Writing About Lives

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.