“June. Come on. We might not get an opportunity like this again.”
“Call me if, like, Lucasfilm gets on the line,” I say. “But I’m sorry, Brett. Even I’m not stooping that low.”
Eighteen
IN JULY, I PACK MY BAGS AND FLY UP NORTH TO TEACH AT THE Young AAPI Writers’ Workshop in Massachusetts. It’s the only program that’s invited me back for the season, and likely only because I’m still paying for that stupid annual scholarship in Athena’s name (the workshop is funded and hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Collective, and Peggy Chan is the coordinator of both). My other regular engagements have dried up since the Adele Sparks-Sato blog hit. Last summer, I was booked week to week with keynote talks and guest lectureships; this summer, there’s nothing on my calendar between May and August.
I strongly considered canceling on the YAWW, but ultimately I couldn’t face an otherwise endless, monotonous summer. Any distraction seemed better than pacing my apartment all day, trying and failing to write a single word. Besides, I’m hoping this might be good for me. Teaching is an unassailably noble calling, and even if this doesn’t redeem me in the public eye, it might at the very least build bridges with a group of students who haven’t decided yet that I’m a public enemy. It might make writing fun again.
I’m assigned to lead a daily, four-hour critique session with the select class: all high school upperclassmen I handpicked on the strength of their writing samples. It’s fascinating to meet them in person. I spot the big personalities in the group immediately: there’s Christina Yee, a tiny goth girl with very pronounced black eyeliner whose writing sample involved lots of body horror and teeth; Johnson Chen, who sports gelled-up hair and eighties-style overcoats like some K-pop singer, and whose navel-gazing writing sample had led me to believe he was an ugly duckling but he is actually quite clearly a chick magnet; and Skylar Zhao, a tall and leggy rising senior who, during introductions, declares her intentions to be her generation’s Athena Liu.
They slouch casually like they don’t care how they’re perceived, but I can tell how badly they want to impress me. They’ve got the classic fledgling talent mentality—they know they’re good, or could be good, but they crave acknowledgment of this fact, and they’re terrified of rejection. I remember this mix of feelings well: unbridled ambition, a growing pride that one’s own work might in fact be that remarkable, paired with staggering, incurable insecurity. The resulting personality is astoundingly annoying, but I sympathize with these kids. They’re just like myself, ten years ago. A well-phrased barb right now could irreparably destroy their confidence. But the right words of encouragement could help them fly.
This summer, I’ve decided I’ll try to be that for them. I’ll put the rest of the world aside. I’ll stop checking Twitter, stop browsing Reddit, and stop agonizing over my own writing. I’ll focus on doing this one thing that I might be good at.
The introductions go well. I use the same icebreakers I’ve picked up over years of creative writing classes: What’s your favorite book? (“Voice and Echo,” declares Skylar Zhao, citing Athena’s debut. “Lolita,” Christina responds, chin jutted out as if in challenge. “By Nabokov?”) What’s a book that would be perfect if you could rewrite the ending? (“Anna Karenina,” declares Johnson. “Only Anna wouldn’t kill herself.”) We construct a short story by going around the room, each adding a sentence to the one that came before. We speed-revise that story in under five minutes. We play with different interpretations of the same line of dialogue: “I never said that we should kill him!”
By the end of the hour, we’re all laughing and making inside jokes. We are no longer quite so scared of one another. I round out the session by hosting an AMA about the publishing industry—they’re all eager to know what it’s like to query agents, to have a book go to auction, and to work with a real, actual editor. The clock strikes four. I give them some homework—rewrite a passage by Dickens using no adverbs or adjectives—and they cheerfully slide their laptops into their backpacks as they stand up to leave.
“Thanks, Junie,” they tell me on their way out the door. “You’re the best.” I smile and nod at each one of them as they depart, feeling like a wise, kind mentor.
THAT NIGHT I SCARF DOWN A SALAD FROM THE DINING HALL, THEN head to the nearest coffee shop and scribble out a half-dozen story ideas—descriptive paragraphs, experimental structures, crucial bits of dialogue, whatever comes to mind. I write so fast my hand cramps. I’m buzzing with creative energy. My students made stories seem so rich, elastic, full of infinite variations. Maybe my gears aren’t irreparably jammed. Maybe I only needed to remember how good it feels to create.
After an hour of scribbling, I sit back to survey my work, scanning the pages for anything I might expand into an outline. On second glance, though, these ideas don’t seem quite as fresh or scintillating. They are, in fact, slightly modified versions of my students’ writing samples. A girl who can’t get her mother’s approval no matter how well she does at school. A boy who hates his aloof, taciturn father, until he learns the sort of war trauma that shaped his father’s past. A pair of siblings who travel to Taiwan for the first time and reconnect with their heritage, even though they can’t pronounce anything right and they don’t like the food.
I snap my notebook shut in disgust. Is this all I can manage now? Stealing from fucking children?
It’s fine, I tell myself. Calm down. All that matters is that I’m greasing the gears; I’m getting back into the zone. I’ve sparked a flame that I haven’t felt in a very long time. I have to be patient with myself, to give that flame time and space to grow.
On my way back to the dormitory, I glimpse my students through the window of Mimi’s, one of the many bubble tea cafés near campus. The twelve of them are crowded around a table meant for six; so many chairs pulled up that they each get only a little bit of table space. They seem totally comfortable around one another, hunched over their laptops and notebooks. They’re writing—perhaps working on my homework assignment. I watch as they show one another snippets of work, laughing at funny turns of phrase, nodding appreciatively as they take turns reading out loud.
God, I miss that.
It has been so long since I thought of writing as a communal activity. All the published writers I know are so cagey about their writing schedules, their advances, and their sales numbers. They hate divulging information about their career trajectories, just in case someone else shows them up. They hate even more to share details about their works in progress, terrified that someone will scoop their ideas and publish before they can. It’s a world of difference from my undergraduate days, when Athena and I would crowd around a library table late at night with our classmates, talking over metaphors and character development and plot twists until I couldn’t tell anymore where my stories ended and theirs began.
Perhaps that’s the price of professional success: isolation from jealous peers. Perhaps, once writing becomes a matter of individual advancement, it’s impossible to share with anyone else.
I stand by the window of Mimi’s perhaps longer than I ought to, watching wistfully as my students joke around. One of them—Skylar—glances up and almost sees me, but I duck my head down and stride quickly off toward the dorms.