On Endings, On Writing, on MFA Programs

 This essay was first published by Women Writers, Women's Books: http://booksbywomen.org/sarah-layden-on-writing/

Many years ago, while commuting to my MFA program in creative writing, I made a habit of seeking out an old windmill along my route. It was both a landmark for the distance I had yet to travel, and a reminder that I was back home again in Indiana after years away.

Now that windmill is gone. By spring, Purdue University’s MFA program will be gone, too.

Perhaps the victim of a passing storm, the windmill once stood along I-65 between my home in Indianapolis and the West Lafayette exit to campus. Acres of industrial wind farms loomed further north, but that lone windmill was no more. Out of habit I still searched for it, driving north to Chicago to promote Imagine Your Life Like This, a collection of stories that I started in the first year of my MFA. That was 2003, twenty years before the book would be done and on the shelf.

The road bled into my writing. So did Indiana, experienced anew after a decade away. In my notebook I wrote about connection and disconnection, speeding tickets (I got two), fields of corn and soybean, lonely drivers in search of a life that eluded them. The naked cowboy, a man wearing only a straw hat and boots and waggling his hips at the passing cars and semis. Had he lost a bet? Found a hobby? I didn’t know. I wanted to, from a distance.  

My stories also featured Central New York, which I missed intensely after my husband and I moved. I’d left a reporting job in Syracuse so I could write fiction, something my entire being wanted to do. While difficult to leave, I was thrilled to meet my new community at Purdue.

One of my first MFA professors, Patricia Henley, shared an Isak Dinesen quote that I still think about: “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” The work, Patricia told her students, was the reward. With so much out of your control in publishing—agents, editors, reviews, sales—you could control your relationship to the work. Her new novel, A Sad Thought You Can Dance To, comes out in 2024.

At Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago, I saw another professor, Sharon Solwitz. I was there to present a panel and sign books, and I was honored to have Sharon’s blurbed endorsement on the back of my collection. In addition to three books of fiction, Sharon’s work appears in Best American Short Stories. We hugged. “You didn’t stop after Purdue,” she told me. This was her first year without a graduate workshop. She mentioned her colleagues, longtime faculty members who support each other amid budget and program cuts.

When I was a grad student, I worked on Purdue’s long-running literary journal, Sycamore Review, learning skills that later translated into a co-authored literary editing textbook. Fifteen years after I graduated, Sycamore Review published my flash fiction, “Gone for Good.” I keep years of issues on my bookshelves to loan to my college students, knowing the journal also might be gone for good.

I didn’t know back then how impermanent things could be; I only knew I felt compelled to record the world around me. On one commute, I brought my Polaroid camera to take a photo of the windmill. It was harder than I expected to find the right road to the farm after exiting the interstate. Then the dust from my tires needed to settle. My disturbance alerted the farmer, who drove out in his truck. He waved. It wasn’t friendly. I held up my camera as explanation. He sat and watched me until I drove away.

All I have is the photo. All I have is the memory. The windmill, too, makes an appearance in Imagine Your Life Like This. In “White Hands,” a woman’s car breaks down, along with her sense of responsibility. The windmill appears and disappears as she watches from the tow truck window.

I wasn’t towed, but I once ran out of gas when I misjudged the distance to the next exit. A State Trooper stopped to help and said he guessed that I wasn’t studying math at Purdue. Correct, sir. The work was hard to quantify. The work counted. There is no column on a spreadsheet to show the benefits of understanding the world through another point of view, and how thoughtful critique of your writing can change not only the writing, but you. Studying fiction does that.

Driving home from Chicago, I passed the wind farms that no longer seemed eerie to me. Now I am used to the towering height of these industrial windmills, their mechanical arms like slow and steady punches. On other trips, I took photos with my smartphone. This time, I didn’t.

More miles of cornfields and soybeans, then I reached the campus exit and caught a glint of metal through the trees. Another windmill in a field, waiting for nature to make its blades spin. Of course, it was there all along. My discovery only became possible from a different perspective.

A funny thing happened on the way to the dinner

So there I am, at the gorgeous Central Library as part of the Indiana Author's Award event. I have two back-to-back sessions during the day, and before the first one starts, I have a minute to duck into the Author's Fair and say hello to Bich Minh Nguyen, one of the finalists for the Emerging Author award (the other finalists were Micah Ling and Aaron Michael Morales.) Bich was kind enough to invite me to join her for the awards dinner at Purdue's table -- she teaches at Purdue, which is where I earned my MFA.

I also see Dick Wolfsie sitting at one of the tables in front of a stack of books. I say hello, and tell him that I had the pleasure of watching a taping of his show with my class more than 20 years ago at Union Station.

"Great!" he says, nice as can be. "Are you still a teacher?"

