“What would have been possible if I didn’t have to flounder and fight?” A lesson in perseverance that challenges the myth that artists, and specifically writers, must suffer in isolation…
by: Charlotte Gullick
Trigger Warning: This story contains a reference to suicide that may trigger some readers.
I sat across from her in the office, nervous because she was new to campus but also excited because I’d worked hard on the section of my book she now held in her hands. She had strikingly brown, almost black, hair that contrasted powerfully with her blue eyes. This was my thesis advisor. I was one of the few students she was assigned during her initial semester. I’d struggled during my first year of studying creative writing as a graduate student, barely completing assignments, not giving my all because I was uncertain if my kind of stories were welcome in this environment. Before she came, I’d made little headway with the novel I’d begun as an undergraduate. This was our first meeting about my writing, and I studied the books on the shelves behind her — all those stories deemed worthy to be printed — lined up together in both judgment and inspiration.
She opened the manilla folder holding my work, informed by my hours of labor and courage and my ineptitude as a beginning novelist. She cleared her throat. “You can’t write in this way.” Her manicured fingers turned the first page and indicated a spot at the bottom of the second. It was a place where the character slid into the point of view of her father, even though she wasn’t with him. “Justine cannot know what is happening when she isn’t in the scene.”
But my main character was so wired into the experience of her parents and knew what the mother felt while in church, what the father longed for while at the bar. I knew these things because they were also my experience. I knew because I was hyper aware of my parents’ actions and worries. I was trying to fictionalize this, to make it clear that sometimes parents ask too much of their children, even though that might not be what they intend.
I was writing auto fiction — about class, race, and rural living — and I was fighting for space on the page and in my own mind. I was blunt and unskilled, but that’s okay, because that’s how it goes when we’re starting out, though I didn’t know it then. That fight came at a premium that I am only now starting to unpack.
I didn’t know how to respond when she told me from her esteemed position that I couldn’t do what I needed so badly to to do. I stopped writing. I floundered. I felt that my family stories didn’t matter. Perhaps the best word to describe this time is uncertainty; a rudderless movement through the world. A time when story was a harmful distance out of reach.
I am a first-generation college student from a town of two hundred where the natural world is present in almost every breath. Less than one hundred thousand people live in Mendocino County, a place known for its redwoods, its rugged coast, and its marijuana farming. We lived seven miles away from the post office and general store on property where my parents were the caretakers. My father wore many hats: cowboy, garbage man, timber faller. My mother didn’t graduate high school because of the 1964 flood and worked line cook jobs while she and my father tried to raise five children. Her lifeline to Jehovah was central in her life, but not mine.
I didn’t know how to navigate the higher education landscape as an undergraduate, and I knew even less about graduate school. After getting my bachelor’s, through good fortune and the support of a key faculty member, my name was given to a director at a University of California school, and this director called to request that I apply. I did, still unclear on what I was applying for. When he called two months later to say, “You’re our first round draft choice,” I was thrilled, flabbergasted, in disbelief. I said, “Thank you so much for having me,” when, if they called now, I would say, “Great, what does my funding look like?”
Once at graduate school, I continued developing a novel that I’d started in the key faculty member’s class. He was also a first-generation student, from a highly rural background, who came from a Mixed-race Native history and was a writer. His encouragement was pivotal not just in my writing, but in my completing an undergraduate degree. I doubt I would’ve finished without his faith and guidance, without the mirror he provided.
When I was told “you can’t write this book,” I spent time with friends in San Francisco, endangering my life by drinking too much, trying to find unlikely quality connections in nightclubs. I spent too much time on the back of other people’s motorcycles, slightly buzzed and not knowing the way forward. During the spring of 1996, my classmates finished their theses, collections of short stories, or novels, and I took an extension.
Despite my floundering — or maybe because of it — the writing program director asked me to volunteer for a writers’ conference the university held in conjunction with The Community of Writers, called Art of the Wild, held at ski resort in the Sierra Nevadas. It brought together authors whose work existed at the intersection of nature, wilderness, and the environment. I worked for the conference, welcoming participants, making copies, moving chairs, and I had precious time with the key faculty member who had nominated me for a Dean’s Award for my undergraduate creative thesis. At one lunch, I sat with him and other — to me — heavy hitting writers: Luci Tapahonso, James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who treated me with kindness and a sense of faith or capability that is hard to name. The key faculty member gave a lecture on persistence and being an outsider in the dominant publishing world. While he spoke, I remembered what was so central to his teaching; compassion and rigor — heart-centered insight that made him so popular as an instructor.
On the final night, as the mountains grew more deeply into shadow, he, a fellow student, and I walked toward the parking lot and he hugged us goodbye; we had both worked with him as undergrads. When he was fifty feet away, he called into the night, “I am so proud of you.” His voice, strong and happy, hung in the air, and settled on my shoulders like the lightest of shawls, something to warm me when graduate school felt so cold and welcoming.
