2019d worked so\u2014<\/p>\n \u2014and twelve people turned into Great White Sharks, and they tore my piece to shreds. The found SEVEN hundred things wrong with the first vowel. The letters crawled right off the pages in shame and went and hid behind the wastepaper basket. The paper SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTED.<\/p>\n Michaels brushed the ash off his fingers and said, \u201cYeah. We can all see that this one is going nowhere, right? Let\u2019s move on.\u201d He didn\u2019t look at me.<\/p>\n It\u2019s entirely possible that at some point during the next half hour, a giant squid ate my backpack. Certainly\u00a0I\u00a0<\/em>wouldn\u2019t have noticed. I don\u2019t remember much of anything until I was back in my co-op, looking at a copy of what I\u2019d written.<\/p>\n At which point I realized that the twelve sharks had taken it easy on me. There were\u00a0fourteen hundred<\/strong>\u00a0things wrong with the first vowel. The sharks had just hit the high points.<\/p>\n Michaels required that you always have at least two pieces of yours in the stack at all times. I looked at my copy of the second piece already in there. I said, \u201cOh, God, no.\u201d<\/p>\n First time in my life I ever blew off a computer science assignment to write. And when I was through, there were only a hundred things wrong with the first vowel, and I didn\u2019t know how to fix them\u2014and I wanted to know<\/em>. And I knew that if the sharks didn\u2019t find them, Michaels would start asking people leading questions until they spotted them\u2014and if they didn\u2019t have ideas how they might be fixed, he would.<\/p>\n Waiting for the next session of the class was a long two days.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n I\u2019m a lousy teacher. I wish I could tell you what Leonard Michaels taught me with as much detail as he did. But I can tell you the most important parts:<\/p>\n (1) You can\u2019t write if you don\u2019t read. If reading is a burden for you, or if you don\u2019t have time to read, you\u2019re not going to be able to write. This is because:<\/p>\n (2) If you read a lot, you already have a sense of what works and what doesn\u2019t work. You should be able to think of paragraphs that made you double-check the spine of the book to see if they were written directly by God\/Buddha\/Cthulhu, and you should be able to think of paragraphs that made you wonder why the author\u2019s keyboard didn\u2019t leap off his desk and beat him to death for them.<\/p>\n (3) The hard part is applying this sense of what works and what doesn\u2019t work to your own stuff. Authors are often blind to the flaws in their own work, and it\u2019s not just because we\u2019re megalomaniacs. (That\u2019s a\u00a0separate\u00a0<\/em>problem.) The problem is,\u00a0we know what we meant<\/em>. We know what color the sky we\u2019re describing is\u2014we can see it, we can see how the sight of the sky is affecting the mood of the protagonist\u2014but it\u2019s damn hard for\u00a0the guy who wrote it<\/em>\u00a0to see that<\/p>\n The sky was the shade of robin\u2019s egg, darkening to a cerulean topaz at the zenith, with a faint haze over the distant moss-green trees; the sun stabbing down like a bleeding hot lance of actinic yellow to pick out deep blue shadows on the ground by the emerald sea and the turquoise prow of the\u00a0Dawn Sloop Sapphire Bright<\/em>\u00a0as white clouds tinted with the faintest indigo backscatter off the teal grass momentarily darked the brow of Grongoram. He murmured to himself, \u201cOh, this sky matches my mood so; just as the zenith darkens, so too darkens my libido; and my hopes are unto this salt mist.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n should be taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot. All those details are important to how\u00a0you<\/em>\u00a0see the scene\u2026 but the reader could give a rat\u2019s ass. In fact, the reader tripped over \u201ccerulean topaz,\u201d and is wondering what the hell that even\u00a0means<\/em>. Sure, if the reader could see it the way\u00a0you<\/em>\u00a0see it, it\u2019d blow his socks off\u2014but you\u2019re\u00a0writing<\/em>, not mind-melding, and That Paragraph Doesn\u2019t Work.<\/p>\n You have to learn to see the flaws anyway. And you have to know what the rules are\u2014all the rules, from grammar to basic plot design to how to write a joke and beyond\u2014so that\u00a0you know<\/em>\u00a0when you\u2019ve decided to break them, and you can be extra sure that despite the fact you\u2019ve broken Rule #716, It Still Works.