Fan Letter

When I was a fledgling undergraduate fiction writer, my professor gave me a thick stack of photocopied stories, and during a brief required conference in his small office made tiny by the numerous stacks of books, said to me, "Your stories remind me a little of Ivy Goodman." He explained to me who Ivy Goodman was. "Ivy Goodman," he said, "was an Iowa Award winner and you should read her work." I walked back to my sparsely furnished, drab one bedroom with the stack of photocopied stories and the question lingering in my mind, "What's an Iowa Award?"

I was new to writing short stories. Heck, I was new to reading short stories. Before the required "Introduction to Fiction" course, I'd read two short stories in my life. Both were read for my high school English class and both were written by men about men doing horrific things. One was "The Most Dangerous Game," and the other was "Harrison Bergeron." I remember thinking that I was getting bored with all these people being chased. When I got to college, I took the intro class to reading fiction and we read all the classics. We read about the woman who kept a corpse in her attic and we read about the enormous radio and we read about the bible salesman stealing the young woman's prosthetic leg.

And then I started writing.

By the time I started writing short stories, I'd been in some pretty absurd situations. I was too shy to present them as nonfiction, so I stole stories from myself. For instance, once, on my way to have dinner with my wealthy boyfriend's family in a big city along the river, I stopped at a trailer park on the way and had the transexual psychic and sometime beautician do my nails so I'd feel fancy for the occasion. That's a premise worth writing about, so I did, but I twisted it. I carved out the best parts and embellished the rest.

It was that story that led to the conference and the mention of Ivy Goodman and my frustration at not knowing what the heck an Iowa Award was. I carried the stack of photocopied stories home and I sat down on my parents' old sofa and lit a cigarette and started reading. I was intrigued. I was impressed. I was enlightened. And I was appalled. I thought that maybe my professor was playing a prank. My work didn't hold a candle. I was completely intimidated - so much so that I didn't think to feel complimented. I just felt kind of sick.

Luckily, my transexual psychic in the trailer park story was the last one I had to write during my undergraduate career. I revised it a little for my applications to graduate school, and then I didn't do much with it ever again. I wrote new opening paragraphs for it. I made new outlines and lists of possible new scenes. But I never finished it. I made that a habit.

I never finished any of them. I'd write a decent first draft and then I'd shy away. I'd retract. I'd think the voice was too distant. I didn't include enough description or detail. They were too thin. They were too something and not enough something.

I made these excuses for years.