Notes and observations:
Beginning
The chapter starts with a letter that Alex Chee wrote to Annie Dillard, when he applied for her literary non-fiction class at Wesleyan University (where he is eventually accepted).
There’s some plenty of good writing advice in this chapter and the first one is revealed to us at the very beginning – when Dillard, in her first class, tells her students not to read her work while they were her students – she wanted them to not lose their individuality.
This, and the other advice that Chee was influenced by greatly was:
I can still hear her say it: Put all your deaths, accidents, and diseases up front, at the beginning. Where possible. “Where possible” was often her rejoinder. We were always to keep in mind that it might not be possible to follow rules or guidelines because of what the writing needed.
This advice must have clearly left a mark because of the way the author describes it. Notice how he acknowledges Dillard’s lack of sternness for this advice.
Heeding her advice, years later while writing this book, the author describes an “accident” at the beginning of the chapter itself, where he blends a story about falling asleep in a drawing class and then reprimanded to head home. He describes the teacher in a non-intimate yet, elegant way:
She was an elegant, imperious woman with dark, short curly hair and a formal but warm manner, known for her paintings of clouds
Cloud painter, and all. How very awesome.
“Stealing” a story from a typewriter
The author talks about an incident when he ended up writing a short story on a typewriter (that he was about to lend to a friend). That writing experience, something that lasted four hours, had a profound impact on him. Stitching together some events from his life, he made up a fictional account that he later finds out, is called “The consolations of the mask”. It is described as:
Where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory.
It is an interesting thought experiment. We all have such places in our mind. It could be raw thoughts that we tend to censor before they are even born, or our deepest fears. We can agree that all fiction must be born out of this.
The author’s friend had asked the typewriter for applying to a class conducted by the famous essaying Phyllis Rose. The story that Chee wrote just prior to handing his friend the typewriter was selected, while his friend did not make it to the list. Chee thought that by writing that story, out of impulse perhaps, there was something from that typewriter that he had taken out. He felt so guilty about it that he had wanted to apologize.
But it is not just his sensitivity that is on display here, there is also an honest modesty. Chee goes on to attend a few writing classes of the highest repute, was accepted at prestigious writing seminars, which he aced (”and won from her another of those mysterious A’s”). But despite all this happening, there was a sense of confusion and he puts it beautifully and then ends it with an ultimate tribute to teachers.
I was someone who didn’t know how to find the path he was on, the one under his feet. This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers.
In awe of a teacher
Chee describes Annie Dillard in an almost romantic way – it is clear that he is in awe of her. The one sentence that gives that away so easily is when he describes the lipstick mark on a cigarette filter as a “crown”. (”Lipstick crowns the golden Marlboro filter”). The next few pages of the chapter are filled with anecdotes of Annie Dillard’s teaching and would serve as an education for any budding writer.
There’s something about the analogies that Chee knits up. It is noteworthy how he describes getting writing feedback from Dillard:
Getting pages back from her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favourite black shirt under the nightclub’s black light, all the hair and dust that was always there but invisible to you, now visible.
There’s so much thoughtfulness on display there. Further, Chee finds more analogies in his learning on the campus:
I felt I finally understood what I was doing – how I could make choices that made the work better or worse, line by line. After over a year of feeling lost, this new feeling was like when your foot finds ground in the dark water. Here, you think. Here I can push.
Chee ends the chapter talking about another one of Annie’s advice to her students – to go to a bookstore and find the place in the bookshelf, where your books will go. It was a symbolic exercise, but nonetheless, an encouraging one – to put up a finger, make a little space between the books. Annie was asking Chee and the handful of her students to aim high – and aim high they did.
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