Don Lee - The Collective

The poetry part of the class didn’t matter to me. What I was nervous about was the second part of the course, when we would write fiction. For all my ambitions to be a writer, and for all the encouragement I had received in high school, told by more than one teacher that I possessed a creative flair, I had never written an actual short story, just unfinished vignettes or scenes.

We did a few fiction writing exercises, and then we scheduled ourselves for the real thing: a workshop rotation wherein we would make photocopies of our stories and pass them out in advance, then have them critiqued in class after reading a handful of pages aloud.

Joshua, of course, volunteered to go first. After he finished his brief recitation, we sat in silence in the classroom. The story portrayed a ten-year-old boy in Seoul after the Korean War who accompanied his father every day as they pushed a cart to deliver and sell charcoal. It was a quiet story, with not much happening and hardly any dialogue, the only fracas of significance an argument with a racist GI. Yet the language was lyrical and precise, with none of the bombastic flourishes and hyperkinetic rhythms I had expected from Joshua. At one point, the boy recalled a long-ago trip to visit relatives in Inchon: “He remembered looking out over the Yellow Sea, where the water lay undulant in the sun, the waves glinting as they moved toward shore, folding over one another like the ruffling of curtains.” The story had grace and gravitas. There wasn’t, as far as I could discern, a single misstep in it.

The professor, Peter Anderegg, cleared his throat. He wasn’t a real professor, just a visiting instructor, an adjunct. He was fairly young, perhaps twenty-seven, and was in his first year out of graduate school. He had published a few stories in some obscure journals, but not a book. Bashful, diffident, at any other college he would have been run over by the students.

“This is really… extraordinary,” he said. “It’s really quite beautiful. ”

Our initial reaction confirmed, the class began chiming in, ladling out our own effusive praise. Peter had a workshop rule, which was that the author could not speak during the roundtable critique, but I kept sneaking peeks at Joshua, and he was beaming with obvious pride. With his literary references and quips, he had already established himself as the class leader, but now he had elevated himself so he wasn’t just another blowhard. He had authentic talent, and from then on, his authority in the workshop was unassailable.

We walked to the Tap, a neighborhood dive, for burgers and beers, and sat across from each other in one of the big wooden booths. I asked Joshua, “How about giving me that story for Chanter ?”—the literary magazine at Mac.

“That little rag?” he said. He swigged his Summit IPA. He had made Jessica and me get passport photos, without revealing why, and then had procured fake IDs for us. Mine was laminated with the name Nick Carraway. His said Seymour Glass, Jessica’s Frida Kahlo. “It’d be kind of a waste, don’t you think? Those guys are idiots.”

I was low man on the totem pole on the journal’s staff, but I was certain I could convince Chanter ’s editors — who were known to be snitty, once turning down a story they had solicited from a prominent author who’d read on campus — to take Joshua’s piece. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll guide it through.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Joshua said. “I was thinking I’d submit the story to a real magazine.”

“Yeah? Like where?”

“Maybe The Atlantic Monthly .”

“No shit?”

“Or maybe Esquire or Harper’s ,” he said. “Fuck it, I might as well go for The New Yorker .”

Such an idea would never have occurred to me. His story was good, but it seemed arrogant — outrageous, really — of Joshua, an unpublished eighteen-year-old, to presume he had a chance at any of those prestigious venues.

As my turn in the workshop approached, my anxiety ratcheted. I kept eking out opening paragraphs of short stories and then tossing them. Finally, I finished a hasty draft, typed it out on a computer in the library, and ran off copies. It was about a couple standing in an alleyway next to the man’s motorcycle, a Suzuki Katana, having an argument. There were vague allusions to illegality: a rigged poker game, a pimp. The woman wore a sequined dress slit on the sides, and there was a recurring image of her blond hair falling aside, exposing the curved nape of her neck, as she reached down to adjust the clasp on her stiletto shoe. It was called “Nighthawks Rendezvous.”

I had rushed the story, I knew. Twelve pages long, it was filled with mangled phrasings and inexplicable tangents and more than a few typos. Writing it, I had had severe doubts that it displayed any merits whatsoever, yet, irrationally, as I read the first four pages out loud in class, I began to think that it wasn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, I thought it might be pretty inventive and original — kind of edgy.

“Comments?” Peter said to the class. “What did you think?”

No one said a word, just like when Joshua had presented his story, and I wondered if the class was similarly awed.

Ben, a political science major, raised his hand. “I’m not sure I understand what’s going on in the story.”

“Yeah, is this real, or, like, the guy’s dream?” Stephanie said.

“I was kind of confused, too,” Tyson said.

“I’m wondering what the author intended,” Elizabeth said. “Was the author intentionally trying to be abstruse?”

This was another one of Peter’s commandments. In order to protect students from feeling they were being attacked, we never addressed the author by name or by saying “you.” We were told to use “the author” exclusively. We weren’t supposed to look at the author, either. We were to pretend that the author was not in the room.

Rules for decorum aside, the discussion began to take a bad turn — the first time in any of our sessions, in fact, that the critiques were unequivocally negative.

“It’s like a really slick music video,” said Geoff, “but I don’t know if it has any more depth to it than that.”

“I don’t think there’s enough of a character arc,” said Cory. “No one changes during the course of the story.”

“We don’t know enough about them,” said Jeremy. “They aren’t developed very much.”

“There’s no conflict that I can define. What’s at stake? Is anything resolved?” asked Drew.

“The prose gets a little grandiose,” said Lara. “It’s reaching for highfalutin but it comes off as ostentatious.”

“The hair and neck thing got to be really tedious,” said Carey.

I waited for Joshua’s verdict. The hair and neck thing — at that moment I realized, with panic, that I had completely ripped the image off, almost word for word, from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de Rendez-vous , a novel that had been on Joshua’s recommended books list.

At last, Joshua said, “You’re all missing the point. The story’s working on an atmospheric or impressionistic level, on mood rather than plot. Character development and conflict are irrelevant in a modality like this. There’s an inherent tension beneath the recurrences, the circularity, of the sado-erotic imagery, and the entire story relies on the flux of linguistic excess. Stylistically it has a kinship to the nouveau roman . It’s phenomenological, in the Heideggerian sense. Structurally and conceptually this story is really sophisticated — I’d say it’s even brilliant. I loved it.”

God bless Joshua’s soul.

After a pause, Megan said, “You’re right. It’s surreal, that’s what it is. The unpredictable way it flows is disturbing and kind of magical.”