My First Time: Kim Powers

The First Time I Told the Truth

(Then Lied About It) 

It was third grade. I don’t remember exactly what the assignment was, but I’ll never forget what I wrote for it. All these decades later it remains one of my first truths, first secrets, first confessions, and now it’s found its way into my new novel, Rules For Being Dead, which is filled with family secrets. (Whenever my friends think I share way too much on Facebook and other social media, little do they know it all started way back when.)

It was my first big writing assignment, maybe to illustrate what a “paragraph” was or to show off my newly-learned cursive writing skills. I know it can’t have been one of those “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” things, because it was late winter/early spring, but it has a sense of that. Did the teacher tell us to write something real? Write something we did last week? Write something painful? It is doubtful she would have asked that of third graders, but what I wrote was painful, without really knowing why.

With a freshly sharpened pencil, I wrote about how my mother, a fourth-grade teacher herself, had just taken me and my twin brother to look at a new apartment in a different town, as she got ready to leave my father. My mother’s sister lived in that nearby Texas town, Plano, so we wouldn’t be alone. In fact, the apartment building wasn’t far from where my Aunt Altha lived, a large brick building with its own parking lot, nestled down near a brook and trees. It was the late ’60s, and apartment buildings (as far as I knew) were these cool new things where fun people lived. Swinging singles! My mother might become single, but never swinging (except for that frying pan she swung at my father during a manic episode.) And with nine-year-old twins in tow, she certainly wouldn’t be hanging around the pool at the weekend cookout; she’d be in hiding, on the lam from an alcoholic husband.

We were shown around the apartment by a woman manager nursing a beer; shades of my father; I’m surprised my mother even stayed for the tour. I immediately hopped on the bed in the bigger of the two bedrooms, yelling, “This one is ours!” Even now, I can conjure up the cool-to-the-touch feeling of the bed’s floral, polyester coverlet. It was pretty, but what I loved most in the room was a beautiful objet d’art on the dresser: a ceramic sculpture of a gnarly tree branch, painted brown, encircled with green ceramic leaves and purple glass grapes. The grapes were clear and see-thru, except for a few air bubbles trapped inside. A touch of class in our new home, at least to lower-middle-class Texan eyes. My mother told us not to tell our father where we had gone, but she didn’t say anything about not writing about it.

So I did. I was already reading little articles about how to be a writer (I particularly remember one from old-school mystery queen Phyllis A. Whitney), and they all said, “make details count.” I wrote my little third-grade heart out describing those damn grapes. The flannel shirt the manager wore. The Schlitz beer bottle she drank from. Writing my little assignment trumped the secret or the shame that my mother was leaving my father, but it wouldn’t remain a secret for much longer. My teacher would read this paragraph about her friend and fellow teacher, who just happened to be my mother, and pretty soon, all the teachers at J. L. Greer Elementary School would know. 

  

But first, I showed it to my best friend Kathy Green. Instead of praising my detail work, the first thing she said was, “Is this real? Did this really happen?” A question I would get a lot in my literary career. In that split second before I answered—and I remember this as clear as day, too, looking through Kathy’s Coke bottle lenses—I knew I couldn’t tell the truth. I answered back, “Of course not. I just made it up.”

I had revealed my family’s truth for the first time, then immediately lied about it.

Didn’t Judas do something like that?

That “Of course not” is crucial. Not a simple yes or not, but a definitive “Of course not.” Just nine years old, but in those few seconds between Kathy’s question and my answer, I realized the enormity of what I’d done, the consequences that could result. I hadn’t thought things through. (Do third graders ever think things through? Is that even possible?) I hadn’t honored the promise I’d made to my mother, exact words be damned. Bizarrely, I don’t remember my teacher’s comment on the assignment, I don’t even remember her name. But what Kathy Green said is burned into my memory.

Call it my first stab at memoir.

A decade later, for a first-year college class, I’d write a sort of P.S. to that story, this time about finding my mother trying to kill herself. I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing at the time, but I knew it wasn’t normal to be looking at my mother’s face through a layer of dry cleaner’s plastic, which she had wrapped around her head and tied tight with the belt from my new Easter Sunday outfit. Our eyes locked for seconds—just the way mine had with Kathy Green—before my mother reached up and ripped the plastic off, then said she was trying to get rid of a cold.

She had lied to me, too—just like I had lied to Kathy Green.

