from John Rowell

MAX STEELE/AWP Presentation

John Rowell

Max Steele was my first creative writing teacher, at the University of North Carolina.  You had to submit a story to be considered for his workshop, and so I wrote one.  Clearly guided by the old principle of “write what you know,” I, a nineteen-year-old, white, middle-class North Carolina boy who had never much been out of the home state, fired off a lengthy tale about a seventy-year-old African-American jazz singer in Harlem dying of tuberculosis and alcoholism who was trying to hold it together to play one last gig in a seedy nightclub. I gave him lines of dialogue that incorporated, for no apparent reason, scat singing phrases, so that he would say things like, “Doctor, I know I’m dying, shudalee be bop, shu bop, shu bop.”   I was very excited about how edgy and adult I felt my story was, and I knew Professor Max Steele, whose creative writing class, I had been told, was the class that all serious writers were dying to get into, would feel the same way when he read it.   So I typed it up and took it to his office, thinking I would just drop it in an envelope outside the door, but the door was open and he was there.  My first impression of Max, white-haired and sitting hunched in his office chair, was that he was grandfatherly—which seemed comforting—and he took my story and looked it over in silence while I stood waiting in the doorframe.  After a minute or two, still staring at my pages and not looking at me, he said, “Why do you want to be a writer, John Rowell?”   Now my impression was that he was not kindly and grandfather-like, but gruff and stern and critical.  I had absolutely no good answer to his question; I simply stood frozen in the doorframe.  “I just…wanted to be in your class,” I said, finally.

“Come back tomorrow after I’ve read your story,” he said.

The next day I showed up to his office; again there was the open door, again he sat hunched in his chair, reading.  He turned in my direction, and said, “Yes, yes. Come in.  Now which story was yours?” He began shuffling through a mountain of white, type-written pages on his desk.  Those pages, I understood, represented the work of all the other students who were trying to get into the class, though I was quite sure none of them had written a story as bold or as edgy as mine.

“It’s about a black singer?  Who’s dying?”  I said.

“Oh, yes, that one,” he said. “I did read that.  It was terrible, it was just terrible.”  

Once again, I stood frozen in his doorframe, paralyzed by something he had said, to which I had no idea how to respond.  And I don’t need to tell you all how I felt because almost all of you have been there—it was, essentially, my first writer’s rejection notice.  And after letting me shuffle from foot to foot, embarrassed, humiliated, with what I’m sure was a red face and injured eyes—there was a most momentous silence—he fixed me with his wise, squinting eyes and said, “But I let you into the class anyway.” 

And so Max proved to be both grandfatherly and gruff, which is a pretty great combination in a writing teacher, especially your first one.  Max taught us how to read a story with the writer’s eye, he taught us how to speak and write critically about a work of fiction; he taught us workshop dictums like “Don’t ever ask a fiction writer if his story is autobiographical.”  And he was not afraid to tell you—in front of the entire workshop—that what you had written “was not a story.”  I heard that about my own work several times, and rightly so.  He made me realize that you could fill pages with descriptions of places and things, you could create fascinating people and set them to talking, you could even have them saying interesting things to one another, but if you hadn’t told a story, if you hadn’t found the story in all those words, it wasn’t worth your time, or his, or anybody else’s.  And he was right, yet how hard that seemingly obvious concept was to grasp.

 One day, towards the end of the semester Max pulled me aside after class and pointed out that in every story I had written that fall, there was an absent father character. I stared at him blankly, the same way I had stared at him when he had asked me a few months earlier why I wanted to be a writer. 

This time I didn’t just stand there in silence, though, I had a real genuine verbal response.   I said, “Uh…”. 

He proceeded to tell me that the reason I was writing absent father stories was because what I really wanted to write was not an absent father story at all, but a story about a boy whose father was very much in the picture, whatever that turned out to mean, and that I was too afraid to write it.  He said I was avoiding writing that story by always having the father character be absent.  At the time, I didn’t really understand what he was talking about—why would I be afraid to write a story about a boy and his father?—but  for years afterwards, I remembered his words, every time I sat down to write. 

I wrote many more absent father stories.

Finally, one day, I wrote a story about a boy and his father—it was painful to do, and it was a sad story, but it was a breakthrough, and I knew it.  My first instinct was to send it to Max, to ask him if I had finally written what he had told me I had avoided writing for so long.  But I didn’t; I doubted he would remember telling me that, anyway, and I had not really kept in touch with him, despite how much I still felt his presence and heard his words every time I tried to get a piece of writing to turn out all right—to make sure it was something he would not look at and say, “But it’s not a story.”  . 

When my short story collection came out, my publisher sent me down to Chapel Hill to do a reading.  The student bookstore happened to be right across from the building where I had first met Max, and where we had had workshop that year.  The book store, incidentally, was the place where I had once stood in line to purchase text books as a frightened and homesick eighteen-year-old freshman, and now I was standing there as someone who had a book of his own.  It was one of those experiences where you can’t quite bridge the gap of time, events and your own personal history in your mind; here I was standing in front of a large poster of my book jacket, about to give a reading for an audience, and a few yards across the way, I was still nineteen years old and still standing in the doorframe of Max Steele’s office trying to come up with an answer to his question of why I wanted to be a writer.  Maybe the answer was still the one I gave to him that day twenty years before:  “I just wanted to be in your class.”

Now of course I had invited Max to my reading, but hadn’t heard back from him, and I had been told by friends in the area that he probably wouldn’t come, and not to take it personally, that he almost never went to readings, not even those of former students.  But just as I was about to be introduced, I looked up and saw him walking in through the door, slowly.  He looked a bit older than he had all those years ago, and he was using a cane, but it was Max, and he was there.  So I read my story about the father and son, which was the title story of the collection, and out of the corner of my eye I could see and hear Max in the second row, listening, making an occasional odd utterance and laughing from time to time.

After the reading, he made his way up to me, a copy of the book I had sent him in his hand.

“Well, John Rowell,” he said, in those same gruff and grandfatherly tones I had first heard twenty years earlier.  And at that moment I was so afraid—still the student, always still the student—that he was going to ask me why I wanted to be a writer.  “Well, John Rowell.  You did it. It’s a story.  But it’s not your best story.  There’s another one, about a boy and his mother…”

Thank you, Max; I still just want to be in your class.