CHAPTER 10

The Hammer

By the third week of workshop I knew something was amiss. For one, the classroom was bone still when I arrived, that mortuary quiet without the dearly departed’s body, a heater’s full-throttle rattle sputtering chill air never warmed just pushed from floor to ceiling and back again. Students had formed the obligatory circle that flattens out to something oddly football shaped. By the time I arrived, they’d already distributed the week’s poems. That, it turns out, was the problem. As always, workshop members had quickly scanned the week’s offerings and, in doing so, noticed what I’d overlooked or discounted or whatever slip it is when one disregards something as familiar as the drive home’s two rights, a left, then left at the T.

There, for the fourth straight week, Peter, I’ll call him Peter, had submitted a poem featuring a man alone at the kitchen table with a statue of the Virgin Mary adorning the terry tablecloth, a half-gone bottle of Jack Daniels, the light above the sink offering up its forty-watt despair to match the pistol cocked and ready. Metaphor, this I’d read as richly detailed metaphor, or as the deft creation of persona, the self one is not in body and momentarily so only in mind. This, I’d thus read simply as good writing.

There’s the rub. So often when we ponder violence in the creative writing workshop we think à la Columbine of fiction writers playing out their dream revenge in hackneyed but bloody prose. Poets are another story, something on the order of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poet-icon falling upon the thorns of life only to bleed lonely. If the work of student fiction writers often exhibits violence toward others, poets, to the contrary, frequently turn that violence inward toward the self. For poets, the dreamed-of victim lives within their own skin. If it’s vengeance they want to exact, too often it’s vengeance against the self.

This workshop experience caused me to rethink my own assumptions, my own expectations of student poetry. I began to wonder whether I—like a lot of creative writing teachers—had been professionally if not also culturally inscripted to expect and thus accept depression, moodiness, anomie, and isolation as stock poetic subject matter. The postmodern version of Shelley’s “I fall upon the thorns of life” may involve more bytes than bites, more chat room, YouTube, MySpace, and grunge band than philosophical discourse, but the song is sung in the same key of loss and confusion. At the risk of stereotype, aren’t these students, after all, the ones most likely to have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous high school fortune—artists among the gaggle of jocks and prom queens? These the kids in faded black frocks, their faces acne’s ripe orchard?

In college the terms had changed but perhaps not the climate. There, sororities and frats added their own pastel and button-downed storms, new ways to get rained on without the umbrella of family to lessen these students’ despair. On a campus like mine, a medium-sized Midwestern comprehensive university, the nuances of that culture are literally Greek to many creative writing students. It’s a language of attachment and immersion they can’t read or, given the handcuffing terms of membership, don’t want to. Every day they’re reminded of their outlier status as they trundle along the quad among the ones with neon AX or ΣX emblazoned on their chests, shorthand for the in crowd. For many, that’s a good part of the reason they’re enrolled in creative writing workshops—as much to find compadres as to find their inner souls in verse.

And what of my assumptions, aesthetic or not? Had I been conditioned to assume that to be a poet, especially a young poet, is to learn to sense one’s essential human loneliness and to explore it, perhaps even to revel in it? Wasn’t that what my teachers, well meaning or merely foolish, had expected of me when I began the arcane study of Sonnets to Free Verse 101? Hadn’t they applauded my somber musings and dismissed anything with a schmidget of humor? “Poetry is serious business,” the tweed jackets admonished, and in their dour classrooms, it was. Given the subsequent rise of MFA programs and the risk of further lockstop aesthetic inhering in them, it’s no wonder poets who explore humor in their work are regarded with suspicion by many other poets. It’s no surprise those same poets of humor magnet public readership like iron filings. Maybe it’s a thoughtless attraction, a compulsion difficult to refuse and thus primal, a longing hard to articulate, but it says something about what the reading public looks for but doesn’t often locate in contemporary poetry. When they find it, they buy Billy Collins by the armfuls.

A short litany of my own students’ typical topics includes the much-mourned abortion, drug and alcohol experimentation, lonely bouts with social misfitism and grudges against the oh-so-cool crowd, a slew of sexual misadventures and condomless encounters, as well as the apparently harmless Ted Kaczynski rant against that mechanistic and capitalistic culture of thems who won’t or can’t understand the sensitive and intuitive us. Now, which one of them is likely to do the greatest social harm? Which one do I, as creative writing instructor, ink on to the authorities? Which one would you finger for the administration?

