I have fond memories of most of my teachers, but weirdly the most influential teacher in my life is someone I haven’t spoken to since I left her classroom, and I have had no interest in ever contacting since. 

I think about it every year around this time. Not just her, though:   

• J.R.: part-time guitar teacher, lifelong Appomattox resident, intermittently employed as a truck driver, intermittently a member of several country bands, intermittently married. In eighth grade my grandpa Hix drove me to his house every Thursday – the first time we were a little late due to a few random stops for Grandpa to inspect the tobacco crop at different farms along the drive. JR was patient, gave thoughtful advice, and had a kind gracefulness that most music teachers choose not to adopt. I can hear the way he said “Good” after I played something correctly. JR taught me bar chords, basic blues soloing, and offered me some genuine encouragement at a pretty formidable moment in my life.
• Wes Williams – my ninth grade English teacher. I remember distinctly the way he taught, pleasantly strolling in front of the class (sometimes with a bizarre affected limp) monologuing like a villain about topics that sometimes vaguely tied back to the honors English class he was supposed to be teaching: frying cold grits in his deep South childhood, the beauty of Poe’s prose style, the origins of the word quixotic, which then led to a digression about his quixotic sister. Things like that. Sometimes he would complain about his wife, who was our middle school librarian, the sort of amazing human being who can stand being married to someone like him. Despite his slight, unassuming appearance, he had a showman’s composure in the classroom, an ability he wielded to great success as the high school’s drama director, leading the drama team to numerous state titles. His compulsive need for attention I suspect was the reason he acted as a lay minister on the weekends. What an entertaining class that was. 
• John Pettyjohn – American history and world history teacher. He was a reformed hippie stuck in the rural Virginia community from which he briefly escaped in his youth. You wouldn’t suspect his groovy past from his appearance now, which was business casual, or his teaching style, which was lecture-based and traditional. The only decoration in his classroom was a page torn out from a surfing magazine, a token of his dissolute youth. He had a worn down, hangdog appearance that I came to understand was due to his being hyper-intelligent and surrounded by low-effort students. One of the few teachers to ever expel me from a classroom for being an idiot.  
• Linda Leatherwood – the type of brusque teacher whose brusqueness masks her love of the job and her students. Big frizzy white hair, thick horn rimmed glasses. She would recruit me for forensics every spring. Due to family circumstances she had to drive my brother and I to school sometimes in middle school, greeting our “good mornings” with “It’s morning…but I don’t know what’s good about it.” Despite our personal connection with her, she didn’t play favorites. I didn’t have a pencil before the final exam and she refused to give me one or let anyone else give me one, only acquiescing once the exam started.    
• Dr. H, an English professor from college. Probably the teacher whose style I try to emulate the most on a daily basis. He combined an exhaustive knowledge of his content with a finely-honed, dry sense of humor. His pleasant boyish affability my fellow students would occasionally mistake for passiveness: he witheringly told a girl in front of him to put away her (flip) phone, and I remember fondly how he once ordered a lumpy bearded young man named Alec to take his malodorous lunch outside the classroom, and then peevishly threw the windows open in disgust before continuing his lecture. A few years ago I had the opportunity to work at a summer program where I taught Dr. H’s nine-year-old daughter. I remarked to him that I was impressed with her ability to be tolerant of those around her who weren’t as passionate or focused, noting that I didn’t have that skill as a kid. “Me neither,” he said.      

