A Dreamer in Fiction Class

“I am a writer,” I would say to myself while looking in the mirror, back when I was an awkward preteen. Ever since I could remember, I thought of stories, usually while looking out a car window or when I was supposed to listen to someone at the front of a classroom. It was only in middle school when something hit me and I began to write them down for all to see on the internet; stories of mercenaries falling in love, cursed kings, floating lands, and war-torn futures. I wrote to get the stories out of me, changing them from blurs in my head to clear images on a page. The response to my writing was a rare kind of love, the love of strangers. People at far distances with no faces would write to me with adoration for my stories, and with that, I changed.

Writing for me was no longer an exorcism, but a call to others. You never really realize how isolated the average life is until you feel the love of a stranger. What grew in me was a hunger for recognition. This is how I became the competitive, somewhat bitter writer I am today.

Though I loved to write, I did not read for fun, though there were certainly books I enjoyed: Watership Down, Out, Crime and Punishment, The House of the Spirits, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the infamous Harry Potter series, Among the Hidden series, and many more. All these I read though because I was trapped in bed with a sickness, on a camping trip, or had book to study for a class. When I was free, I got distracted with my friends, television, video games, and my own stories. I cursed that reading and writing were so interconnected; knowing so many had an advantage out of sheer hobby, so I planned to take the most difficult of English courses to force myself to read more.

I remember when I had to get my middle school English teacher to sign paperwork for me to get permission take honors English in high school. He refused, saying I did not read enough. I went against his wishes with a parent’s signature, taking nothing but honors English classes in high school. I earned my best grades from those courses. Every teacher I had was none-the-wiser to my reading habits. When I asked permission from an English teacher to take AP English, she responded with trust in my passion and ability. I found that to be a significant indicator of how far I had come since middle school.

In college, I double majored in English and anthropology. My anthropologist side was just as blood rushing as my writing side. I wanted amazing stories to be endured with my body just as my soul, and that wish was granted. By college I had experienced things that made my life as precious a gem as my own fabrications. The sweet taste of sugarcane in the Belize jungle, licking the Narnia lamppost in Oxford’s winter, the hugs of Nicaraguan street children, riding a giant Galapagos tortoise, hiking a sacred mountain in Japan, getting pickpocketed in Paris, purified by Ecuadorian shaman, the stories were endless. I kept a collection of journals, writing religiously every day, sealing these experiences in ink so they may last even longer than me. I believed highly in the philosophy of Japanese writer, Mishima Yukio, that I should craft myself from both sun and steel, the spiritual world of a writer and the real world of a warrior. I am no warrior, and I certainly don’t plan to commit seppuku like Mishima, as I rather watch a flower wilt than set it on fire. My steel was not a sword, but the sting and shine of reality.

I chose to be a black sheep among my peers. I hated being placed with everyone else when it came to writing. To me, writing was not something to be packaged and shared. It was someone’s blood, someone’s dreams, something so personal that it had to be crafted with intimacy beyond a classroom. That dream was not granted for me. My roommate though, somehow obtained what I desired after a teacher chose her for private lessons due to her talent. Her talent seemed effortless, passionless, as she often skipped his private lessons and wrote things for him last minute. I was bitterer than ever.

This led me to Mylene’s fiction class. I knew Mylene as the fairy godmother of Guilford, especially to English majors. I wrote for The Guilfordian, and I recalled Mylene was compared to a Hogwarts teacher in an article due to her magical essence. It was as they said, she danced around the classroom and spoke of everything that got me dreaming. “What is fiction?” she asked us. My mind felt like it was full of crystals, full of reflections, and I thought “everything.” When Mylene wrote “everything” on the board, I knew this class would make me ache. It’s the sort of ache when you have a small taste of something marvelous but then never see it again. That’s how I felt in classrooms, never satisfied. I knew that was my own fault, because I chained myself from speaking too much in a class. I cared so much that I didn’t want others to realize how much I cared. So when I saw “everything” on that white board, my heart swelled with joy and maybe I even smiled, but nothing more, because that was all there was for me in a classroom.

To me, my classmates were friends and foes. Some of them I loved and others I despised, most were despised. There was a great lack of wisdom involved since I did not know many of them very well. I chose to believe that there is no greater enemy than a shadow, an equal, but that goes the same for friends. Most were English majors, aspiring writers like me, yet that thought felt like a wound. Mylene chose a classroom of comradery, uncompetitive, so I clenched my teeth less in fiction than in journalism or literary theory where the teachers would hold up the best work for all to see. In those competitive classes, there was little in me but hunger, in fiction I got to be a little more human.