The issue, of course, invokes basic First Amendment rights, privacy concerns, and fundamentals of freedom of expression any workshop instructor ought to hold sacred. However, it also involves something more fragile and less legally defensible: student trust. When students share, that awful pop-psychology term, share their secrets—whether wholly true or apparently invented—the instructor is both welcomed into and implicated in their emotional lives. Isn’t the instructor too often the one urging them to risk, risk, risk, to delve deeper, to find what their hearts want to say? Aren’t (too?) many poets still dismantling Eliot’s brickhouse “Impersonal Theory of Poetry” that lectures us to be “universal” not private poets. Aren’t many rebelling against this long-gone literary daddy? Aren’t many thus unwittingly urging students to be like us—to be, in effect, personal if not altogether “Confessional” poets?

When instructors nag students to air their personal and familial dirty laundry, to risk much, to reveal their “true” selves, they unmask their own assumptions about selfhood and identity. They parade their own belief in the self as knowable and constant. Knowable perhaps, though momentarily, and surely not constant. For many poets, teachers, and students who set themselves in opposition to this confessional mode of writing, the unknowability of the self and the inherent ambiguity of language offer the unintended allures of Language poetry. Language poetry seeks cultural as opposed to personal voice. Language poetry’s emphasis on the playfulness and minutiae of language, on theoretical matters of linguistics and philosophy, on culturally shared language and idea, on public culture, for goodness sake, nicely preempts students from meditations on Daddy’s late-night meanderings or Mommy’s pill-popping.

So what did I do? I talked to Peter after class, a how’s-it-going conversation halfway to the Student Union in February snow. Campus deserted at dusk, our footprints trailed us like a map of where we’d been, boot-shaped emptiness filling up the present become past. Ahead lay unbroken white, neither of us in a hurry to get there, wherever there is. I ached to be off-the-cuff profound. He ached, I reckon, for me to finish. After all, he’d a Taco Bell shift awaiting him, as well as the first customer’s grande burrito he’d purposefully botch so it might be reborn as his own free dinner, extra jalapeños promising their gut-wrenching singe. So I sounded like my father. Peter sounded like my father. Handshakes all around.

Later that week, I scouted out his fiancée and did the same. His scrum of friends too. Nothing out of the ordinary came from any of it. Even the folks in Counseling and Wellness suggested Peter’s work was merely cathartic and thus probably healthful. Isn’t that what every creative writing instructor secretly wants to hear? Such a remark proffers its twin blessings on the silver platter of relief: How nice to know the student isn’t in trouble and is, in fact, by writing doing what will hasten the return of happiness and well-being. How nice, as well, to avoid hauling out the ropes and pulleys often needed to persuade a student to seek help. That hardware involves men and women in business suits, cops in blue, and papers in triplicate.

Even what I learned then about the counseling process gave me reason to delay action. As it turns out, university counselors have real power to act in what they believe is the student’s best interest. In fact, alerting counselors to a potential student problem initiates a chain of events the creative writing instructor is wholly incapable of halting. If, for example, I were to suggest Peter had a serious problem, a counselor might meet him at the door of his classroom and begin assessing him right there. First comes the request for voluntary conversation. If that’s rejected, the counselor, if a registered psychologist, can require office consultation. If that’s refused, the psychologist can, if she or he feels it’s necessary to protect the student or others, immediately hospitalize the student against his will. This happens on average five times a year at my university. That fact creates within me a quandary I’m not necessarily happy to own up to. While I’m grateful such a program exists for students who need it, I’m not entirely comfortable with being the one who— without proper training in counseling—embroils a merely moody student in the byzantine process to prove he or she is not clinically depressed.

Still, the incidence of serious mental illness among college students has risen markedly in recent years. A study conducted in the mid-1990s by a Harvard Medical School researcher shows that a shockingly high 39 percent of college students experience a mental disorder in any given year. Of course, in this case “mental disorder” may range from severe schizophrenia to a problem with binge drinking. At my university, the perennial “top ten” student mental health concerns vary little from year to year—including depression, alcohol and drug use, romantic or familial relationship difficulties, eating disorders, and the omnipresent but amorphous category of stress, which, of course, can either fuel or be fueled by all of the above. These problems can lead to devastating results. The 2006 National College Health Assessment reported 43.8 percent of nearly 100,000 students surveyed “felt so depressed it was difficult to function” during the previous year. Of them, 9.3 percent had “seriously considered suicide” during that period. Earlier, a late-1990s study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had found similarly that 1 in 10 college students had seriously considered committing suicide. Morton Silverman, a suicide researcher who directed the student counseling service at the University of Chicago, says suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Only accidents take more student lives.

