I have had occasion this morning to think about the creative writing “teacher” (my community college days were few but wild, y’all) who hated everything I attempted because–and he literally said this in class as well as wrote variations on returned assignments–he believed Jim Harrison was the perfect writer, that everyone should write just like Jim Harrison, and anyone who didn’t write like Jim Harrison was wrong, evil, and deserved endless mockery so that they never wrote again.
Lest this sound like hyperbole, rest assured I am actually underplaying the bizarre nature of this man’s…beliefs? I suppose is the word?
Harrison was no doubt a reasonable human being and a serious writer; I am certain he was completely unaware he had such a stan. This was relatively pre-internet–AOL chatrooms were just getting started, and I don’t think this particular “teacher” was on IRC either. (At least, gods have mercy, I hope he wasn’t.) I am fairly certain Mr Creative Writing “Teacher” wrote snail-mail love letters to Harrison though, and with the clarity of time have come to realize he was probably banging his very young (she and I were both in Running Start, albeit from different high schools) quasi-TA and star student as well.
All in all, that man probably damaged hundreds of nascent and emerging writers. A real prize.
In those days I was more concerned about the evangelical nutcase in the political science class whose entire raison d’être was trying to shout down the poor professor, who had escaped Communist Bulgaria in a literal potato truck and was clearly doing his best to keep a shiny vision of America as the land of opportunity while dealing with a loud mustachio’d Limbaugh-dittohead bigot. As I’ve gone onward in my life, though, sometimes I think about Jim Harrison’s Biggest Fan, teaching a 101 Creative Writing course and being That Fucking Guy before the internet arrived to give that variety of dickbag an even bigger platform.
Fun times, fun times. No wonder I’m an autodidact.
I rented Legends of the Fall at Blockbuster (and that piece of information dates me, yes indeed) that quarter because everyone was gaga over Brad Pitt but I was a diehard Aidan Quinn fan, and also because I was curious about who this goddamn Jim Harrison actually was. I ended up checking the book out at the library as well, along with Dalva, and neither made much an impression. I thought Larry McMurtry and Leslie Marmon Silko did everything better, and even somewhat enjoyed suggesting that Mr Writing “Teacher” perhaps read Ceremony, which I’d done a few papers on in high school.
I already had one foot out the door by that point, and was practicing a brand of “helpful” shitposting (as well as my own variety of malicious compliance) long before the internet. My very last act in that class was to write a satire of Tristan and Susannah from Legends boning desperately in a barn, based on a piece of anthology erotica I’d read a short while before, which involved Casablanca, cold cream, and Rick doing some very ungentlemanly but no doubt fulfilling things to Ilsa while searchlights pierced the sky.
Now, I cannot tell you with certainty what the “teacher” thought of my swan song, because I never went back to pick up the graded hardcopy. But I like to think that he realized what I was lampooning.
Got an F on that course, but the satisfaction lingers. And every once in a while I think about that “teacher”, and how he would just simply hate that by pure spite and endurance I have a career actually being published, which he never managed. (Yes, I checked a few years ago. Because sometimes I am that petty.) Of course he’d sniff that I’m just a hack doing filthy genre things, not a Big Literary Writer like his holy Saint Harrison. But the money has fed my kids as well as no few dogs and cats, and also paid the bills for a while now.
I’m sure that “teacher” never thought of me at all afterward, while I still have no desire to ever pick up another Harrison book. (It’s not the author’s fault.) And my view of writing classes/courses as well as critique groups never recovered from that early experience.
I do hope that political science teacher made it, though.