But this time in my writing class, when my fellow freshmen asked if it was true, I finally said yes.

We never moved to that swinging singles apartment. A few months later, after seeing it, after me writing my first little paragraph, my mother was dead. Natural causes? An accident? Suicide? Murder? It was never really clear. Until now.

I’ve finally gathered up all those little pieces I’ve written through the years, all those loose family ramblings and revelations, and put them into Rules For Being Dead. In it, a little boy loses his mother, and no one will tell him what happened. No one will tell her either, the dead mother herself, who’s forced to float around in limbo, looking for the answers that will set her free. It’s the book I’ve been trying to write, needing to write, for most of my life.

This time, I’m ready to tell the truth.

Kim Powers is a two-time Emmy winner and author of the novels Capote in Kansas and Dig Two Graves, as well as the memoir The History of Swimming, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award winner and Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Memoir of the Year. He also wrote the screenplay for the festival-favorite indie film Finding North. Powers is the Senior Writer for ABC's 20/20, part of the team that has received three consecutive Edward R. Murrow Awards. A native Texan, he received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. He lives in Manhattan and Asbury Park, NJ. His new novel, Rules For Being Dead, will be published on August 4.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

My First Time: Margo Orlando Littell

The First Time My Life Imitated My Art

In 1889, Oscar Wilde claimed in an essay, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” I found this to be all too eerily true when I began researching and writing my novel The Distance from Four Points. I set the novel in a fictionalized version of my hometown, an impoverished former coal-mining town in the Appalachian foothills of southwestern Pennsylvania, and many details of my setting are drawn from life: blighted homes, neglected commercial properties, a sweeping, general abandonment of anything approximating decent real estate. Decades ago, my hometown had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country—now a quarter of the (small) population lives below the poverty level. That collapse is reflected in the once-grand homes now crumbling along the main street of town. My novel is, in part, about aggressively negligent small-town landlords; I’m drawn to ruined homes, especially the ones who’ve held onto shadows of their former beauty. Old woodwork, original stained glass, intricate pavers visible beneath the weeds. My novel was inspired by these relics. Art imitating life.

The protagonist of my novel, Robin, becomes a small-town landlord when her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her with nothing but a handful of “investment properties” he’d blown their savings on. She has a fraught relationship with one particular ruined house, and ultimately finds herself involved in its restoration. She encounters squatters, destructive tenants, month after month of missing rent payments. She becomes a member of a landlording group full of men whose moral code of squeezing tenants for every penny she can’t abide, but who offer her a path to survival she believes she has no choice but to follow.

It’s a grim setup, and Robin doesn’t get a lot of mercy from me for most of the novel.

It was a fun book to research. To shape my descriptions of the rentals Robin inherits, I scoured photos on Zillow and Craigslist, amazed at the lack of care landlords took when listing their properties. Laundry piles, overflowing garbage, obvious damage to walls and windows—what you see is what you get, they were saying. Don’t bother us, we won’t bother you. During a visit to my hometown, I had a realtor take me through some available properties, and I witnessed the neglect firsthand. Though most of the properties seemed uninhabitable, tenants were either living there or had only recently moved out.

And yet. Some of the historic homes—enormous houses that had been split into badly maintained triplexes—beckoned. Beneath the grime and grit, they retained some of their old glory. The house at the heart of my novel was based on an actual house in my hometown, a particularly tragic beauty. Red brick, with a round turret from ground to attic, the pointy peak long missing, the windows in the round turret rooms broken and boarded. It was just a block away from my parents’ house, and I’d admired it my entire life. This house happened to be on the market while I was researching my novel, and I was able to go inside for the very first time. There was woodwork; there was original stained glass; but the smell of cats and garbage was physical, the neglect and destruction total. The house was destined to be condemned and, eventually, demolished. I was grateful for the chance to have seen it, and the new details inspired my work on the book.

Then two big events turned art-imitates-life upside down: a landlord friend bought that house, intending to flip it; and, a few months later, I joined in as an equal partner. The moment my name was added to the title, I became a small-town property owner, just like Robin. Fast forward through an extensive restoration process, and an unsuccessful attempt to find a buyer. Instead of selling the house, we rented it out—and voila, I was a landlord, just like Robin. Our first tenant bounced all her checks and refused to leave, becoming a squatter. In my novel, a squatter lives in the fictionalized version of this house. Many tenants lied on their applications, an egregious trick that was both humiliating and enraging, and I found myself getting counsel from my hometown’s most notoriously negligent landlords—just as Robin finds herself aligned with the local landlords who are harder and less merciful than she could ever be.