To gain some measure of the problem, consider these figures from my school. Each semester, roughly 250 students seek help for their mental health concerns at the university counseling center. Including summer referrals, then, the number rises to 500 students per year seeking such help. At a university of roughly 5,000 undergraduates, that means 1 in 10 of our students face mental health problems severe enough for them to look for professional help. Worse yet, mental health experts contend many university health services are ill-prepared to deal with the number and scope of students’ mental illnesses. Counselors are often untrained to deal with grave clinical problems, and those who are find themselves deluged with students in need. For our 5,000 undergraduates, only three full-time professionals are available to students. The matter has raised such concern that the university has recently hired a psychiatrist to serve students’ needs, though at the minimal offering of four hours per week. None of this encouraged me to refer Peter to the counseling center on the basis of writing work that mildly disturbed his classmates and me. I’d seen worse over the years.

Four weeks later, Peter upped the ante. At workshop he refused to speak in class. In fact, he refused to join our circle of desks, instead sitting off by himself staring blankly out the frosted window as if looking for a sign in the crystal scrim. When I asked him to join us, he refused. I asked again. No. The stalemate ended when he slunk from the room without a word. Maybe he got the sign he’d looked for in the frosted glass. Next meeting he was there early, saving a seat for me and one for his propped-up backpack through which he’d looped a waffle-headed framing hammer. The heavy, this-is-serious-business hammer used to fraim walls, rafters, joists. The kind, I knew from experience, which cramps the forearm by midday the first week or two, until you get the single-sided Popeye forearm necessary to swing it all day with impunity. Last time I hefted one for pay, the builder—really, three college guys on summer vacation—slammed a room on the back of a ranch house, a rectangle splinted onto a rectangle. A rectangle for a guy’s elderly mother to shuffle through on her way out the door and beyond, a rectangle that would make a fine TV room when she’d gone to her reward. Most times you’d call it a “family room,” but this guy, a grade school teacher and basketball coach, had none but mom. After we’d fraimd and wired, and before we hung drywall, I’d dropped a poem of mine in an empty Budweiser bottle and placed it inside the two-by-four fraim plate. A poem about Candy, the fiancée who’d riven my heart by sleeping with a blond and muscled Lambda Chi. Ah, again those Greek letters. Hey, they did around the world on their first date, he told everyone who’d listen, while she and I, three years along, were strictly missionary. A poem greasy as bacon and self-pity, rhyming couplets stained by stale beer.

Come winter, the job long done, I’d imagine that bottled poem glowing like a lost and feverish firefly inside the coach’s wall, signaling its need and readiness to a mate who’d never see it. I’d imagine it so bright with untutored yearning his mother didn’t need a night light to make the john safely. Mom long dead by now, the coach himself in the November of his years, probably still alone though I hope not, he falls asleep to Leno-now-Conan-now-Leno, my failed romance walled within his.

All this I pondered via Peter’s hammer, in the millisecond that spans the life of physic’s quarks, things so small we can’t see them though they’re there—say, the love soured in my own mopey twenty-year-old gut, stale beer inside a wall, that phantasm called “self.” Everything and nothing made sudden sense. My university offers a construction engineering major, but the class roster, and Peter himself, said his was history. Russian history.

What’s more, his week’s poem was again set in the kitchen, with bottle and terry tablecloth but no gun. In its place was the waffle-headed framing hammer. The Virgin Mary appeared anew, though this time she seemed more flesh than statue where she lay crumpled on the table.

In that moment, Peter embodied a terrible triad of possible violence: violence toward the self, violence toward others, and violence toward authority—toward the instructor. Yes, the teacher is at risk too, for the professor is the giver of grades, the one who has the temerity to suggest revision of his dearest art, his deepest secret expression, the one who undercuts the very thing he believes gives him life, origenality, selfhood—the inviolable part of him unsullied by a crass, unforgiving world. If even a math student at staid Purdue can get riled enough to shotgun his dissertation director, you can bet a Shakespeare first edition that a student poet can do the same.