This is where I had to explain that yes, I am now a teacher, but back then, well, I was in the sixth grade.

Poor Dick Wolfsie was mortified. He clapped his hands over his mouth and apologized. "Wait until my wife hears about this." (Note to Dick Wolfsie's wife: It was totally fine. Funny, in fact.)

My sessions were titled "Get Started," a course I'd taught before for the Writers' Center of Indiana. My first group kicked off with participants asking a number of questions, which helped focus the discussion. We wrote a little, talked a little more, and people discussed the stages of their various writing projects (for some, they had yet to begin, so "Get Started" made perfect sense.) It was a great, participatory group. Afterwards, I watched two attendees introduce themselves, then exchange contact information along with meaningful hugs. Not exactly typical of a short writing session, but hey: I'm thrilled that connections were made.

Have I mentioned that I did not eat lunch, not officially, on this day? It had been a busy morning. My husband had rented an aerator for the lawn, and drove across town to do my parents' lawn, too. When he got home, he looked peaked. "I feel horrible," he said, and collapsed into bed.

Really? I was thinking. I haven't showered, and the baby needs to eat, and he's taking a nap? I looked closer. He was more than peaked, he was green. And he'd have to take care of the baby -- who'd had a bug two days before, which my husband must've caught -- when I left to teach. "Rest," I said, "then call my mom if you need her." Grammy's always on call. Three cheers for Grammy!

So I wheeled the high chair over to the bathroom door and took a quick shower while the baby ate. He whined at first, then kicked his feet and laughed each time I peek-a-booed around the shower curtain. I quickly got ready and grabbed a banana to go. Got through the first session, then realized I'd need a little more sustenance. I bought a granola bar at the library cafe and ducked into the now-empty author's fair room to eat.

A man walks in. "Are you an author?" he asks. "Are you famous?"

"Um, yes?" I say. "And no."

We chatted a bit about his writing, his identity crisis, his career change. I gulped down the granola bar. I only had a few minutes before the next session, and I raced off. I do a lot of racing around these days, which is funny considering my high school volleyball teammates used to call me Eeyore. Because I was slow. Also: grumpy.

The second session went a little differently. People came in and out, sort of trying out the class before deciding it wasn't for them. Or maybe they wanted to hit more than one session before heading home. There was a distracted vibe. I talked about getting messy, creatively, rather than trying to shoehorn ideas into a prearranged format. "But I'm halfway done!" one person argued. "I've got it all mapped out on a spreadsheet, and now you're telling me to start over?"

Was I? I didn't think so. I had been talking about getting started. As the title of the session would suggest. Even so, I began to sweat. Was this nerves? Students offer challenges all the time, and usually it doesn't faze me. I like trying to think on my feet and explain something in a new way. But I was definitely sweating. Maybe I shouldn't have worn a wool sweater.

I was in the middle of a sentence, answering a question about the merits of MFA programs, when I knew that it wasn't nerves. I felt sick.

"I need to excuse myself," I said. "If I'm not back in five minutes, we'll have to cancel."

Deep breathing got me to the bathroom, where I proceeded to retch my meager lunch into the toilet. "Sorry," I said weakly to the person in the next stall, who was nice enough to ask if I was OK.

Actually, now I felt great. "I'm fine," I said emphatically, popped a Breathsaver, and returned to the room to finish the session. A concerned trio of library staff waited for me there, and I reassured them I could finish the remaining ten minutes. And I did. I can still make the dinner, I told myself. That was a one-time thing.

It wasn't. I had to pull over once on the way home, and couldn't even make it to the passenger side to get sick on busy College Ave. Someone, I thought, is going to drive into my open car door, and also my head, and this will be a humiliating way to die. While vomiting on the roadside.

"I can still make the dinner," I said when I got home. My husband eyed me from the couch; my mom shook her head doubtfully. I laid down on the floor. My sweet baby scooted over and flopped his body over mine as if giving me a hug.

"Just a sec," I said, and ran to the bathroom.

Old Faithful, my husband called me, once I was well enough to joke about such things. I stayed in bed until late afternoon Sunday. The bug my son had and my husband nearly had was no joke.

So, I missed the dinner, which, judging by all of your photos on Facebook, was really nice. Congratulations go out to poet Micah Ling, who won the Emerging Author award, and I wished I'd had the chance to talk to her, and to catch up with Bich, and to meet Aaron, another Purdue MFA grad.

Jell-O and soup and saltines and a really great husband (and mom, who came back on Monday to take care of me AND the baby) fixed me up right. Baby's feeling great now, too. Here's hoping I'll keep my clean bill of health for the Gathering of Writers this Saturday. I'll continue my strict regimen of granola bar avoidance, and everything should be just fine.