The most influential teacher in my life – Ms. Flannery – had many of the qualities of the above-mentioned teachers. An Eastern North Carolina mother of three almost always dressed in a black cardigans, jeans, and boots, she insisted you call her by her first name, an order she would issue to you in her rapid cadence always full of hand gestures, which were punctuated by a cigarette if outside. She claimed her writing was inspired by the voices she heard in her head. Electric blue eyes, authoritative posture – she liked to brag that she worked at a bar that taught her to pour beer from a tap and hold a baseball bat at the same time. She had big black hair and (if I remember correctly) at least one Celtic rune tattoo. Her first classes were always especially intense, emotional affairs, beginning with her swarming into the room carrying an armful of papers, seating herself with a deep sigh, and proceeding to narrate her blue-collar, single-mom path into academia she had created for herself. This exposition was required to justify the fireworks of the subsequent classes in which the riveted creative writing students received clear, unfiltered feedback about their manuscripts, what worked (not much) and what needed revising (pretty much everything). Ms. Flannery cursed a lot; I remember the time she looked up from the first manuscript of derivative-Michael Chabon-yuppie-realism I ever submitted to her and muttered, “Boy, learn to use a fucking a semicolon correctly”; I learned. This style of instruction probably sounds melodramatic or annoying. I’m not going to defend it, but I will note that it was tempered by a few things. First, she was extremely knowledgeable. She had read everything worth reading, was a Nabokov nut in particular, as well as Garcia-Marquez, which she said she read in the original Spanish. Her first classes always included the detail that she had been accepted at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop but turned down the opportunity due to family circumstances. She had friends all over the industry, including the poet Liam Rector, whose life she was mourning when I first took her class, and she had plans to leverage these connections into a low-residency MFA program. And in addition to this deep well of knowledge, she had a passion that she extended to her students, a generosity in learning about them and accepting them. This passion stood out in a college filled mostly with professors who were nice enough, but made it pretty clear how disappointed they were to be teaching you. Ms. Flannery had plenty of disappointment in you to share, but she also knew how to motivate with the right sort of praise. If your writing had even the smallest spark of originality, she would identify it, praise it, and order you to nurture it – and weed out all the cliches and horrible writing surrounding it. It was all tough love from someone very skilled at making you feel worthless while offering just enough of a boost to make you feel motivated to come back. Her favorite monologue in cinema was the opening speech in Glengarry Glen Ross, which she showed to us sometimes as an allegory for the writer’s imperative to A. Always. B. Be. C. Closing. Always be closing. Always be closing! This scene also informed her bluntness. Unlike most writing teachers I’ve encountered – high school, college, online – she didn’t couch her feedback in cautious equivocation (“In my opinion…” “I just feel like, personally, that…” “Respectfully, I have to say…”), the type of mealy-mouthed instruction that allows a bad writer to continue living under the delusion that they are actually a misunderstood genius. Instead, she carefully articulated the fraudulence of your drafts, and made it clear that you had to either commit to refining your craft, or go away. She would sigh and start a long tirade with “Look…” or “I’m gonna be honest…”, which with her accent sounded more like “Ah’ma bee-ahhhnis…”. This not to say that the class was a joyless grind – she had an uproarious sense of humor, and her wheezy smoker’s laugh would often punctuate the sessions. She incessantly stressed the need for revision, to treat writing as the craft it is and not some occasional drop-in hobby, the importance of writing every single day. If her rhetoric didn’t make its point, her grading did: she almost always gave Fs on the first drafts of manuscripts. She was welcoming of most students, regardless of age and background, able to develop a rapport with most. 

This included me. I was 19 when I first took her advanced fiction-writing class. I had had plenty of mercurial teachers prior to her. And I had also had plenty of knowledgeable, attentive teachers. But I had never had a teacher with both qualities, though, a teacher who would deliver a profane rant while citing portions of Wayne C Boothe’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (a ridiculously scholarly look at writing that she used as a bedrock of the showing vs telling dichotomy) or John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. At that point in my life, it was a revelation to hear someone talk with the sort of evangelical certainty I felt about writing AND offer the type of careful instruction that was lacking in my life. I remember her frustration at a student’s manuscript, a climatic scene where the writer neglected to show the most dramatic moment in the narrative. “This matters, y’all!” she bellowed, before calling time for a smoke break. 

It wasn’t as if she held herself on a pedestal, either. She was willing to show us her own drafts, her process. Short stories, poems, essays, even screenplays (she said she had a series in development with Lifetime. She showed us a pilot for a series she had writted called OBX, set in the Outer Banks and otherwise very different from the series that got made recently). One morning I was visiting her office, and I remember her revising a free-verse poem, and she wasn’t satisfied with the ending of one line. She wanted a word like silent, but only one syllable, and she wanted to retain the “s” sound. We talked and pitched words until she finally landed on staid. 

Another important thing she taught was the process of finding journals and submitting work, not as easy back in 2009, when my house still had dial-up internet and most journals only accepted mailed submissions. She showed us all how to do it and encouraged us to put our work out there. She took groups of students to the AWP conferences every January, a pretty rare practice for undergraduates. She offered me the opportunity to work at the university literary journal, of which she was editor. 

Spending time at the journal, taking several of her classes over two years (including an independent study of experimental fiction), we developed a pretty strong rapport. I valued her opinion, and I knew she viewed me as an impressionable mind. As we know from reading Peak, the only way to grow is by pushing yourself to limits AND receiving authoritative feedback. Under the tutelage of Ms. Flannery, I grew as a writer, faster than I would have without her guidance. She had an influence on my reading habits, my work habits. I didn’t feel the need to write derivative Michael Chabon yuppie-realism, because I was not a yuppie. I took pride in my humble background thanks to Ms. Flannery, herself from blue-collar origins, and my writing in turn reflected that confidence. As a result, I won a few short story contests, got a few works published. 

Despite this, as my internship reached its conclusion, I realized I wasn’t sure if I was really a professional writer. A very instructive part of my time with Ms. Flannery was being able to observe that the life of most professional writers is a shameless hustle. There are very few who can call it a full-time job. Everyone else is either hustling hard (working in academia or other side jobs) or being supported by their folks. My friend Dave was looking to pursue a career in screenwriting – both his parents were doctors. The frumpy bearded guy with the malodorous lunch, Alec, was a lifelong child of private schools and the rich parents that attend such an education. Some will remember the job landscape in the spring of 2009, as the housing crisis of the prior year dried up the job market. My dad, the only person in my life even more blunt than Ms. Flannery, was adamant that I have a clear plan that involved financial stability when I graduate. Was I really going to continue in academia to become a professional writer?   