Words that helped me to return to the page.
My graduate thesis advisor’s words cost me something that I am still trying to identify. Time, of course, and faith, that effable quality that can define our lives, whether we are writers or not.
When my first novel was published five years later, one review said, “What sets this first novel apart from the others is the risks it takes with point of view.”
This is the point in the story where many would read my persistence as some indication of my character, of my grit, of my resilience — of pulling myself up by those very tired, clichéd boot straps. Of course, those things do play a part in the eventual completion of my master’s thesis and my ability to graduate, six months after the rest of my class, but what would have been possible if I didn’t have to flounder and fight? What are the costs of having to fight for space, for validation in an institution that says it is there to support you, but in reality, makes you struggle and sometimes even suffer? I think about that key faculty member and the costs he must’ve paid in pursuit of his PhD, of striving for tenure.
For over fifteen years, I have taught at the community college level, with thirteen of those years as Department Chair of Creative Writing at Austin Community College. In this role, I worked to help undo the myth that writers accomplish their goals alone both in creative writing and composition classes. The idea that artists, and specifically, writers, must suffer in isolation seems to permeate the core beliefs of most students’ understanding of what it means to write, whether it’s a poem, a novel, a story, or an expository essay. In the end, I learned, as I tried to help undo this fable, that the story of what it means to be a writer — or a “successful” American — is not just harmful, but is also an instance of bad storytelling. A good story has more nuance, more complexity and finesse that the one we are fed about success in the United States. The simple narrative does damage, and all of us deserve more.
Most students, as they mature in their understanding of how craft is built through practice, study, and supportive feedback, grow to accept that being a writer, creative or not, means connecting to community, it means that discipline is more important than talent, that being a writer is a humble activity, rooted in a quest for understanding of self and the world. In teaching craft and undoing the myth of a tortured artist, I aim to mitigate the damage caused by the go-it-alone narrative. Perhaps I am also trying to suggest there is more than one way to tell a compelling story.
I don’t think about my first graduate experience that often, for a variety of reasons, with the primary being that it feels so ugly. It sits inside of me with a pulsing energy that only intensifies when I let my mind linger on the experience in general, and that moment specifically. There’s a visceral tang that floods my mouth, metallic tinged.
After graduate school, I was lucky enough to get to know that key faculty member’s family. I house sat for him one summer while they traveled. I stayed on a couple of nights after they returned from their vacation. I sat with his wife and two teens for dinners, I had morning coffee with him, sitting outside on his porch in the New Mexico mountains. We talked about our writing, how it had to be something that brought us joy, a sense of satisfaction, and how hard that task was. He was pensive, tinged with bitterness about his fight for support in his department. In between our comments, he pointed out the different birds that came to the bird feeder ten feet away: Dark-eyed juncos, mountain chickadees, Western tanager. At one point, a red tail flew into the nook where we sat, right over my head.
I left his home, off to my next adventure in Southern Colorado.
Five years later, he took his own life. I cannot know all the factors that informed his decision to stop fighting to create space for himself, but I definitely wonder about the walls that had been placed in front of him that contributed to his death.
He was resilient and persistent and creative and kind and the best teacher I ever had. And yet, he isn’t here any longer. When I think about his death, there’s a visceral tang that floods my mouth, metallic tinged.
If we could travel back in time, we could guide that graduate thesis advisor to approach my work with more tenderness and curiosity. She could’ve said, why is breaking point of view important to you? It’s not working yet but why is it significant?
But she did not. I’ll never know her reasons, her logic, her biases. I can guess that she, like many university faculty, ascribed to the idea that part of the function of graduate school is to weed people out who don’t belong, rather than lift up and support those who come from outside the dominant culture. Whether she was trying to gently teach me about writing craft or about the rules of success — that remains unclear. In the end, it is only the second lesson that, with a lot of time, finally emerged from the exchange. While rejection is certainly part of the writing life — if one aims for publication — her words were more than rejection, they were a full stop even after I finished my thesis.
The narrative of persistence and self-determination is ultimately an inaccurate one. And it damages people, both those who “make it” and those who do not. Of course, challenge is part of the way we grow, how we stretch and surprise ourselves. When a door opens because of our dedication and focus, so much is possible.
But when it stays locked, it becomes a wall, a barrier, that keeps too many out.
I write regularly now, carving out time so that I connect to the world through language and image, endeavoring to name my experiences so that I might better understand them. It is a door I need to step through, a threshold that holds deep meaning and importance for me. When I do, I lessen that sour taste in my mouth. I step back into the story of my own life.
Charlotte Gullick grew up in Mendocino County and is a novelist, essayist, and educator. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Best of Brevity, Pembroke, Dogwood, and the Rumpus. She is also the co-author of the book Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process.