Every novel requires immersion: into setting, character, and story. I’ve dreamed about characters, fallen in love with them, heard their voices in my head. This time, this novel, was different. Deeper. My life inspired the art, consumed what I created, and then spit it back out as a new reality. I assumed the same burdens as Robin, trod the same fraught path, and now feel the same tight grip of anxiety that she does on the first of each month when the rent—again, again, again—fails to be paid.

I gave Robin a happy enough ending. Until I somehow find a buyer for my property, however, my landlording story will go on and on and on.


Margo Orlando Littell is the author of the novels The Distance from Four Points and Each Vagabond by Name, both published by the University of New Orleans Press. Each Vagabond by Name won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal, was longlisted for the 2017 Tournament of Books, and was named one of fifteen great Appalachian novels by Bustle. Originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, Margo now lives in New Jersey. She is on Twitter and Instagram and her website is www.margoorlandolittell.com.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

My First Time: Philip Cioffari

My First Time: A Long Time Coming

I’d waited many, many years before it happened—what I like to call, to borrow a term from baseball, a triple play. Mine was the literary/dramatic version. The year was 2005.

It’s easy now that my fifth novel, If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues, is being published to forget or minimize the time and effort it took me to get here. As I’ve said, prior to the “triple play” I want to tell you about, I’d been writing a long time.

Upon completion of my doctorate in English, I began writing full time—that is, four to five hours a day, every day. It took me six years and many rejections before my first story was accepted by the Northwest Review, a literary journal published by the University of Oregon. I remember thinking, naively, that my literary career had finally begun, that my stories would be accepted on a regular basis from then on: no more rejections. How wrong I was. It took many rejections and another two years before my next story was accepted, this time by the Michigan Quarterly Review.

It’s probably safe to say that writers—artists, in general—are never satisfied. Though I went on to publish many stories over the years in both commercial magazines and literary journals, my true goal was to have a novel published. The novel, for as far back as I can remember, was what I considered to be the ultimate artistic achievement. It was the form I read in childhood and adolescence; and during college and graduate school my love for the genre blossomed into undying love. I loved the weight of the novel, the feel of it, the graceful arc of its structure and, of course—what all readers love—the way it creates for us another world that embraces us till the final page.

I don’t know how many “failed” novels I wrote over the years—at least a half dozen, I’m sure—and as time went on I began to consider the possibility that I might go through my entire life without realizing my goal. That possibility grew with each passing year.

In the meantime, I was doing all the things I believed a writer should do to improve his craft. I read as many novels as I could, re-reading my favorites again and again. I continued to write every day, I wrote and re-wrote the novels I was working on. I took evening classes in writing at the New School. I attended conferences and workshops, seeking all the feedback on my work that I could get.

At one of those conferences, the AWP Conference in Pittsburgh in the early 2000s, I was drifting through the book publisher’s section when, from across the room, I spotted a man fronting the booth for Livingston Press. He had a dark beard and wore a black jacket, black shirt and pants, black boots. His black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. His outfit and demeanor reminded me of Johnny Cash.

In one of those rare occurrences in a lifetime, I said to myself: that man is going to like my work. Believe me, I am not a person full of self-confidence, but for some reason I felt a moment of certainty in that room of book stalls.

So I approached him, asked him about the press, fingered several of the books on display. I was impressed by the books themselves and their cover designs. I asked him if I could send him some work and he said, “Yes, send me some stories.” Which I did. He wrote back to suggest I enter the nation-wide story collection competition the press ran each year. So I put some stories together and entered that year’s contest. By some stroke of good fortune, I managed to place second. No publication, but he encouraged me to apply again the following year. I re-assembled the collection, removing stories he seemed lukewarm about, replacing them with what I hoped were stronger pieces and that second time around I won the competition.

Thus, the first step of my triple play.

While all this was going on, I had two other projects I was simultaneously working on. One was a movie script I had been developing, and the other was a novel I was putting together using some of my stories as a stepping stone. Actually, the novel had been in progress for nearly ten years; I was at this point on my 20th draft.

