I was conducting an undergraduate fiction writing workshop and the story before the group had been written by a nineteen-year-old girl in love with the third baseman on our college baseball team.

The story was about a boy on the brink of a wonderful life. It told what a fine, kind person he was, and what a good husband and father he would make after his big-league career, and the beautiful house that he would have in the suburbs, and how it would have a dance studio in the basement, and a room for all three dogs, and another for the nanny, and a kitchen with an old wood stove next to the industrial gas range. Vacation-purchased art, each piece generating a paragraph of memories, would line the living room walls. A trampoline was in the back yard, next to the heated pool. Even the neighbors were nice. Even the grocery-delivery man.

Somewhere in the story was the author, but if you looked for her, you couldn’t find her. It was also full of grammar and spelling mistakes, which you could find.

The baseball player I could recognize from the story had been in one of my English Composition classes, and I remember thinking, when I first read the story, that it was a good thing it was a fiction workshop. He was not a fine young man with a glorious if somewhat conventional future. He wasn’t even a nice person.

The baseball team was known to be hostile to women, to their classes, to their professors. They genitally hazed new team members. They bragged about their sexual conquests, which often as not occurred as date rape. Girlfriends were seen as a threat to team unity. The team exalted in its hyper-masculinity, and so did their coach, who wasn’t a nice person either, probably due to his own unreconciled gender, power, and identity issues.

The team generated a steady stream of broken dreams. Our college resembled a traditional, idyllic, bucolic small liberal-arts school, but beneath the surface, it was a violent place where females, no matter how intelligent, kind, and full of good will, risked being seen as disposable.

 

I had been teaching long enough to recognize my student’s story as a love letter, and love letters are nice things, even when they’re poorly written, even when they’re written to a person who doesn’t exist. I didn’t know if the girl who had written it would ever become a writer, but at least once in her life she had sat down at a keyboard and written two thousand words and not thought about what she was doing while she was doing it. She was proud of her story, and had written it in a rush, in time to get it copied and distributed at last week’s workshop. I was glad to see that she was still happy about it. That meant she hadn’t had her heart broken in the week since she had brought it into being.

I had also been teaching long enough to call undergraduates boys and girls, even though our college maintained the fiction that they were adults. I believed the neurophysiologists that said human frontal lobes don’t fully develop until we’re twenty-five, later if we’re male, and that as a result teachers should treat undergraduates like children to be nurtured rather than as adults to be criticized. I tried to be a nurturer of writers, although I noticed that I could be cruel to a type of workshop student—a good writer—who would form nihilistic cabals with two or three other good writers and make fun of everyone else’s writing.

My cruelty would take the form of high praise for bad writing. “Pay attention to this story,” I’d tell my workshops, once I’d finally located the least cringeworthy paragraph of a piece, “and see how well-realized this, uh, dance studio is. The author is creating a room of her own, a sacred space where the horizon is wide open and full of light. It’s what you have to have to be a writer.”

This sort of comment always infuriated the little cliques of critics, and surprised and delighted the authors of the scorned pieces, who hadn’t realized that they were that talented. Afterward, everyone went back to their keyboards determined to create an even more sacred space for themselves, even if for them the sacred was indistinguishable from a savagely alienating irony.

What I never did was tell an author of a story that the ingredients were all there but the author was still struggling to be born. If my nineteen-year-old student had been older, say, or had suddenly seen her beloved boy as part of a primal horde of incestuous brothers getting ready to kill and ritually devour their father-coach, I would have said: “I hope there’s a woman in this story somewhere. I hope she’s doing double-flips on the trampoline with the grocery-delivery guy, after having sex with him in the pool while the neighbors peeked through slats in the backyard fence. Soon she’s going to cook the grocery guy breakfast on the wood stove in the kitchen, and give him the Barcelona trip’s signed Salvador Dali print as a souvenir of the morning’s surreal erotic interlude. He’ll leave just before her husband gets home from coaching Little League, which is where his baseball career ended up. She’ll tell her husband she wants another wall of mirrors in the dance studio, so she can see herself reflected back and forth to infinity.”

“‘Isn’t one wall of mirrors enough?’ her husband will ask. ‘How many more of yourself do you need to see? Is this what my life is all about? Providing you with mirrors?’”

“The urgency of that question,” I would have told this older, wiser, sadder student, “lies in direct proportion to the author’s absence from the first draft of your story.”

 

Almost every writer has had a moment when the wrong word, a scornful glance, or a sneer could have ended a lifetime’s worth of dreams. I was certain that would happen to the girl who had written the story, but I didn’t want it happening in my workshop.

I pointed out good paragraphs and good words. I praised her story’s detail, its sense of space, its lack of darkness. I did point out the invisibility of a woman in a setting that seemed designed by and for a woman.