My more human side seemed to be a weaker side though, and I still wonder today if it is better to be hungry. My journals were thoughts on a page that felt as unclear on a page as my head. We started with a short story, Mule Killers, which captured none of me. My journal felt like thought vomit when I wrote it, but reading it later, it was clear and honest. I saw beauty in the story’s imagery and curiosity in how the characters were named. The second story, What you Pawn I will Redeem, captured all of me. It was unexpected, even though similar situations have happened in my history. The voice of the character was not so different from the voice in my own head. The story had a magical realism sense that resonated with me. I saw Sherman Alexie used both sun and steel, the magical and the mundane, darkness and humor combined to tell a story. Neither side took from the other, but complemented them. It hit my two hearts, but my passion for the story made no difference in my journal except that the blurred thoughts purred with affection for the story. The grades for my journals were good, but good never soothed me. It felt like something that just needed to be done well with little pride or feeling involved.

The journals started and ended in blurs, but they did accomplish some things for me as a reader. I began to feel an odd, scientific element in my reading process. I began to question why a story was being told and to whom, that was even something I took for granted as a writer. With each piece of dialogue, I thought of every reason something is said. The most fascinating thing I learned was to look for what was not said. It brought this whole new idea to me, that what is not there is just as important as what is there. All these tactics have been impossible for a writer to avoid, so I always used these strategies unconsciously. The short stories that we read each played up one of these strategies so highly, it was hard not to recognize.

The journal that hit close to my passion was no other than the creative writing exercise. We were supposed to describe the feeling of being trapped in the form of a short creative tale. In college I have been too busy to exorcise myself, so stories and the desire to tell them ooze out of every pore. I gave a drop of my ocean, describing a piece from a story that has been cooking in my head for many years. When asked to write creatively for a class, I would search the invisible library of stories in my head for something to fit the prompt, nothing is conjured, it was always there. Emily Smith read my creative piece and her positive feedback felt like a soft wind that cooled me down. I did not feel good about giving someone else feedback for their story. Perhaps that is greedy, to crave to receive but not contribute, but I always felt that my edits were about taste and that seemed unfair. To put my hands in someone else’s vulnerable world, it was like redesigning their room. I knew what may appear as dust to me may have invisible purpose to them.

The creative journal was not the only piece of myself I shared with the class. There was a blog to which we posted our thoughts based on various assignments. I enjoyed the blog more than the journals, perhaps because it felt like home for me as a writer who began on blog-like sites when I started writing. My favorite pieces were not my thoughts on readings, but the creative writing part. Very early in the semester we wrote a fictive answer to a real curiosity. I chose my curiosity, within the same week I saw a squirrel behave strangely. It lay in the grass and I almost stepped on him or her. The creature did not run, merely curled, maybe waiting for death. I decided my fictive answer should blend with reality and the inner circle of Guilford, writing that a teacher, Heather Hayton, made squirrel zombies as she threw a strange vial into the trash that the squirrels of Guilford always ate from. I recalled a story she told her class in literary theory that a friend of hers managed to create zombie rats. That stuck with me as did the fact that Heather had an entire class dedicated to the study of zombies once. I wrote something that could make me laugh aloud at how stupid and ridiculous it was. Too often I could be heavy handed in my ideas; it was good to sometimes be light-hearted, though it is something I certainly would not do anything with outside the class blog.

My other favorite was near the end of the semester when we studied flash-fiction. Like before, I went to the library in my mind, seeking what was already there. This time though, it was about my own life rather than a fictional character’s. “Drowsy, he woke to us giggling,” I wrote. I fondly remembered a time in Nicaragua when we were all quarantined. I was stuck with probably the most attractive man I’ll ever meet in my life. Carl David was hot, but was also a drunken asshole who liked the break rules, and he could write a damn fine poem, all the ingredients to make me hate someone. He kept me up at night, sitting at the end of my bed while talking with others. He ignored my pleas for silence so I could sleep. One day during our quarantined he fell into a drunken slumber and I drew a face on his face for playful revenge. Everyone laughed at him when he woke and I lied, saying we were laughing at a joke while he was asleep, thus my six word story. It still felt like a small door holding back a bigger, better story. I was never good or pleased with word limitations. There was also “The bubble popped on his hotdog,” which was a random memory of when I blew bubbles at a convention. Someone went up the escalator with a hotdog and one of my bubbles came down and popped on the meat. It was a strange, surreal moment for me. Mylene later showed each student her favorite of the two entries, she preferred my Carl David one, and I agreed. The hotdog was a little weird.