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n Professor Michaels wanted us to come to his office hours. All professors say this\u2014and believe it or not, I think they\u2019re all telling the truth. The key is what they\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0want is for you to come to their office hours\u00a0and be interesting<\/em>. What\u00a0they<\/em>\u00a0find interesting may not have the slightest thing to do with what\u00a0you<\/em>\u00a0find interesting, though\u2014particularly in the sciences, which is why most engineering types don\u2019t bother. (I used to make a game out of it. I\u2019d wander by and see if my professors looked\u00a0bored<\/em>\u2014or if they\u2019d been trapped by someone asking them to explain something that should properly have been handled by a graduate student, peer tutor, the textbook, their sixth grade math teacher, or a parole officer. Being surrounded by tens of thousands of people, many of whom were skilled at brown-nosing, I figured that to thrive, I should brown nose by\u00a0actually<\/em>\u00a0being useful and pleasant.)<\/p>\n I finally got around to doing this with Michaels. I wandered by; he looked bored, so I went in. I wasn\u2019t well prepared for this. I knew how to get a computer science professor talking, because I more-or-less\u00a0understood\u00a0<\/em>What Computer Science Was All About. But I didn\u2019t have the foggiest idea what a professor of English even\u00a0did\u00a0<\/em>when he wasn\u2019t teaching. I panicked, and tried to sympathize with him about his administrative burden. Unfortunately, this means that what I\u00a0said<\/em>\u00a0was, \u201cSo. How goes the old fill-in-the-bubbles thing for the course grades?\u201d<\/p>\n He looked uncomfortable. He started telling me that assigning a grade in something like \u201ccreative writing\u201d was more or less arbitrary, and he understood the pressures students faced with maintaining their grade point averages, but department chairs give professors funny looks if they just spew out \u201cA\u201d grades across the board, and about eighteen other things I tuned out on because I didn\u2019t really care. I was in brown-nose mode: be a sympathetic audience. So I said, \u201cYeah, yeah, yeah\u201d a lot.<\/p>\n Finally, he wound down. \u201cBut\u2026 to answer your question: I\u2019m going to give you an A minus for this course.\u201d And a man two and a half times my age winced, in preparation for my exploding at him.<\/p>\n And I said, \u201cOh. Okay, thanks. But how goes the paperwork and all? Are there a lot of people arguing with you this year?\u201d<\/p>\n He said, \u201cUh\u2026\u201d And we looked at each other for a while.<\/p>\n My eighteen brain cells sparked and fizzed feebly for a while, and finally I said, \u201cOh, shit. Is\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0what you thought this was all about?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat I came in here to ask you about my\u00a0grade?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0ask about your grade.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t! I asked how the paperwork was going!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat? Why would you care about the paperwork?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat, you thought I cared about the\u00a0grade<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat?<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cProfessor Michaels! I\u2019m a damn\u00a0computer science student<\/em>, you know that! I don\u2019t\u00a0care<\/em>\u00a0what my other grades are! Nobody on the face of the\u00a0earth<\/em>\u00a0cares what grade a computer scientist got in a creative writing course! Christ, Professor, I\u2019ve already got a\u00a0job!<\/em>\u00a0Do you know how few people can handle an array of pointers to pointers to functions without losing their fucking\u00a0minds?<\/em>\u00a0I could quit school\u00a0tomorrow!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Undergraduates at Cal don\u2019t say things like that often.<\/p>\n \u201cMy God!\u201d I went on. \u201cScrew the A minus, give me a C! If you have to put down a certain number of Cs on the page so the department doesn\u2019t think you\u2019re going soft on the students, save the A minus for someone who needs it!\u201d<\/p>\n Undergraduates at Cal don\u2019t say things like that\u00a0ever<\/em>.<\/p>\n His eyes narrowed. \u201cYou\u2019ve got an angle or something,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAngle? I have no angle.\u201d<\/p>\n Michaels was the son of first generation Polish immigrants, and grew up on the streets of New York City. My father was the son of first generation Polish immigrants, and grew up on the streets of Buffalo. We looked at each other. We didn\u2019t know what was going through each others minds\u2014but we knew all the steps of the kind of dance we were about to do.