Storyville

I grew up surrounded by books. The centerpiece of the living room of whatever apartment or house we lived in was a wide and tall bookcase, filled with the hardcovers and paperbacks that my mom and big sister discovered at garage sales or exchanged with friends. Thrillers and mysteries, romances, some celebrity memoirs and biographies. Mom read during lunch at her job as a secretary for an oil drilling company outside our small town in the Texas Panhandle and often finished a novel in just a few days. Me, I was a lazy reader and thought myself math-minded.

Frank Wolf’s calculus class, fall term, first year at Carleton, taught me otherwise. A kind man, he gave me a D, though I surely didn’t deserve it. From the start, I was completely out of my depths. I considered myself a fairly serious student, but quickly learned that I didn’t even really know how to study. And it wasn’t just in math. Though the readings in Constance Walker’s Rhet 1 seminar intrigued me, during the winter, as in calculus I again mostly felt just lost. I was never able to make the connections that others did, my own interpretations were facile and obvious, and the Five-Paragraph Theme I’d brought with me from high school never got me beyond a C+. It seemed foolish to imagine myself a potential English major when I’d struggled so mightily in the most basic course.

Thank god for the French department.

My mom had emigrated from France in the fifties, and she, my sister, and I had lived there for a year when I was seven. We didn’t speak the language at home upon our return — wanting to fit in, my sister and I had refused to — and so, a decade later, sitting in the auditorium in Olin for the placement test (for which I’d not had the common sense to prepare), I realized that I’d only retained two words, maison and oiseau. But I had an ear. In French 1, I could make out the sentences as they were being said, even if I didn’t always understand their meaning. My accent wasn’t terrible when responding, so I sounded more competent than I actually was. I spent the spring trimester in Pau, fulfilling the language requirement, and had an epiphany: I would declare a French major.

In French classes, the playing field was leveled. Reading was a travail for all of us, and nobody wrote well! I still felt like an imposter, incapable of identifying theme or of recognizing metaphor, but my facility with the language pushed me into the B+ range, and eventually a little better. Struggling alongside others who were equally disoriented gave me the courage to take risks, and my confidence grew. In one class, Dana Strand asked us to imitate the prose style of an author. I chose Camus and became utterly captivated by the rhythm and subtleties of his prose after paying such close attention to it. And I found myself wondering if maybe I couldn’t do that, too. Maybe I might be able to write a story of my own — and in English!

My decision to try to become a writer was born of my experience as a French major, but was nurtured by other aspects of my time at Carleton. We lived together in the dorms, all of us from all over, and hearing others’ stories taught me to begin to hear my own. The liberal arts curriculum fostered curiosity. I studied Japanese, political science, astronomy — subjects I hadn’t even known I was interested in — and became a sort of “expert generalist.” This is the very definition of what a writer does. And in every class, regardless the discipline, writing featured prominently. So, I, like everyone else, wrote and wrote and wrote.

In this issue, the Voice recognizes the significance of writing at Carleton by celebrating the creative writing published by Carls. Some of us write books, others are devoted to short forms, and the content we produce ranges from the academic to the technical to the literary. For the sake of continuity and space, we have focused specifically on fiction and poetry — two genres that aim to beguile as they illuminate, that reveal the complex truths of our common humanity while exposing us to new worlds.

My process for identifying Carleton authors was imperfect at best. There are so many more than I could include here. Those represented in these pages are meant to display a broad cross section of voices as well as of subject matter. Most of the fiction is excerpted from longer work, but I had the great good fortune to be presented with a few complete stories that fit our word limit. I hope that these selections will give as much pleasure to you as they did to me.

I also wish to thank David Schimke, Teresa Scalzo, and their team in the College Communications office. They are skillful, tireless, and, as a result, a pure joy to work with. This special issue was their idea. I am honored to have been asked to participate in shaping it.