The blog was not pure creative writing however, most of the other entries felt similar to my journals, blurs. To my own surprise, I got a little into reading what my classmates wrote. I still don’t quite know why, maybe it was to make sure I was doing something right and confirming that through seeing what everyone else did. When we read the book Falling Man, Tindall’s blog post caught my attention. Her writing had the same presence as the smell of fire in the sense that she was burning with strong opinions. What she wrote got my second, world-wandering-self angry. She believed that terrorists were monsters and did not like that there were no monsters in DeLillo’s book. “I am an American,” she said “American this” and “American that” as though that were a reason or excuse for anything. I hated that. I hate the idea of dehumanizing people just to make others afraid and give a reason to attack and detest them, and she seemed to have wanted that. I wrote back a thoughtfully written script, trying to not start a war or have bad feelings, just enough to make her think. Still, deep down, I wanted to debate with her in class. I wanted to tell her that she was a terrorist’s shadow, that she dehumanized them just as much as the terrorist probably did with us, causing 9/11 in the first place. I did not though, because when I saw her face in class, I pitied her. It was easier to disagree with her in the blog, but when I saw her face in class, she looked scared to hear what anyone else had to say.

Moving back a little, there was more than blogs, journals, and creative writing bits in the fiction class. We had a story analysis and of course I chose What you Pawn I will Redeem because it seemed natural to pick what I most enjoyed. Now as I said before, good grades do not soothe me, but that did not mean bad grades were okay. Bad grades unsettled me. My story analysis on What you Pawn I will Redeem was written with confidence but when it was returned, I felt like an idiot. When Mylene handed them back to us, she warned us we could not get a C if we did not fulfill all of her requirements, I had a bad feeling. The word “citation” was sprinkled in nearly every paragraph. I misunderstood the requirements such as the page numbers, thinking the bibliography page counted as a page since that was true for some of my other classes. When I read the feedback I kept thinking that I got too comfortable in that class, that I got lazy. It’s all fun and games with journals until the larger essay with a bad grade hits you in the face. Luckily, the teacher was merciful and gave everyone a second chance. Her revisions were easy to follow, much like the editors I worked with in The Guilfordian. Once I got over the initial panic, it was just something to learn from.

Overall, I did participate in the class more than others. There were class times when I spoke a great deal and thought a lot about what we discussed. Other times I retreated inwards, dreaming of the world here or elsewhere, sometimes I was not so much dreaming but boiling with the hunger for something different.

As much I would dislike the position, if I was a teacher for the fiction class, things would be different. I will not dream, but be realistic when thinking of how I would be as a teacher. I will not lie and say I will be my own ideal. I’m still not sure what my ideal teacher even would be. While Mylene would make her students more vulnerable and human through stretching at the beginning of class, I would be more uptight. Class would begin with an attempt of humanity, asking how everyone was doing while knowing to not always expect an answer. Instead of dancing, I would probably gain my own style of pacing. I would follow the method of trying to get everyone to speak in class, knowing from my own experience of how easy it is to drift inwards.

My favorite topic to teach would be how places and people are represented in the texts we read, probably because it’s a topic that hits both worlds. As stated before, “everything is fiction,” and studying how places and people are represented is like a type of anthropology. In fact, Heather Hayton was a teacher who told me that English was evolving into a type of anthropology. Anthropologists looked for and identified patterns in human society on large and small scales, and we English majors do the same. English should be qualified as a study of man, and I would tell that to my students. I’ll tell them that to get them wondering, thinking, and possibly aching as I did.

I would approach Falling Man by setting a stage. It would take time, but I’d like my students to know of many different perspectives on 9/11 before reading the book. We would look at representation of 9/11 on a macro scale before going into the micro scale with DeLillo. Since 9/11 is a sensitive topic, I would expect certain reactions similar to Tindalls and will prepare myself to put my opinions aside for the comfort of my students. I would have them read different ways terrorists and victims were represented. I also loved how Mylene brought up the question of when it was okay to write about tragic realities such as 9/11. Following Mylene’s example, I would also discuss that topic with students. After setting the stage, I would get students to share what their own representations of 9/11 are, letting them write a journalistic assignment on what they would desire in order to get them hungry for Falling Man.

Representation involves everything we’ve learned. We must ask ourselves about each character’s agenda, what their goals are, and what that means in representing a victim or a terrorist. To identify a character’s code, the character’s morals, is also a part of how they are represented, we see codes in cultures and places as well. The list can go on and on of the elements used to represent various people and things in a book from what they epiphanies are to voice.

