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My memory of my years at CCS ? which is presumably as faulty and myopic as my memory of most things ? my memory is that for every semester (trimester?) of the three and a half years I studied in Santa Barbara, I took Marvin Mudrick?s Creative Writing class. (Someone unacquainted with the CCS system might reasonably ask: What? Did you keep failing? You couldn?t pass after all those tries?)
But no. Each week, with hope and trepidation, we handed our stories in to Mudrick. Each week, he walked into the classroom carrying a stack of white typewritten pages. He sat at the perfectly empty desk at the front of the room, set the pile of paper directly in front of him, and proceeded to read aloud ? and anonymously ? the stories. The presumption was of anonymity, but of course the students exhausted lots of energy trying to figure out the author of any given piece. Often, given the predilection of young writers to include thinly veiled autobiographical details in their work, this was not difficult. That game could distract us for a certain amount of time, but sooner or later we would settle into what we were there for: to learn how to write good stories, to learn what made for a good story. How they worked. Hearing the work read aloud allows the writer to hear his or her narrative voice translated from the voice inside the head ? where the imagination claustrophobically resides ? to the reality of a told story, a written work.
My memory is also that Mudrick was a fairly tough critic, perhaps because the one and only time he praised a story of mine occurred on the last day of the last class I ever took with him. Although in that matter also I suspect my memory of collapsing time and going for the jugular. Because even as he criticized, Mudrick encouraged us and taught us how to become writers, and better writers. Or else why did I keep returning?
What strikes me now is how seriously he took our fledgling writing and he we in turn learned to take ourselves seriously but not not uncritically. In that class there was never any question that writing fiction was something worth doing, that it mattered. The unspoken assumption was that we would set high - impossible? ? standards for ourselves, and then fail repeatedly.
In the intervening years, while I might fuzzily long for palm trees, and Red Rock Canyon in the Santa Inez Mountains, and weather reports heralding surf conditions ?from Point Conception to the Mexican Border? (to my mind one of the most poetic phrases in the English language), what I should be recalling fondly are those countless semesters of learning how to fail, and then come back for more.
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