A TV producer friend of mine read my script and suggested I direct the movie myself. At first I resisted, never having done a film before, but second only to getting a novel published was my goal of making a full-length feature film. So against all odds I forged ahead, put together a cast, a crew, and scouted locations.

In the midst of all this, I managed to complete a 21st draft of my novel, Catholic Boys. On a whim, to help fend off the discouragement I was feeling at the difficulty of making a movie, I sent it off to Joe Taylor, he of the Johnny Cash outfit, at Livingston Press. Within several weeks I heard back: he was accepting it for publication.

Step two.

The final step occurred when, having completed the filming and editing of the movie—Love in the Age of Dion—it went on to win (the first of several awards) Best Feature Film at the Long Island International Film Festival.

All of this occurred, after a lifetime of waiting, in the year 2005.

I mention all this to reinforce some age-old truisms. Perseverance does pay off. Just when things seem hopeless, hope—as if by wizardry—magically returns. As Woody Allen and others have said, ninety-nine percent of success is simply showing up. Show up often enough and who knows what might happen. Sometimes the most unlikeliest of things.


Philip Cioffari is the author of the novels If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreak Blues, Catholic Boys, Dark Road, Dead End, Jesusville, The Bronx Kill, and the story collection A History of Things Lost or Broken, which won the Tartt First Fiction Prize, and the D.H. Lawrence Award. His stories have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals and commercial magazines. He wrote and directed the independent feature film, Love in the Age of Dion, which won a number of film festival awards, including Best Picture at the Long Island International Film Expo, and Best Director at the NY Film & Video Festival. He is professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Click here to visit his website

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

Author photo by Ken Haas

My First Time: Elizabeth Kadetsky

My First In-Depth Encounter with an Actual Author

In 1990, the summer before I enrolled at Columbia Journalism School, a friend had passed along her job as amanuensis to a man whom I will call Harry Dewitt because, really, he was a very nice man, and I appreciate the exposure he gave me to an old-fashioned view of the publishing industry. It is not his real name.

Harry met me in his floor-through Park Avenue apartment, a grand if faded space adorned with dusty oriental carpets and rattan. I remember a French sculpture that resembled Rodin’s The Kiss. Harry appeared to be in his eighties, with pressed slacks belted too high, a stoop, and prominent eyebrows. He looked at me shyly and actually said, “You’ll do,” though his manner was less intimidating at first than bashful, almost like a boy on a first date.

“The new amanuensis,” he added, to himself. He spoke with an antiquated New York accent similar to the one I’d often heard in Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn movies, speaking to a sort of continental, American but not quite American persona. Or maybe it was Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success that his accent evoked for me. Harry said he’d been working on his memoirs—memoihhss—but that until he had a better sense of my abilities we’d start with correspondence. They were putting on a new production of one of his plays in Bonn. He named the play by title. I’d heard of it, hadn’t I, he asked, and of him? I avoided the questions by saying that I’d been living in California, though I did tell him honestly that my friend had caught me up to date on his biography.

He set me up at an IBM Selectric typewriter and began dictating from a large oak desk with small pieces of primitive-style art that seemed mildly erotic in nature. “Verlag Straussberg, ” he began, adding an address with a multisyllabic German street name.

“Excuse me. One g or two in Verlag?” I interrupted.

He looked at me with contempt. “My dear. Where did you go to college? Verlag. Publisher, in German, of course. Excuse me,” he added. He walked to the end of the large room, probably the apartment’s fifth or sixth bedroom, then he walked back officiously and began pacing as he continued to dictate.

“Dear George. My fourth play, first produced on Broadway in 1934, is being restaged in Bonn this coming January. I trust you recall the extent of my oeuvre, which spans forty debut productions in cities including Dusseldorf, Bruges and Trieste.

“The production in Bonn marks the first staging of works by, and I quote, ‘distinguished American playwright Harry Dewitt, author of several powerful plays about men struggling in the vortex of history. They advocate ideas, suffer, often are executed, but eventually their ideas win.’”

“Do you want to add the citation?” I asked.

“Citation? Oh no, no. It’s from the New York T…” he said, trailing off—I later discovered it was from not the Times, but from a small weekly newspaper upstate. He walked up behind me. “My dear, you are an awfully slow typist.” He put on his reading glasses and peered at the page, which by now, it was true, had more correction fluid than type. “Comma!” he added. “My God! What are they teaching you in California? Don’t you know that the last item in a series always takes a comma!?”