In Falling Man the terrorist is represented in a sympathetic way, even positioned as a victim himself. Near the end of the novel, he holds the ideas of his brothers close to comfort as he is about to crash the plane. The book said, “He thought of the Shia boys on the battlefield in the Shatt al Arab. He saw them coming out of trenches and redoubts and running across the mudflats towards enemy positions, mouths open in mortal cry. He took strength from this, seeing them cut down in waves by machine guns, boys in the hundreds, then the thousands, suicide brigades, wearing red bandannas around their necks and plastic keys underneath, to open the doors to paradise” (DeLillo, 238). In this quote we can see the terrorist’s agenda. He literally is looking into himself to find his drive, his reason for doing this terrible thing in order to find the strength to commit. This struggle also reflects on the character’s code, as he is fueling himself to break a sort of code of how he normally behaves. I would want to concentrate my lessons on how things are represented. I would ask my students why they think DeLillo chose this representation of a terrorist. What would are DeLillo’s goals in this representation? How would they represent a terrorist if they wrote a book and why? The representation of the terrorist is one of the elements that I found most interesting the book.

Then we have the book Typical American. I would go about teaching this book differently from Falling Man as the book is not written on top of a real tragedy. Unlike Mylene, I would probably start with Typical American before Falling Man as Typical American would not require as much as a stage set up in terms of examining representation, as I found the representation in Typical American to be very general while Falling Man felt more specific because of the context of 9/11. Also it felt odd to go from Falling Man to Typical American because the moods of the novels were so different. I think it’s easier to go from something happier to something more solemn than the other way around. Besides, with my plan to set the stage for Falling Man, it would also be easier to transition.

To keep with the theme of representation though, I would put my students into groups based on characters (I would probably do this for Falling Man as well) and each group would focus on how their character is represented. I would get each group to discuss things about their character based off of key terms such as their agenda, code, bodies, conflicts, voice, and inventory such as it they have any connection with physical items and why. Ralph’s list in the beginning of the book for example, would be significant for the students who got his character. He puts his code and agenda out there for us, in a list no less. After crafting a list he comes to an interesting conclusion about how important it was to not get close to girls, “For girls, he knew, were what happened to even the cleverest, most diligent, most upright of scholars; the scholars kissed, got syphilis, and died without getting their degrees,” (Jen, 7). This represents Ralph as naïve and finding good in education and bad in pleasure. We could take this list and compare then to his actions and find that Ralph is a character that easily gives into temptation despite his goals. Why would Jen represent him this way? I would question students, as we did in fiction, on how they felt about Ralph’s character and why they would think they were made to feel that way. For example, many people I talked to in fiction class hated Ralph and I was among them. I thought perhaps this was purposeful to show how America could corrupt an individual, because I really liked Ralph in the beginning. Having no reason would be a fine answer but they would have to tell me if there is a reason that there is no reason. I want to twist their minds the same way “everything is fiction” does. I want them to wonder if there is meaning in meaninglessness. As much as I dislike how the “American Dream” is overused in literature, it would need to be discussed for Ralph and about every other character in the book. What I liked about studying both these books was they overlapped the theme of what America means. As someone studying anthropology, I am fascinated by symbolic interactionism, the study of symbols and assigned meanings, this fits with all that I would want to look into with Falling Man and Typical American. So taking the symbol of America within these two books felt like a good bridge, though not exactly my favorite thee.

Perhaps being a teacher would not be so bad, as I’ve heard that teachers learn despite their teaching. Maybe having students of my own could feed my hunger? Then again I think a teacher should teach in hopes of teaching, not learning, or else they would be very frustrated. With that in mind, I would probably not be a star teacher. I would probably be one of those rambling professors, as I feel so often that I am rambling when I try to prove my knowledge to my teachers.

My current identity though is of a student, and that is where I will close. No semester has exhausted me as the one when I took my fiction course. It was not the courses fault, though it may have played a small part in playing with my desires. Each time a student mentioned a book they were working on or their feelings as writers, I felt myself despise them. When we spoke in groups though, things were different. If I could make someone laugh, all my angst left me. Maybe it was a sadistic part of me that I felt my narrative powering over them, or maybe I was softer than I gave myself credit. It certainly made me begin to wonder if I was changing through this sense of comradery in class, or that I was just beginning to recognize myself more in terms of being with fellow writers.

