“Although we will be working on short stories in this class—anyone who wants to attempt a novel must have prior approval, please see me during office hours before this week is out—the reading and viewing list is key. I will schedule viewings during a to-be-agreed-upon time that works for the majority of students. You may, of course, watch the films on your own.”
A thin girl, not one of the knockouts, raised a nervous hand. “What do you mean by ‘suggested’？”
“Suggested,” Gerry repeated. “Encouraged. Recommended. Not compulsory, but something that will enhance your experience.” Blank stares. “Not part of your grade.” Happy smiles.
“Here’s what will affect your grade. Turning your work in on time. Providing comprehensive critiques on others’ work. Finally, it is important that you show up. Attendance is literally thirty percent of the grade in this class. You can’t be successful in a fiction workshop if you don’t show up. You can’t be successful at anything if you don’t show up.”
He had not taught for almost fifteen years, but it was like muscle memory. The words rolled out, familiar and yet new. He was energized in a way he had not been for a long time. Goucher might not have Hopkins’s rep, but what it did have was an alum who had donated a ridiculously wonderful amount of money for a visiting professorship. He would receive $150,000 and a living stipend as the first Eileen Harriman Creative Writing Fellow. It would have been foolish to say no, even if it meant returning to Baltimore, tricky because his mother assumed he would move back into his boyhood bedroom. He did not. He took a sterile short-term lease behind the Towson mall, telling his mother he had to be within walking distance of campus. She accepted this lie readily, which made him feel guilty. Hadn’t his mother endured enough lies from men? But the house on Berwick was like something out of a ghost story—only not Peter Straub, more Shirley Jackson. He worried that if he went back in, he would never get out.
Besides, he was a newlywed of sorts, married less than a year to Sarah, and he would be boarding the train to New York every Friday to return to her.
He had taught this class before, more or less. The Abbott book was new; he recognized that he needed some women in his syllabus. He expected the students to assume he would be Team Novel all the way, and he generally was, but there was some subtlety to his method. Obviously, The Godfather （film） trumped The Godfather （book）。 Ghost Story （book） defeated Ghost Story （film） handily. The Getaway was the best one-on-one matchup because novel and film both had their merits, but the book was an existential nightmare whereas the film was a straight-up love story.
The Red Baker–Wire bracket, as he thought of it, was interesting because the novel was working on a human level, whereas The Wire had bigger fish to fry. Gerry preferred the former, but he understood why others argued for the latter. The idea was to shake the students up, to get them to form their own ideas. The novel had been changed forever by film and television; there was no going back. The question was how to go forward.
Their own short stories, the ones they had submitted—they were more scenarios than stories, but so it goes, that’s why they needed a class—were clearly shaped by cinema. The nonlinear ones owed much to Pulp Fiction and maybe the TV show Lost, not that he had ever watched the latter. Then there were the zombies. So. Many. Zombies. What was the appeal of zombies? He really didn’t get it. They weren’t even a good horror device; he had hoped Shaun of the Dead would kill the zombie motif forever. But zombies, being zombies, kept coming back.
“Given that this is our first meeting, let’s start with an exercise—I want you to take the line, ‘He was vacuuming the rug when the phone rang’ and proceed from there.” They looked disappointed by the prosaic line, or maybe they just didn’t understand a world where phones sat on tables and rang. He would tell them when they were done that the line was Raymond Carver’s and Carver had written a short story once with nothing more than that opening line in mind. Not that Gerry was a big Carver fan, but it was a good exercise.
Or was it? When he asked who wanted to share their work, he was amazed at how their imaginations defaulted to mundane or hyperbolic. One girl had a SWAT team enter in the second paragraph. Another simply described vacuuming. The best were two of the three boys; they were clearly the most talented, and that was going to be tricky in this environment, but what can one do? Luckily, the third boy was a moron, so that balanced the scales a bit.