This of course was not categorically true; even I knew that the Chicago Manual of Style offered caveats for the Oxford comma, but I added the comma as he wished, in the space between the words Bruges and Trieste.

“Oh no no!” he cried, watching. “A Space. A space!” He reached across me from behind so close I felt a wind at my ear. He tore the paper from the typewriter. “Start again.” He handed me a new piece of his stationery, from a full, double-ream-sized box. The page had his name and Upper East Side address embossed in raised, shiny letters.

I would have been offended at his maltreatment of me, but I did feel sorry for Harry Dewitt. It went on like this. He re-dictated the same letter fourteen times that first day, addressed to, I think, every German publisher whose address he’d been able to locate in a directory then useful, before Google, called the Gale Directory. The letter didn’t actually have a point, just to remind the reader that he existed. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I could easily just copy it while he went back to his important work creating oeuvres treating the struggle of man against will, evil, and ignorance.

Later he introduced me to his wife, Daphne, also in her eighties, a sharply-dressed white-headed woman with sparkling pins in her hair who treated her husband with all the regard he’d come to expect given his stellar career. “Ah, the new amanuensis,” Daphne had said, upon meeting me, with no trace of humor or irony in her voice at all.

Later, once I enrolled at Columbia, I met several students who’d worked as assistants to actually famous writers, such as Mary Gordon, David Halberstam, and Gail Sheehy. None of these students had ever heard the word amanuensis.

I suppose one’s relative standing in the world of writers determines the relative length of the words they must use to describe their importance. Harry, I think, benefitted less from my actual typing and secretarial skills than from the mere fact I played a role that enhanced his own.

Today I see that Harry Dewitt is easily Wikipedi-able, and that his Wikipedia page was obviously written by himself. I’d typed its exact words many times. He was born in 1906 and lived to a hundred. Such stamina. But was he the real thing? Did his stamina, post-1940, when his fourth play was produced in Lausanne, ever get channeled to his work, or was it devoted for the next fifty years solely to the task of promoting the creations of his younger genius. Too bad for Harry he didn’t live to see Facebook. Okay, maybe he was a fraud. Maybe his labors with his revolving door of amanuenses provide just a cautionary tale. But working for Harry Drewitt showed me an old way of life. And it also showed me that in the Facebook and Twitter era, self-promotion has merely taken another form. Literature and the pursuit of status will always be intertwined. Sometimes I remember Harry as I read Facebook to myself. I put on his Cary Grant accent and read aloud, and I am possessed of a feeling I have gained a greater perspective on our literary times.


Elizabeth Kadetsky’s memoir-in-essays, The Memory Eaters, explores family illness, addiction, inherited trauma, and the secrets of her inherited past. She is author of the memoir First There Is a Mountain, the short story collection The Poison that Purifies You, and the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World. A professor of creative writing at Penn State and nonfiction editor at the New England Review, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program, MacDowell Colony, and Vermont Studio Center.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

My First Time: Barbara J. King

The First Book My Mother Didn’t Read

On my bookshelf at home sits Still Alice by Lisa Genova. The novel, which tells the story of cognitive psychology professor Alice Howland’s struggles with early-onset Alzheimer’s, is 292 pages long; nestled at page 265 is my mother’s bookmark. Before she could finish reading, my mother, Elizabeth King, died of COPD and vascular dementia at age 88.

Through her 80s, thanks to the crush of those oxygen-robbing diseases, my mother read increasingly slowly and with a comprehension that I could not readily judge. Yet she read, always. Her need to read was enduring and was beautiful to me.

When I hold Still Alice in my hands as my mother held it in hers, a world of mental images floods my brain, telescoping backwards in time. I see my mother reading my book How Animals Grieve, deliberately and intently, in her wheelchair at the assisted living facility near my home in Virginia. I see the moment, years ago, when I handed her my first book, based on my anthropology dissertation and written for a far narrower audience. (It was titled The Information Continuum: Evolution of Social Information Transfer in Monkeys, Apes, and Hominids—and she read it anyway!). I see the two of us browsing in a bookstore, my knowing that no matter my age, she would insist on gifting me with a book because it flooded her with pleasure. Finally I see her as young mother driving me again and again to Shrewsbury Public Library in our little town, where the universe of books truly opened for me.