<\/em>\u00a0It was like homecoming for both of us. The kind of homecoming where you say, \u201cOh, God, I have to spend the holidays with my family,\u00a0again<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHonest,\u201d I went on. \u201cI don\u2019t need it.\u201d I have a very faint Polish accent. It began thickening.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got something going on. What, you\u2019re trying to trick me into making some sort of do-this-by-then-and-I\u2019ll-give-you-an-A deal?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cC minus!\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou think I can introduce you to a publisher?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cProfessor, I can\u2019t go any lower than a C minus. My faculty advisor over in the CS department\u00a0knows<\/em>\u00a0I can write\u2014if he sees a D or an incomplete, he\u2019ll come after the English department and demand to know the reason why, and probably want me to take the course again. He\u2019s pushing me to go to grad school.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAha! A letter of recommendation for grad school, is that it?\u201d<\/p>\n I was a kid, and I was het up. He gave me a perfectly good out. Not only did I not take it, I didn\u2019t even\u00a0see<\/em>\u00a0it. \u201cFrom an\u00a0English professor?<\/em>\u00a0They\u2019d laugh me right out the front gates!\u201d<\/p>\n He ran out of ideas. \u201cWhat the hell did you come in here for in the first place, then? Answer me that!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYOU LOOKED BORED!\u201d<\/p>\n We glared at each other for a while.<\/p>\n My eighteen brain cells sparked and fizzed. Finally,\u00a0I<\/em>\u00a0saw an out. I quickly put on a not-quite-perfect poker face over shrewd. \u201cAlthough\u2026 You know that undergraduates can\u2019t access the stacks in the main library directly.\u201d<\/p>\n He blinked. \u201cThey\u00a0can\u2019t<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo. We have to ask for a specific book at the desk. They fetch it\u2014eventually. It takes a while.\u201d<\/p>\n This totally derailed Michaels\u2019 train of thought. \u201cWait a minute. The\u00a0students<\/em>\u00a0can\u2019t get to the\u00a0books<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNot in the\u00a0main<\/em>\u00a0library. There\u2019s a smaller building that we can use. But we can\u2019t go into the stacks\u2014unless a professor signs a little sheet of paper every semester, saying that we\u00a0need<\/em>\u00a0access for some reason\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s\u00a0stupid<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCan\u2019t argue with you there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf I had known about this, I\u2019d have signed the damn thing\u00a0anyway<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cReally? The guys at the library said it hardly ever happens\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat? Are you\u00a0sure<\/em>\u00a0that\u2019s how it works?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cProfessor, you may have noticed that this campus is getting just a little crowded here and there. The books in the main library are\u00a0old<\/em>, lots of them\u2014no way to replace them if anything happens to them\u2014and they don\u2019t want twenty thousand kids not old enough to drink sneaking cigarettes in the back\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut,\u201d and then he started sputtering. \u201cIt\u2019s a\u00a0library<\/em>. They\u2019re\u00a0books<\/em>. Books are supposed to be\u00a0read<\/em>. This is a\u00a0fucking<\/em>\u00a0UNIVERSITY!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cY\u2019know, I could probably walk over and get the paperwork now,\u201d I oozed.<\/p>\n He pointed at the door. \u201cGo! Go now!\u201d<\/p>\n I stood up, checked my watch. \u201cOops\u2014your office hours are almost up\u2026 Tell you what; I\u2019ll bring the form by tomorrow in class.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll wait,<\/em>\u201d he grated.<\/p>\n On my way out the door, he yelled, \u201cAnd you\u2019re taking that A minus, too!\u201d<\/p>\n I have no reason to believe that he didn\u2019t go to his grave thinking I was the slimiest negotiator for a trivial beneficence he\u2019d ever seen.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n But I kept showing up for office hours, and we would talk. And the course ended, and summer came, and I kept coming by to chat.