In my junior year, I landed in a creative writing course taught by Doug Winn. I suspect now it was his first teaching job, and he must have been in his mid twenties, reedy, with wavy hair and a bushy mustache. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was\na small class, maybe fifteen students. Winn required us to keep\njournals and often made observations in the margins. He also dictated\na commentary on cassette tape about our writing during the semester.\nSome of Winn\u2019s commentaries were made in public places such as a\nLaundromat, where bizarre characters would occasionally interact with\nhim as he spoke into the recorder. We met Winn\u2019s inaugural\ndistribution of the tapes with utter astonishment\u2014we didn\u2019t know\nthey were coming. At lunch I raced out to my car, plugged the tape\ninto the cassette player, and listened to what my teacher had to say\nabout my writing. I also heard him recommend authors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Winn\ntold me something about my writing\u2019s wry voice and candid sexual\ncontent reminded him of Kurt Vonnegut and that maybe I should check\nthis author out. I did, the very day Winn advised this. I rushed to\nthe school library and found the novel Breakfast of Champions<\/em>,\nthumbed its uncut pages, and noticed some peculiar drawings,\nincluding ones of the American flag and a female\u2019s pubic hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\ndevoured Breakfast of Champions<\/em> and the rest of Vonnegut\u2019s\nnovels. I\u2019d never read anything like them: the voice, satire,\ntime-bending, moral outrage, revisionist history, tone, and the\nbursts of ribald sexuality. Next Winn mentioned Norman Mailer. I\u2019d\nnever heard of him either. I took the bus to Portland to visit for\nthe first time, Powell\u2019s Bookstore, a holy and cavernous literary\nplace Winn suggested I explore. There, I bought The Executioner\u2019s\nSong<\/em>, The Armies of the Night<\/em> and The Fight<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\nArmies of the Night<\/em>, Mailer\u2019s third-person account of his\nchaotic participation in a protest march against the Vietnam War,\ninitiated me into a brave new ego-centric world of personal writing.\nIn this book, I read sentences such as: \u201cHe had in fact learned to\nlive in the sarcophagus of his image\u2014at night, in his sleep, he\nmight dart out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus.\u201d\nImmediately, I began emulating Mailer\u2019s third-person point of view\nwhen writing about Matt Love, now the only subject I deemed worthy of\nmy prose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Winn\nlaunched a literary magazine that year and I got the impression then\nhe might have paid for the press run himself. He kicked off this\nventure in grand style by convincing the police to cooperate with the\nmagazine\u2019s staff to stage a phony automobile accident in front of\nthe school. Thus, we called the magazine Pile Up on 12<\/em>th<\/em><\/sup>\nand Jackson<\/em> and it contained five of my pieces, including a\nnon-fiction story in the style of The Armies of the Night<\/em>\ncalled \u201cLove Among the Little Girls.\u201d No wonder after reading\nthis bombastic piece and another one titled \u201cGirls, Soon to be\nWomen, that I Have Known,\u201d Winn commented on tape: \u201cYou have a\nlittle of this attitude that nobody is smart but me and that kind of\nattitude is not fun to be around. I don\u2019t get a good response that\na reader gets into that kind of attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my\nsenior year, I took an independent study in creative writing with\nWinn. Together, we developed the academic requirements for the course\nand they called for a journal, a book review a week alternating\nbetween fiction and non-fiction, a film review every other week, a\npiece of reportage or an essay a week, character sketches, poems, a\nfilm treatment, and a major short story at the end of the semester.\nWinn also expected me to teach his beginning creative writing class\nfor one period. I doubled all the written requirements and taught for\na week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As\ngraduation loomed, Winn invited a few students over to his ramshackle\nhouse for dinner and cooked us a spaghetti feast while incense burned\nand a jazz record played. That evening, he presented us homemade\ncandles as special writers\u2019 gifts. It felt like we were reenacting\nsome Last Supper rite but absent the impending crucifixion. A few\ndays later, Winn found me at school and handed over my graduation\npresent in a neatly gift-wrapped package. I tore it open right there\nand beheld tattered copies of Henry Miller\u2019s trilogy The Rosy\nCrucifixion<\/em>: Sexus<\/em>, Nexus<\/em> and Plexus<\/em>.\nWithout any sort of preface to Miller, whom I had never heard of,\nWinn told me, \u201cI think you\u2019ll like this guy, now go out and\nbecome a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my junior year, I landed in a creative writing course taught by Doug Winn. I suspect now it was his first teaching job, and he must have been in his mid twenties, reedy, with wavy hair and a bushy mustache. It was a small class, maybe fifteen students. Winn required us to keep journals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,942],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-city","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5892"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5894,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5892\/revisions\/5894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}