In that universe, my mother held up some books as her favorites: Biographies of arresting public figures, mysteries that invite a cognitive quest, and at the top of the heap (a function, I know, of maternal pride) my own books. She read each of the five, and somehow, inevitably just happened to have one with her—cover held high in her lap—at lunch with new friends or when one of her doctors walked into the examining room to greet her.

And then she died. No matter that my mother had recently acquiesced to her physician’s suggestion that she enter hospice, and no matter that I had negotiated the arrangements; her death came as a blaze of shock to me. I’d been with her just hours before. While she did seem a little off—she was tilted in an embodied way, so that I insisted she get out of the wheelchair and into bed, and asked the nurse to come look—there was no clear crisis and she expressed no discomfort. To my forever gratitude, we parted lovingly. When only hours later the phone rang at home, I could not process what the nurse intended to convey. My mother had passed? Passed where?

Among the losses I felt as I sat with her body that night, organized the funeral service in New Jersey, and spoke over her grave, one I did not anticipate. Twenty-three months after her death, my Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat was published. Fresh grief washed over me when, just as had happened five times before, a box stuffed with copies for me arrived shortly ahead of the book’s on-sale date. Extracting the top copy, meant for my mother, I felt disoriented to the point of dizziness.

My father had been keenly smart, and together we shared many of life’s joys, but reading was not one of them. He had died years before I became a book author. I have no siblings. My husband, an avid reader and sweetly attentive to my writing, first knew me as a 30-something adult. My daughter shares my reading habits, to my serious delight; she’s 26 and later in her life, my books may occupy her intently. But who could possibly read me as my mother had read me? Who could take in the profound love of anthropology and animals inscribed in my books and yet see in her mind’s eye the young girl who pestered her for a trip to the public library for another volume in the “Cherry Ames Student Nurse” series?

In the past, handing my shiny-new volumes to my mother, each with that heady new-book smell, was a way to say thank you. Neither of my parents had finished high school, though both later earned GEDs. My father left school to join the Navy during World War II, and departed on Liberty Ship runs to Murmansk; my mother worked at a factory and took a variety of other jobs during the war. Later, my father became passionate about, and highly successful in, his work in the anti-organized-crime division of the New Jersey State Police. (Once or twice I’d accompanied my Dad on dry runs to count windows and doors before house raids on mob figures, and once in our driveway he made me back away from the family car before he turned on the ignition, a caution I only fully figured out years later.) My mother wanted most—truly wanted; she told me this often—to be a homemaker and raise me, though she also did part-time book-keeping for the town of Shrewsbury once I entered school. In our home, the furniture and rugs were threadbare in the early years, but I was given encyclopedias and other books, and music lessons. When I enrolled at Douglass College as a first-generation university student, the 28-mile drive from Shrewsbury to campus felt to me like a long-distance trek (and in so many ways, it was). Through graduate school, field work in Kenya that began shortly after my father’s death, becoming a professor in Virginia, and falling hard in love with book-writing, I felt that my mother journeyed with me.

In her final years, my mother understood fewer of the details of my participation in academic and—as my books found their audience more and more—in public discourse. Yet the year before her death, when I brought her a copy of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 which featured a piece of mine, she glowed as she read it. That, I had expected. What blew me away, what caused me to glow too, is that she read on and on from there, tackling chapters devoted to hard science with a fiery curiosity.

Sometimes, I’m sorry to say, I became impatient with my mother’s mind. Always sharp with numbers, she now pored over her financial statements and announced her suspicion that the bank was cheating her. These dark worries of deception and theft extended to the overworked and mostly very kind caregivers at her assisted living home. This was brain disease at work, I knew, yet it caused me embarrassment. Her only child, her advocate in public, I fought with her sometimes in private, and she fought back. We had always navigated mother-daughter waters with intensity, on some days battling to keep the love ahead of the exasperation.

In the presence of books, though—the world’s books, my books—we found common cause. Our sensibilities converged; we discovered then rediscovered much to share. Now, my seventh book is written and in the hands of peer reviewers. Revisions are certain to come, based on these readers' wisdom. Then will come the long wait for my publisher to turn manuscript pages into print, and for that day when a heavy box of new books will thud onto my doorstep. Already I anticipate deep pleasure, and once again, a spiking of deep loss.