I was skeptical. Devoting yourself to pushing words across the page for the entertainment of the masses, for the education and enrichment of the masses, requires a confidence in your abilities, a belief that this is a worthy endeavor worth the sacrifice of your time you could perhaps be using to contribute something more substantive to the world. Interact with a professional writer sometime and marvel at the narcissism. This August I had to sit through a keynote address from a young-adult novelist who had just published her second book and had recently been nominated for the National Book Award – a detail she mentioned literally a dozen times as an oh-by-the-way aside in her poorly prepared, cliche-filled hour-long ramble that was meant to pass as a keynote speech. There’s nothing unusual about this level of self-obsession, though. Of course writers are full of themselves – the grind of the profession self-selects for those crazy enough to believe they have something worth sharing.  

For me though, as I looked at my life experiences, growing up in Central Virginia on a farm and took stock of my own talents in other areas aside from writing, I became more and more skeptical this was for me. Ms. Flannery, sensing my doubt, told me several times that I was crazy to doubt myself, that a life of letters was meant for me. She was adamant about pretty much everything she believed, whether it was your destiny in life or best way to prepare pork barbecue.

I still had doubts. As I continued to work with Ms. Flannery and the literary journal, I got involved in three different bands, a radio show, and a Spanish minor. The focus of my future started to become clearer. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it wasn’t going to involve grad school. 

This was confirmed once and for all with my last task for Ms. Flannery, which was to help organize the 2009 Southern Humanities Conference. It was a small meeting of academics representing a handful of panels over a weekend. Ms. Flannery was in the midst of it all, chatting it up and pressing the flesh like a politician. I arranged for some retired tobacco auctioneers to speak, as well as some veterans of the Iraq war, but mostly it was a bunch of literature-based sessions, barely-published writers reading their drafts and then taking questions about their vision or their writing process. It was an exhausting weekend, and I remember sitting alone in a hot tub in the motel we were staying at, reflecting on the snake-eating-its-tail nature of academia.  

A few weeks after the conference, Ms. Flannery advised me to take a gap year to write and refine my portfolio for a big push at MFA programs. By that point, though, I had started to understand more clearly the drawbacks to Ms. Flannery’s style of teaching. She was borderline abusive (it was pretty routine to see students tear up or just flat out cry during workshop time), openly critical of her colleagues in a way that wasn’t professional. Ironically, the professor she trashed the most as an ineffective teacher ended up experiencing the most success in the department during that time period, selling a memoir about fishing with his son, or something like that.

My internship was over, and the more time I spent away from her, the more I realized that her confidence edged too far into delusion. This involved some big things, like when I did some research with the admissions department at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which had no record of her ever being admitted or turning down admittance; her ability to read Spanish was almost certainly a stretch if not a complete lie; her series that was in development with Lifetime never got made, if it was ever actually in development; the residency program she was confident would get off the ground was soundly defeated by the college provosts later the next year.  

There was no dramatic final meeting between Ms. Flannery and me. After my classes and my internships were done, that was it. In spite of the amount of time we had spent around each other and the rapport we had developed, I never reached out to her as I took a semester of teaching classes at University of Richmond and subsequently moved north for my first job — and she never reached out to me.  

What I appreciate from Ms. Flannery (not her real name, btw, duh) and have incorporated in my own teaching: writing does not have any inherent value just because you wrote it. Writing anything of lasting value – fiction, poetry, nonfiction – is difficult, filled with carefully chosen details creating (in the case of fiction) a vivid and consistent dream. Most writing, of any form, requires extensive revision. All students should receive clear, articulate feedback. 

From a behavior standpoint, though, I take her as a model of what NOT to do. In short, I take her as a lesson in the care required when dealing with impressionable minds. It’s a delicate business. The showman in any good teacher wants to dazzle and impress their students. But everything in the classroom has to be…grounded. Because when the students finally see through all the smoke, you’re done — the door is closed. 

*

As I was writing this, a final teacher came to mind: Professor Derek (?) Taylor. I only took one class with him, so I never got to know him that well. But I had one interaction with him that stuck with me. It was a few weeks after graduation, and we crossed paths in the library parking lot. He was very tall, judgmental in a pleasant but definitive way, quick to call you out if he suspected you hadn’t done the reading, always literally and figuratively looking down on most of us. 

He asked what my plans were after graduation and frowned when I told him I wasn’t going to a pursue an MFA and was instead going to enter the teaching profession. He nodded slightly, gave a thoughtful pause as if he was looking into the future and examining the different possibilities. Then he gave a more definitive nod, but still didn’t smile. 

“That’s good,” he said. “I think you’ll be a good teacher.”

I have always appreciated that.