I came to another realization about myself when I went to an outside meeting in which Mylene discussed how to get published. For some reason I felt calm while she spoke, maybe it was because I did not hold back with my passions to ask questions and say what I felt. What stood out for me was her understanding of other writers. She asked why we wrote and I told her that the stories were in my head and I wanted to get them down. She described that must feel sort of lonely and it must feel good to exorcize a story out. If she were shooting an arrow, she hit the center mark. All my life, until college, I thought the same way in its most sufferable form and it pained me. I began to get obsessed with being understood in high school, to defeat loneliness as though it were an enemy. By college, something changed, I reveled in loneliness like a badge of pride. I realized it was strength, a reason in the first place to write. If that is my reason, I should love it rather than seek to tear it down. Strangely enough, when I decided this, I don’t think I have felt lonely in a long time. Still Mylene brought it all back to me, and I even felt a little emotional for a second, not for the present, but what I felt in the past. That Mylene, as a teacher, could notice that and nonchalantly resonate with me warmed me but I also ached more then more than ever in the semester. I wanted to write for me, not my classes, but I did not possess the time.

When she discussed about publishing, it was as I thought. The world of publishing was a game of chutes and ladders where there are hundreds of chutes with only about three ladders. I enjoyed Mylene’s honesty, and it made me certain that I want to self-publish. I’ve written enough to know that the desire for a high level of recognition to lead to one’s very own destruction. To be a fancy writer published by an industry would be a dream come true, but it’s a dream I won’t sacrifice so much for. Knowing myself and how much I ache for recognition, seeking recognition from the industry to be denied may be too much for me to handle.

As it may be obvious already, I love writing fiction more than reading. By the end of the current semester, I found my future semester slammed with two English and two anthropology courses all required for me to graduate. With that I could not take the fiction workshop next semester, at least not while maintaining my sanity. After taking this fiction course, if I could take any course, it would be Mylene’s fiction workshop. I knew if I took that, I’d grow more than ever. I had to graduate next semester, and to do that, I had to take my capstones and last 300 courses. My one hope was not giving up The Guilfordian, and I decided to take it for no credit, as I had to write somehow. My many friends mentioned how gleeful they were to take the fiction workshop while I could only scream on the inside. A part of me is able to convince myself that perhaps the fiction workshop could do the opposite of good to me; it could make me shrink back into a self-criticizing coward who hates to share her work with others. I should probably choose to believe that for my own sake.

Another event that drove me a little batty was that a creative writing major has suddenly been offered while I’m a senior. When choosing go to Guilford, not having a creative writing major was my main negative point. Now as a senior it is suddenly in the process of being available. Since studying abroad in Japan, I could not even be on the creative writing track for the English major. I still carry on with the positive idea that at least I am strengthening where I am weak, in reading.

On the positive side, Mylene was in my future as a teacher for my capstone. After seeing how she connected with her students, and how she drew a human-side of me in writing, I figured change could come no matter what subject she taught. That was my comfort amongst the little disappointments in the coming semester.

As for where I am going, that is probably the biggest question, and also the one I have always disliked answering. Why? It’s because I like where I am. If I kept thinking of where I’m going, I’ll just keep thinking that until I’m suddenly in my deathbed. Maybe that’s taking the question too far, but it makes sense to me. I try to live like I’ll die soon, and I concentrate on the present. If the present is painful, then I’ll use thoughts for the future to my advantage. Enough avoiding the question though, my future goal is to keep the stability of the present. I am balancing my two worlds perfectly by deciding my two majors. I still travel the world, having gone to Japan, Oxford, and Ecuador in the past three years. I study writing, hoping to be free soon to write as I once did, instead of my classes. Journalism has possessed a special attraction to be, as it seemed to be a career path that balanced both worlds perfectly. I would live both physically for real stories while spiritually in writing them with craft. Writing for The Guilfordian has fed my hunger and desire like no other course. If I could choose a future, it would probably be to continue on that journalistic path. On the side, I would write my stories for pleasure and self-publish for those who need a story like I’ve needed them.

On the last day of class, Mylene had every student speak aloud to come to a conclusion for the semester. It was one of those days I travelled inwards and what was there was blurs, blurs, and more blurs. When she called on me I just thought of this essay, “it will have the answer by the end” I thought. Reality and conclusion was a decision I could not make so clear without ink. She pulled at me, wanting something, anything. I do not remember what I said exactly but I said something along the lines of, “my conclusion to this class is a choice, and I have not decided what to think yet.” Mylene seemed to like that as a conclusion to the class reflecting on our first day, “Fiction is everything.” I have come to my conclusion, and it is that I’m tired of these courses tugging at me to stretch my mind, though I know it’s good for me. After about three years of not writing my stories religiously, I am hungry to write for myself. Only one semester more and I can put what I learned to the true sweet reward, my stories.