<\/p>\n I\u2019m under no illusion that there was a Deep Connection O\u2019 The Soul between us. Even though it\u2019s damn near obligatory in reminiscences like this to say something like, \u201cNobody else had the deep understanding of my issues and background I needed so badly at the time; truly, he was a guide and guardian to me, as he was to so many others\u2026\u201d Yeah, yeah, save the purple crap for your fiction. Besides, I don\u2019t know how he was with other people; the rest of his life was\u00a0his<\/em>. He was nice to\u00a0me<\/em>, though; I know that much.<\/p>\n He was a Pole from New York City who could write\u2014yet somehow found himself in California. I was a Pole who could about put together a compound sentence without impaling myself on a semicolon\u2014born in Buffalo, but raised in California. That ain\u2019t much of a connection. I didn\u2019t need a father figure; I\u00a0had<\/em>\u00a0one. (Better still, he was actually\u00a0my father<\/em>, too\u2014which meant one less phone number I had to keep track of.) But having said that\u2026<\/p>\n There\u2019s an old, old image: the angel sitting on one shoulder, the devil on the other. It meant one thing to the medievals, who thought in terms of sin and good works. It meant something else to me when I was in school: the devil said to do the smart thing, and the angel said to do the right thing.<\/p>\n I mostly listened to the devil. It was the correct decision at the time, and I wouldn\u2019t change any of the specific choices I made.<\/p>\n But at the risk of violating the save-the-purple-for-the-fiction sneer I just made, Michaels was the angel. And more important, he saw that when I dreamed, I wasn\u2019t dreaming about being the best damn computer scientist on the face of the earth. Neither he nor I knew what the hell I\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0dreaming about, but we knew that wasn\u2019t it. And he didn\u2019t psychoanalyze me, he didn\u2019t try to be a father or an older brother or a drinking buddy\u2026 he was just Professor Michaels, who sometimes I would go to to talk about certain things.<\/p>\n Although I should note that he didn\u2019t like being Professor Michaels. Some time that summer, he said to me, \u201cCall me Lenny. My friends call me Lenny.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t do that,\u201d I said. \u201cLenny is a diminutive. It\u2019s too familiar.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI call you Stephan.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, but that\u2019s as it should be\u2014I\u2019m an undergrad, you\u2019re a professor. And if you ever call me Steve or Stephanku, I\u2019ll punch your lights out.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, though, I\u2019m beginning to warm to the idea. I\u2019ve got a stick up my butt about formality\u2014but it\u2019s been a decade and a half, now. It\u2019s taken me a little too long to get used to the idea\u2014but I think I can call him Lenny now. I no longer care that it\u2019s diminutive; it\u2019s far more important that it\u2019s affectionate.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n I took the course again in the fall. It was the same course, really\u2014Lenny said that the only difference between the lower division version and the upper division version was he\u2019d read the name of the person who\u2019d written the piece to be discussed. As God is my witness, I don\u2019t remember whether he actually followed through and read names. By then, I\u2019d figured out it was fundamentally unimportant to the process\u2014and when one deals with computers, where equipment becomes obsolete very quickly, one gets into the habit of deliberately forgetting information that\u2019s no longer important. I\u2019m pretty sure he used one of my pieces during the first few weeks as chum to set off the sharks\u2019 feeding frenzy\u2014but of course, by then both he and I knew I wouldn\u2019t take anything about it the wrong way.<\/p>\n The two most important things I learned the second time around:<\/p>\n First: mythic feel versus realistic feel. In\u00a0Little Red Riding Hood<\/em>, it doesn\u2019t matter where the forest is, whether the characters are speaking English or French, or what year it is\u2014the story is totally divorced from such things. Circumflex Vachss\u2019\u00a0Flood<\/em>, which\u00a0has<\/em>\u00a0to be New York City in the present day. The rules are different for myth versus reality\u2014but it\u2019s\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0easy to screw this up and accidentally let a mythic story founder on the rocks of specifics, or a realistic story suddenly float off into the ether of abstracted storytelling.