Writing About Lives

Last night my good friend Rowena and I completed our Columbian journey together. Sure, we have a few more readings, to turn in our theses projects and to eventually graduate, but the hard part – the course work, the committees, are done.

She arrived to New York from New Orleans where all her things were in storage at a friend’s place. A few weeks later Hurricane Katrina destroyed almost every remnant from her childhood except for a box of journals. We were in our first nonfiction workshop together and decided to go hear Toni Morrison read in New York at a Katrina awareness event. As we had breakfast we compared notes on our lives we kept saying “You too? Me too?”

Mystics would say we have a similar soul history and yet we couldn’t be more different.

I’m black. She’s Pinay. (You’ll have to look that one up.)

We both have mental illness in our immediate families.

She fled medical sales. I fled journalism.

At separate times and without knowing each other;
We both did UNO’s study abroad program in Madrid under the same professor.

I laugh loud. She laughs louder and then claps.

We struggled with whether writing nonfiction is cultural treason.

We go to the same church on Sundays and eat Asian afterward.

We go walking through Chinatown and then poke around a bit.

Fittingly we both ended our time in the same nonfiction workshop again where we had a wonderful experience with the professor. Last night after our last event, we walked down Broadway to 120th. She turned right and I kept walking. It’s a path we take regularly to rehash events from the day.

Since the fall of 2005 until now, time I have bonded with a lovely woman by the name of Rowena Cruz in ways I can’t even document. She went from being a wallflower barely speaking up for herself to rolling her neck with the sassiness of a snake. “You think I’m gonna…..” You ought to see it.

When my mother met Rowena she said: “She’s so cute. If I was as cute as she is I’d be out dancing and snapping my fingers every night.”

Dance, Rowena, dance.

I am very pleased to announce that my essay “The Last Sancitified Lady,” got honorable mention in the University of New Orleans Study Abroad Writing Contest in the nonfiction category. Had I won I would have spent July taking creative writing classes in Madrid and living in the dormitory for free. I attended the UNO program in Madrid in the summer of 2004 and it was fantastic. My participation in that program paved the way for me to get into Columbia’s MFA program.

Although I did not win, an honorable mention shows me that my material has improved dramatically and caught the editors’ attention, something that NEVER happened before in contests. And hopefully that means I’m on the right path.

Congratulations to all the winners. If you want to read more about it go to http://lowres.uno.edu/contest.cfm

Cheers!

Last Saturday I hopped on the subway and went down to Brooklyn to visit with my friend Gun. We get together every few months and I had never been to his place. After about two hours of tea, walking around a bit in his neighborhood and getting a slice of pizza, we jumped on the R train to get back to Manhattan.

The trains were slightly crowded when two women in traditional Middle Eastern garb got on with two small children, a young girl still in a stroller and a boy who couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. The kids were giggling and having a good old time.

Suddenly the little boy, who was just an adorable kid but on a black cloth mask with pointed corners. All we could see were his eyes sitting right across from us. Other people on the train started to stare at him. It was obviously a kid’s mask and game when Gun leaned over and whispered: “What do we have here a little terrorist in the making?”

It was one of those moments I wanted to laugh so badly my eyes started to water and I felt ready to explode. Laughing hard would have been rude. That made it even funnier, so I fought it back even more. Gun said exactly what I and anybody else looking at this little boy thought. I haven’t wanted to laugh that hard in years.

Had that little boy in that mask shown up at an average American elementary school they would have sent him home for sure.

One of the most thrilling experiences I had at Columbia was interning at a literary agency two days a week. I opened a lot of mail, made a lot of copies and read a LOT of submissions. The biggest mistake nonfiction writers make is attempting to pitch a collection of essays as if they are a single memoir with a through line. Fiction writers want to sell short stories as novels. Seems really tempting to us coming out of MFA programs, but the agents and the publishing houses are interested in complete cohesive manuscripts – not patchwork quilts.

I was driving alone one spring night on U.S. 40, a rural Indiana road between Indianapolis and Greencastle, when a 212 number registered on my cell phone. I picked it up.

“Hello.”

“Hello, is this Samuel Autman?” said the voice on other end of the phone with a British accent.

“Yes, this is Samuel Autman.”

“Samuel. This is —— —— and we’d like to offer you a slot in our nonfiction program here at Columbia if you’re still interested.”

This essay is about how one professor can change a student’s life.

I had applied to MFA programs at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Long Island University at South Hampton, The Art Institute of Chicago and the University of San Francisco. Columbia was my first choice. Of course I told the man I’d be happy to accept the slot.

“I just have one more question for you,” he said. “In your application you wrote about a family. Are those people real? You dazzled the committee members with the piece.”

I had submitted a writing sample about my extended family in Grady, Ark., where I spent summers with my Aunt Freddie Mae and her twelve kids, and many more relatives. Not knowing any of the
rules of creative writing, I just wrote what my gut told me, uninhibited.

“Yes, that’s nonfiction. Those are my relatives.”

“Someone on the committee said “of course that’s fiction.’ ”

That was my first interaction with Michael Scammell.

By the time I finally arrived into New York and at Columbia he was on a yearlong sabbatical. I had heard all of these stories how rough he was on students in his nonfiction workshops. In that year I struggled in both of my workshops. Still stuck in newspaper mode, which had so carefully globbed ont my brain like guck, I struggled to conjure the kind of texts that dazzled anybody. My confidence bottomed out. I came dangerously close to not returning in the next year. The only reason I didn’t drop out was I didn’t want to regret what could have been. One professor’s note burst into flames of praise about something I had written about my father. Off and on all summer I expanded that piece which I would submit for my first piece in Scammell’s thesis workshop the following fall.