Then one of the other students in the workshop looked at the girl and said, “This story is an immature, unrealistic, poorly-written piece of shit. It reads like you wrote it to keep somebody from dumping you. I don’t know why you’re in this class. If I were you, I’d do anything with my life besides trying to write.”

Silence. More silence. Outside of English Department meetings, I’d never witnessed anything as deliberately destructive. The girl who had written the piece teared up, gathered her belongings, and left the room.

 

The perpetrator was a forty-five-year-old non-traditional student, freshly divorced, remarried, and back in college to complete her degree, loudly interested in writing children’s books. Once her victim had left the room, I didn’t think anyone in the workshop was going to benefit from anything I did or said, so I dismissed class and told everyone we’d put off the second story scheduled for that evening until the next week.

“You weren’t just trying to damage her story,” I told the woman. “You were attempting murder.”

I didn’t sleep well that night. I got more and more disgusted with the ugliness I had witnessed. That it had happened on my watch didn’t make it any easier to think about.

I wasn’t thinking in my own best interest when I confronted the woman the next day. “Don’t come to the workshop again,” I told her. “If you won’t drop the class, I’ll have to meet with you one-on-one for an hour a week. But I can’t let you hurt people the way you hurt that girl yesterday.”

That afternoon I was called to the Provost’s office, where I met the woman’s attorney, who also happened to be her new husband. He said the college could either fire me or face a lawsuit.

I had brought along a student witness from the workshop, who confirmed my account of what had happened. The husband-attorney rested his forehead in his hands, and said, “She has a hard time admitting she makes mistakes.” Then he said, “I just want this thing to go away.”

“So do I,” said the Provost. “I’ve got an idea. She can transfer to the poetry workshop. Lots of poets write children’s books.”

It was decided. I still had a job. The college’s lawyer could relax. So could I. But as I was leaving her office, the Provost asked, “Why do these things always happen to you, Professor Rember?”

I could have said that everyone had a shadow side, and that fiction workshops brought it out in people, but that wouldn’t have been helpful. I could have said that I hated bullies, but she would have told me that there were better ways to deal with them. I could have said that people who go back to college in mid-life sometimes envy the youth, optimism, and innocence of nineteen-year-olds and are determined to show them how hard life can be. I could have said that the college was, beneath its placid surface, a violent place. Instead, I suggested that it might be bad luck.

“I’m thinking of buying a rabbit’s foot,” I said.

“Buy one for me while you’re at it,” she said.

 

The good that came out of the incident was that I had a terribly polite, constructive, and helpful fiction workshop for the rest of the semester. I don’t think it produced any better writers than a typically snarky workshop would have, but it was certainly much more pleasant to teach.

The bad made itself evident six weeks later. I had worked late in my office. It was dark, and heavy snow was falling. My car was one of the few left in the college parking lot, and when I walked to it I found that the driver’s side window had been shattered. There had been no witnesses, but at the start of the next school year one of my creative writing advisees said he had run into “that nasty woman” at a party in Boise. She had told him she had finally gotten even with me. Nobody messed with her without paying the price, she said. She had waited until a snowstorm provided cover. She had used a tire iron.

It could have been worse. If breaking a single window had restored justice to that woman’s universe, I considered myself lucky. She could have broken all of them. She could have had a gun.

I had insurance for the broken window, and the local body shop replaced it within a week. When I found out how it had happened, I told the Provost, and she said I would do the college and myself a favor if I forgot all about it. She also said the college had lost two tuitions because of my workshop—neither victim nor perpetrator had returned for the new school year—and I was not to allow that to happen again.

 

I still hate bullies. I still call them cruel, ugly people to their faces. I still ask them to remember the horrible things they’ve done to others. Inevitably, they don’t know what I’m talking about, because it’s in their nature to forget the bad things they’ve done and instead remember the bad things done to them.

Bullies turn all their rage and violence toward anyone who calls attention to their cruelty, which is one of the risks of being truthful around them.

Much of what they do lies below the level of their awareness, and they don’t like it when you remember things for them. That may be true of all of us, bullies or not.

It’s been almost thirty years since that night in the workshop. I’ve forgotten the name of the girl who left my classroom in tears. I’ve forgotten what her third baseman even looked like. I do know that he never replaced Greg Nettles in the Yankees lineup.

I still remember the woman who broke my window. I check the obituaries in the Boise paper for her name. I’d like to know if her marriage lasted, and if she ever wrote her children’s book or published a book of poems. I’d like to think that life punished her for her sins, but I know that life doesn’t work that way, and she may have gone to her grave a nasty woman, one still tormenting people with the pain of her own wounds.

She may be still alive, of course, an animate memorial to the darkness of this world.