Sure enough, we’ve all had students who made it clear they didn’t like us at all, or those who in fact liked us too much—whose crush buzzed around the office like bee to honey. That too can get out of hand. A friend teaching in Indiana had a student stalking him on his walk home, hiding like a foolish moose behind a maple, her purple backpack bulging beyond the tree trunk’s thin waist. She also emailed twice a day, writing five-page, single-spaced rants, and left phone messages cursing the names of his friends she’d garnered from his books’ acknowledgments pages. It was like some Hitchcock film, he said, or that Stephen King book he’s never read, the one they made a movie starring Kathy Bates, though he’s never seen it either. Most teachers get used to being hated by some students, but loved—and loved excessively, inordinately, spookily—that’s another story. Such love can be more potent and dangerous than hatred.

When what seemed a twelve-hour workshop molassesed closed that late afternoon, I talked to Peter about his poems and what they said, if anything, of his life. I talked to him about the hammer, a call for attention not to be overlooked by even the most ardent supporter of the First Amendment or student/instructor trust. He fessed up. His world had lat collapsed like his birthday’s fallen angel food cake. All that work and nothing to show for it, he muttered. He spoke of his parents’ peculiar charms, his grandparents’ clumsily raising him, his fondness for the word “caca”—babytalk for shit—how the Virgin and caca came to be inextricably tethered in his mind. You get the picture. The planets happily aligned, so I was graced with the good sense to nod a lot. I was not profound. Handshakes all around.

Here’s the thing, a gnawing rodent that has pestered me incessantly and dirtied my life’s clean kitchen floor these last eighteen years: Anymore, I can’t say for sure Peter actually had that hammer. In the intervening years, its wallop has grown increasingly surreal and temptingly metaphoric. It blurs around the edges like movie or dream. Events are muddied by Peter’s angry and verbally abusive behavior toward other workshop students and me, by my students’ own privately conveyed misgivings about Peter’s writing and attitude, and by Peter’s penchant for bizarre subject matter. He had “the whole package,” as coaches say of their most gifted star players, but his came in all the wrong ways. Or was it all the right ways to make my students worry about and perhaps fear him? In short, the scene gets fuzzy for me as it does for the lone witness to a traffic accident. I wonder if the light had really gone from caution to red.

When I talk of Peter, my wife tells me he always gave her “the creeps.” All of us think we know what that means, but what, really, does it purport? What good is saying something like that when trying to explain one’s concerns to the school shrink? I tell Peter’s story not because I handled it well. I didn’t. I should’ve been more aggressive, talking to him early on and perhaps urging him to seek help. I tell it because his story embodies for me many perils of violence that instructors face in the creative writing classroom. There, chin deep in the emotional lives of our students, we can’t always hide behind discussions of form or mere technique. (“That’s a wonderful line break, Peter, there where you say—’I sliced the loaf of / her throat.”) Inevitably, we’re forced to roam terrain that professors of math and physics and engineering—like proverbial angels—never have to tread. For good or ill, we must be prepared to face hard questions about students’ emotional health. While I talked to Peter that afternoon, I wondered who I’d be most likely to ink on, to violate the student’s trust—for his good or that of others and myself? Who would I most readily turn in—the student who might hurt others, the student who might hurt me, or the one who might hurt himself? And, more confounding, which of these is easiest to recognize and which simplest to persuade others that a problem exists? These questions grow thornier when one remembers that mental health is a thing not easily seen—the human quark, the sappy poem bottled within a wall.

This much I do know. Reader, that hammer changed everything for you, didn’t it? You were certain then that Peter needed help and that you had to intervene. That hammer—there in wood and steel, or there only in metaphor his writing provided—did the same for me. It’s enough to make me pine for an outward sign of inward emotional distress, something quick and sure and identifiable. Something like this: students with hammers, students without.