<\/p>\n Second: sense of location. I remember this primarily because it was the first of his lessons that I just plain flat out didn\u2019t get. Location informs the tone of a story; a forest in Oregon is not the same as a forest in California, and I\u2019m not just talking about what species the trees are. Two towns separated by five miles of country road can be so different as to bring about century-long feuds. Slowly,\u00a0slowly<\/em>, I\u2019m beginning to understand this. But I can look at things I\u2019ve written, and I have to say, \u201cLenny, I\u00a0know<\/em>\u00a0this part, right here, doesn\u2019t reflect the location; it\u2019s just a place. This sucks. But I\u2019ve tried, and I\u2019m sick of beating my head against this particular wall; I\u2019m going to have to move on now, work on something else. I\u2019ll get it eventually.\u201d<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n Graduation day. No, not when I got my degree; that was just a day. By the time I had everything I needed to get the scrap o\u2019 parchment-colored paper, I was already deeply cynical about computers and how I\u2019d just spent the last four years\u2014not to mention in possession of a good head start on a pretty serious alcohol abuse problem. When they called my name to walk across the stage and collect my handshake and beribboned scroll, I walked backwards all the way to do it. Nobody blinked an eye; computer people think things like that are slightly admirable. They\u2019re a sign of someone capable of thinking outside the box\u2014while remaining close enough\u00a0to<\/em>\u00a0the box not to rock the boat.<\/p>\n Graduation day was when Lenny reached into the stack and pulled out one of my pieces. He read the whole thing, every word. The last line of the story got a tremendous laugh from the class. People kept grinning and chuckling over it as they were settling down, getting ready for the discussion. Lenny put it down, and said, \u201cWell?\u201d<\/p>\n Nobody said anything.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a good piece. Maybe even\u00a0great<\/em>, a little\u2014but still. What\u2019s wrong with this? How can it be improved?\u201d<\/p>\n Crickets chirping.<\/p>\n \u201cCome one. What, it\u2019s\u00a0perfect?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe if you read it again,\u201d someone said.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, no. Well\u2026 it is pretty good, at that. And I\u2019ve got some other points I want to make; think about it, and we can come back to this one later.\u201d He put it back into the stack, and we went from there.<\/p>\n I was sick. Other people in the class had written things that were better. And that last line wasn\u2019t supposed to be funny.<\/p>\n Sometimes, you graduate not because you\u2019ve learned everything you need to know\u2014but because the rest of what you need, you can\u2019t learn there.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n I don\u2019t remember what grade he gave me that semester. An A, probably. We never discussed it, before or after he filled in the bubble on the form.<\/p>\n Bad Magic<\/em>\u00a0is my first book. Lenny would have hated it. But that wouldn\u2019t have mattered to him; when he taught writing, whether he\u00a0liked<\/em>\u00a0the pieces he read had nothing to do with anything. So he would have gone through it, and told me what worked and what didn\u2019t work, and then sat back and said, \u201cYou know, you actually\u00a0can write<\/em>, a little. When are you going to write something\u00a0real<\/em>?\u201d And then, maybe, we would have had our old argument where he\u2019d sneer at authors who substituted zombies for people and violence for death and called it \u201cScience Fiction,\u201d and I\u2019d sneer at him for wasting everything\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0knew how to do on short stories about fragments of time and place that have been gone for thirty years; and those opening steps of the dance done, we\u2019d have taken it from there.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know I missed him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes. I took his undergraduate creative writing course twice when I was at UC Berkeley. Professor Michaels passed away last year. I\u2019d always planned to go find him again once the book was on the shelves\u2014but since I had every reason to believe he\u2019d hate it, I didn\u2019t keep an eye on him. So I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,7],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephan-zielinski.com\/dwa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}