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imagination for the stark disappointment of words. This is why we type a line or two and then hit the delete button or crumple up the page. Certainly that was not what I meant to say! That does not represent what I see. Maybe I should try again another time. Maybe the muse has stepped out back for a smoke. Maybe I have writer’s block. Maybe I’m an idiot and was never meant to write at all.
    I had my first real spin with this particular inadequacy when I was a freshman in college. As a child and as a teenager I had wanted to be a poet. I wrote sonnets and sestinas and villanelles, read Eliot and Bishop and Yeats. I entered high school poetry competitions and won them. I would say that a deep, early love of poetry should be mandatory for all writers. A close examination of language did me nothing but good. When I arrived at Sarah Lawrence College as a freshman I submitted my poems and was admitted into Jane Cooper’s poetry class. I was seventeen.
    Jane Cooper was a kind and gentle soul whose poor health was exceedingly bad the year I studied with her. She faded in her own class, which was primarily run by a group of seniors and several graduate students, the best of whom was a woman named Robyn. Robyn drove a Volvo and wore a raccoon coat. She was not only an astute writer, she was the kind of critic who, in a matter of a few thoughtful sentences, could show that the poem up for discussion was a pile of sentimental, disconnected words. I admired Robyn and was terrified of her, and soon I had so assimilated her critical voice that I was able to bring the full weight of her intelligence to bear on my work without her actually needing to be in the room. I could hear her explaining how what I was writing would fail, and so I scratched it out and started over. But I knew she wouldn’t deem my second effort to be any better. Before long I was able to think the sentence, anticipate her critique of it, and decide against it, all without ever uncapping my pen. I called this “editing myself off the page.” My great gush of youthful confidence was constricted to a smaller and smaller passage until finally my writing was down to a trickle, and then a drip. I’m not even sure how I passed the class.
    At the end of that year, I moved my poetry books to the bottom shelf and signed up to study fiction with Allan Gurganus. I thank Robyn for that. I would have arrived at fiction eventually, but without her unwitting encouragement it could have taken me considerably longer.
    Most of what I know about writing I learned from Allan, and it is a testament to my great good luck (heart-stopping, in retrospect, such dumb luck) that it was his classroom I turned up in when I first started to write stories. Bad habits are easy to acquire and excruciating to break. I came to him a blank slate, drained of all the confidence I had brought with me to that first poetry class. I knew I still wanted to be a writer, but now I wasn’t sure what that even meant. I needed someone to tell me how to go forward. The course that Allan set me on was one that has guided my life ever since. It was the course of hard work. But he also managed, and may God bless him forever for this, to make the work appear to be a thing of beauty.
    Allan had what must have been the best office on campus, with a fireplace and French doors leading out onto a garden, which in the spring was full of heavy French tulips and dogwood trees. There were hardback volumes of Chekhov and a framed black-and-white photo of John Cheever. There were drawings Allan had done, postcards from exotic friends in exotic places, a large crazy quilt on the wall made out of satins and velvets. When he walked into a room, we stirred, we leaned towards him. Everybody did. Allan, young, with a handful of well-published stories, was as dazzling to us as Chekhov or Cheever themselves would have been.
    There was an enormous generosity in him. The class, a weekly fiction workshop that