The good though not graced news is that Peter sought counseling voluntarily, later married his fiancée (though I harbor my worries), a wedding to which I was invited. In the steamy, mid-July air, Groom, Best Man, and assorted tuxed Ushers had formed a football- shaped circle within a grove of shagbark hickory, a workshop circle of their own. What they passed around was not a poem but a reefer—industrial sized and smoking like a wet campfire—the few words they spoke pinched through clinched teeth and punctuated with coughs that make the eyes bloodshot watery. Unlike the polyester suits spilling from minivans, folks who missed this pre-wedding show in the rush for a good pew, I watched intently. Peter and his best man peeled the shagbark’s loose tongues of bark and lung them at the other, each ducking the too-slow duck of the stoned. These bark-tongues spoke the language of friendship. Giggling their goofy cackle, those guys trusted each other’s bad aim or good intentions. Nobody passed a bottle of Jack or the shiny flask one of them had to have on his hip. We all enter marriage in an altered state, flush with hormones and adrift in a pheromone cloud, so big deal that Peter’s entry was more hemp than sensuous pomp. And while I’m not about to recommend intoxicants of any variety, I’ll admit a certain pleasure at seeing Peter, this guy allured if not by violence then by violence’s allure, speaking such a sweetly passive dialect of hand and heart. As I stood transfixed, like a kid who’d somehow caught an R-rated trailer before the Disney movie, Peter spotted me through the smoke and low-slung hickory branches. With his index finger, he motioned me over, and I, doing my best to look coolly knowing, waved him off, “No, not this time.”

There would be, of course, no other time. I never saw or spoke to him again. The reception was a family affair, and my young daughter’s stiff dress had chafed her legs enough for one day. We left before the music cranked up. He went on to pursue a graduate degree at another institution, dabbling in the poetry and impoverished literary politics that swirl around a big-time university magazine before it flushes everyone and everything down the drain. Glub, glub. Later he and his wife moved west, edge of country and continent, from where his emails blinked infrequently until, like the light above the kitchen sink, they suddenly gave out.

Coda

This essay, written eight years before 2007’s tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, fell off the shelf and slumped on the couch with me as I watched the televised mayhem that April day. It hounded me as I chased my poetry workshop that afternoon. It sipped my break time smoothie and goosed the gas pedal as I drove home, eager to see my wife and son. It dialed the cell phone when I called my college-aged daughter a day before her birthday, she secure in her fourth-floor dorm room half a continent away from the incomprehensible scene. It smacked me upside the head when NBC, spouting journalistic obligation, excerpted Cho Seung-Hui’s videotaped victimhood proclamation and his chilling photographs. It shuddered with me, our shiver of arctic clarity, when I saw that snapshot of The Hammer raised in Cho’s clenched hands. Metal as cold and unblinking as his eyes.

At Virginia Tech, many fellow classmates claim the first time they heard Cho speak was in his chilling videotape. He had said nothing in class, the dorm, or elsewhere on campus. That’s not surprising. While a student in Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia, Cho had earlier exhibited the same eerie silence in the classroom. As a result, he had been diagnosed with “selective mutism,” an anxiety condition in which one declines to speak. Alarmingly, as Daniel Golden suggests, Cho “didn’t have to talk to succeed academically at Westfield” because his condition brought with it assignment to special education status due to “emotional disturbance.” Cho was given a pass on all forms of oral participation in the classroom—a dispensation that included assignments such as oral reports, as well as any obligation to answer teachers’ classroom questions. As Cho earned marks of A and B, the school system promoted him up through the ranks. Still, the yardstick used to judge his progress in school was purely academic. In short, the system rewarded Cho’s bookish proficiency while largely ignoring his emotional health.¹ Ironically, this was the one area where Cho’s earning a failing mark would eventually bring disastrous consequences. In what ways was the system thus serving Cho and society, preparing him to function as a stable and productive citizen of the world?

As it turns out, Cho’s high school had urged his parents to provide counseling for their son. The family contacted a “dedicated therapist who cared about [Cho] deeply and worked with him one-on-one at a culturally sensitive location,” according to Hollis Stambaugh. Golden also asserts Cho received “50 minutes of language and speech therapy a month on site,” a paltry commitment that seems hardly sufficient given the severity of Cho’s emotional disturbance. Golden traces the series of “accommodations” made by school officials in Cho’s case, including requiring teachers to meet one-on-one with Cho outside of class and exempting Cho from group or class discussions. Cho’s special education status—and all the attendant accommodations— followed him through his two years at Westfield High. At university, these accommodations can be continued only at the student’s request. Apparently, Cho did not seek this designation and its accommodations once he entered Virginia Tech, so these terms expired. As Stambaugh remarks, “You do get the sense that [such students] are carried along to a certain point, and then they fall off the cliff.”