On the first day of thesis workshop I arrived thirty minutes late, thinking it started at 2:30 instead of 2 p.m. He seemed pleasant enough, but the unknown intimidated me. Because my last name starts with an “A,” I was in the first batch of people to be workshopped. I submitted “Father in Fragments.”

The following week the students in the workshop went around the room and made comments. More of this. More of that. People pretty much like it. No fireworks either way. Scammell sat in silence, reserving his remarks for the end.

When the last person finished talking, Scammell looked at me, he looked that essay and he looked at the class and said: “I was absolutely blown away by this essay. In my entire eleven years here at Columbia this is one of the best essays I’ve read here.”

I went numb.

He praised for the piece’s boldness, lyricism. Went on and on for about ten minutes in this vein. The last words he spoke were “this is a stunning debut. I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

In that moment, all of the self doubts and regrets about my first year experience disintegrated. Euphoria and joy flooded my heart – someone at Columbia could see what I was reaching for in my prose. From that moment until now, my perceptions of myself and Columbia were completely transformed. Though not every piece of writing I wrote for his workshop lived up to that piece, he always would say: “I look forward to the day when you write another piece just like the one you wrote about your father.”

As a result of his nudging, I have continued to write about my family of origin and intermediate family members based in the Deep South. And almost every time I trod out these characters – either in fiction or nonfiction, literary lightning seems to strike.

And that is the power that a professor has to change a student’s life.

Thanks so much Michael.

Much of my time in New York has been me sitting, reading and writing, trying to get my essays to work. Last night we had the annual reading for Our Word, a student group that supports writers of color in Columbia University’s MFA program.

I was the second on the program. Nearly 100 of my fellow students, professors, and my mother in from St. Louis, all gathered in Philosophy Hall to hear seven students read. I nervously walked to the podium and adjusted the microphone. While my Utah narratives have not quite worked in workshop, I really honed in and polished a piece about some of the difficulties I experienced as a black man living in Salt Lake City. Time and space seemed to stand still as I read. For five minutes I stood there reading, not knowing whether or not the crowd was with me. It felt like they could be. When I got to the last line of my six pages, I bowed, said thank you and it happened. Every writing failure I’ve endured in my two years melted when the crowd erupted into an explosive applause. It was the best feeling I’ve had in years, a crowning moment. Nothing else mattered – the debts incurred, the fears that an MFA in creative writing was a waste of time or that I was too old all vanished with the crowd’s response. It was indeed overwhelming.

At least a dozen people came up to congratulate me on the piece and how engaging it was.

I am so grateful to have been a part of Our Word, one of the only such groups for students of color at any MFA program in the United Staes.

Most of all, I was glad to have shared this moment with my mother.

Sometimes this neighborhood feels more like Columbia than Harlem.

Each day I look out of my window and see the Cotton Club on 125th and Riverside.

This world that we inhabit is neither all Columbia, with smiling undergraduates nor all
Harlem, a gritty, urban dwelling and once the cultural capital of black America. Instead
it’s Harlumbia, a delicate mixture of both. Earlier today Columbia’s public safety
division sent out this chilling reminder:

The Public Safety Department has been made aware of two recent assaults that have
taken place near the Morningside campus. In both cases, the victims were attacked,
but no property was removed by the assailants.

In the first incident, on April 1, 2007 at 8:30 p.m., a student was attacked from behind
as he walked on Morningside Drive near W. 115 St. The suspects jumped him from behind
and placed him in a choke hold. The victim was able to escape, and it is believed that t
he suspects fled into Morningside Park. The victim was able to provide a partial description
of two of the suspects:

#1 male/ black/15-16/5’6″/short curly hair/
Wearing a blue backpack

#2 male/black/15-16/5’6″/large dark puffy jacket

In the second incident, on April 3, 2007 at about 8:05 p.m., a Barnard affiliate was
assaulted as he walked on W. 123 St. between Amsterdam Ave. and Morningside Ave.
Two suspects attacked him from behind and placed him in a choke hold. The victim
provided the following description:

#1-male/black/late teens/5’8″/med. build, wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt with white
lettering.

#2-male/black/late teens/5’8″/ med. build, wearing dark clothing

If you have any information concerning these crimes please contact the 26 Pct. Detective squad.
If you are traveling at night, please remember to use the Columbia University Escort Service.

At some point in the future I plan to muse here for a bit about my experience living in Harlumbia.

In my two short years in Columbia University’s MFA program, my professors have performed miracles.

My sentences learned to breathe and expand.

My prose slowed down, fatigued from 13 years of journalistic haste.

Inauthentic phrases and cliches have been almost completely excised.
If they slip through, an alarm goes off in my head.

Scenes, which had only paid a periodic visit to my paragraphs, are now
welcomed and embraced.

Three-dimensional characters have been given voice through dialogue -
not just stepping up to the microphone where they have a quick say.
They are now able to speak freely.

Imagery, which could never appear in newspaper writing, are now free
to populate my prose.

Above all, the voice of my soul, not one imposed by the university, but my own
God-given one, has been able to climb out of hiding, stand tall and take form.