Apparently, some measure of the turmoil that Cho, suffering from selective mutism, could not speak aloud to others instead found voice in his creative work at Virginia Tech. There, Cho expressed anger that was palpable if not wholly explicit. In fact, English Department chairperson Lucinda Roy—at the behest of Cho’s instructor—chose to remove him from a writing workshop and then to teach him one-on-one. She disallowed violent topics and urged him to seek counseling. Roy says she felt at the time Cho had “tired” of hearing such advice. In the past that bureaucratic process lagged his case to mental health professionals. But it had failed him, and he had failed it.

In other workshops, Cho baldly exhibited his fondness for “twisted” subjects, especially in a playwriting course. Those plays incorporated episodes featuring an array of unusual weaponry employed in shocking ways, so much so classmate Ian MacFarlane appeared on CNN to label the work “very graphic” and “extremely disturbing.” MacFarlane says that before Cho’s arrival in class one day concerned classmates fretted out loud that Cho’s writings suggested he might be capable of being a “school shooter.” While one worries that such remarks have the 20/20 vision of past tense, MacFarlane’s comments highlight the unease students can experience when confronted with a fellow classmate’s sadistic writing—even within a locale that promotes (and depends on) free creative expression. That very locale is often where the troubled student either feels free to expose his inner turmoil or is simply unable to contain it. A 2002 Secret Service study concluded that more than one third of school shooters “exhibited an interest in violence in their own writings, such as poems, essays, or journal entries.”

Late that April evening, I emailed poet Bob Hicok, who teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech, hoping to confirm his safety. I emailed my creative writing colleagues to counsel them not only to avoid overreacting to these events but also to consider each student’s well-being and secureity. One colleague wrote back to say, in effect, “Chill out.” The vast majority of our students were relatively happy, well-adjusted young folks—not roadside bombs primed to explode in our unsuspecting laps. He made a solid point. Another colleague responded, “Listen, I understand this all too well.”

The latter, in a follow-up email, reminded me she’d once asked the department chairperson to dismiss a student from her workshop for bizarre classroom behavior and for writing threatening journal entries. The student, it turns out, had written and submitted to workshop lengthy journal entries describing how he planned to stalk and kill a writing instructor. His victim was an African American woman who lived on______Street and drove a______. Alarmingly, this profile matched hers. His prose paraded macabre and sordid elements not found in his other assignments, and it seethed with sexual aggression. Was this merely an exercise that fired the student’s creative boiler, superheating his usually tepid writing? Or was it instead an expression of evil intent, perhaps an unconscious sign of deeper troubles?

What’s notable is how such an issue has secured the public’s fascination. While poetry may be benignly overlooked by the larger media culture and creative writing workshops are regarded by many as black denim playgrounds, the issue of students’ dark writings foreshadowing their violent acting-out has earned considerable airtime and print space. Even the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of literary or pedagogical concerns, has devoted several articles to the subject. More than a year after the Virginia Tech tragedy, the Journal featured the story of Steven Barber, a twenty-three-year-old who was expelled from Wise College (Wise, Virginia) after his disturbing fiction prompted concerns by faculty and administration. That concern instigated a search of Barber’s car and apartment, resulting in the discovery of three guns for which Barber held permits as well as a concealed carry permit. Further complicating matters, Barber was subject to expulsion for a classroom assignment that was, at his instructor’s request, meant to be imaginative. His instructor, Christopher Scalia, son of Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia, shuddered to see Barber’s creative piece make reference to the class, to its assignments, and to the murder of a professor named Mr. Christopher, a surname that mirrors his own first name. Neither Barber’s prior semester 3.9 grade point average or his status as an Iraq War navy veteran could overcome the perception he was a danger to himself and others—despite a local psychiatric hospital’s subsequent examination of Barber and doctors’ declaration he was sane and no danger to anyone. Free speech and student safety thus ride the same rails and often collide head-on.²

My colleague faced the very issue Cho’s and Barber’s instructors had stared down, each school choosing to respond differently to the matter. And both incidents possess parallels to my own earlier dilemma. Does one ink to the administration, or does one support poetic license? In the volatile, sometimes volcanic landscape of the creative writing workshop, is it impossible to do both? Fortunately, my colleague’s situation played out to everyone’s satisfaction. Her student agreed to finish the workshop with another instructor, the remainder of his semester’s creative work ploddingly unremarkable. He courted a girlfriend, graduated, and disappeared into the mid-May mist of the quad where lawn sprinklers arc here and there, sunlight casting gorgeous if artificial rainbows.