Barbara J. King is emerita professor of anthropology at William & Mary and a freelance science writer and public speaker. The author of six books, Barbara focuses on animal emotion and cognition, the ethics of our relationships with animals, and the evolutionary history of language, culture, and religion. She spoke about animal love and grief in her TED talk given from the main-stage at TED’s 2019 Vancouver conference. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, NPR, Aeon, and Undark, and she regularly reviews books for NPR and the TLS. She lives in Virginia with her husband and rescued cats. Barbara tweets persistently from @bjkingape and her website can be found here.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

My First Time: Katey Schultz

The First Time I Read My Story to a Veteran

I’d been in Sitka, Alaska all of twenty-four hours and had already fallen in love with its deep, dark winter—the way the snowpack held the moon’s reflection and the old growth spruce draped their boughs like the tired arms of towering women. I would live on this island in the North Pacific for five weeks and to kick-off my writing residency through The Island Institute, I was asked to read from my work-in-progress at the public library.

By this point in my career, I’d had a handful of short stories published, won a few flash contests, and read in front of fewer than ten audiences. I didn’t have a book out, and very few people knew that they’d come to see a civilian woman writing about military culture. My characters, often speaking in first person point of view, donned burqas or hefted AKs. They complained about broken NVGs and POS you-name-its. They used the language of the Global War on Terror fluently: haji, raghead, infidel, militant, freedom, patriot, terrorist. But they also used the universal language of humanity: “Since my brother died, I cannot taste my tea. Since my brother died, I cannot taste anything;” or, “My brothers, my fellow Marines, the way the moon cast a blue light across their bodies. It made them look holy. More than anything, it made them look dead.”

About thirty seconds before start time, the director of the residency whispered in my ear. “Oh good,” she said. “He’s here.”

I looked around. Almost forty folks had shown up and for those of you who know Alaskan culture, let me just say no one was wearing heels. These were my kind of people! But wait, what had the director just said?

“Who’s here?” I asked.

“Brian. He just got home from Iraq three days ago.”

I gulped. So this was how I would go down, in The Last Frontier at a public library, wearing long johns underneath my Levi’s.

But before I continue I should pause to tell you this: it wasn’t the content or point of view in my stories that worried me. I knew my stories were about the tiny moments and impossible decisions that make us human—regardless of ethnicity, gender, politics, or experience. What worried me was getting the facts right. I didn’t know a single veteran, I’d never served, never been to the Middle East, and I wasn’t from a military family. I’d researched to the best of my ability, but this would be the first time I read my fiction in front of anyone as close to the current conflicts as Brian.

It probably would have been easier for me to write fiction putting penguins on Mars, but I didn’t care about penguins on Mars. What I cared about were the men, women, and children fighting battles and enduring hardships in wars that somehow had little day-to-day impact on my own life, “back home.” How could that be possible? And what did it feel like to be put into a situation where you could do everything right, but still be wrong? Where following orders or cultural customs could cost you your life? Where not following them could, too?

“Are you ready?” the director asked. “We need to get started.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just one thing. Where’s Brian sitting?” She pointed him out. A tall, late-twenties-something, man with dark hair and molasses brown eyes. He sat dead center, four rows back, alert.

The reading itself went smoothly. I was in the zone. No needling voices of doubt or tongue-twister flub-ups slowed me down. And after thirty-five minutes, the director seamlessly guided the audience into Q&A. Brian was the first to raise his hand. I was all nerves and pounding heart and syllables by then, but nodded in his direction, inviting him to speak.

“I just got back from Iraq, and I was wondering where you served?”

I exhaled. “I didn’t,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for showing this so believably. It’s like you were there. You had me completely convinced.”

And from that moment on, I never looked back.

Brian’s acceptance would later grow into what I now lovingly refer to as “my war lit family.” Writers like Matt Gallagher, Teresa Fazio, Kayla Williams, James Moad, Jesse Goolsby, Shannon Huffman Polson, David Abrams, Charlie Sherpa (aka Randy Brown), Andria Williams, Pete Molin, Brian Turner, Helen Benedict, and Ben Busch (to name only a few) have welcomed me into their fold, helped me complete a second book, and refused to put up walls where so many could have been built. The United States Air Force Academy opened its classrooms to me and its cadets opened their minds to my work. The William Joiner Institute for the Study of War & Social Consequences let me Skype in to a classroom of veterans. TOLO News translated my interview live, in Dari, and broadcast it in Jalalabad and beyond, as I spoke to them from a classroom thousands of miles away.

But before all that, was Brian, whose comment was the highest compliment I could have received.

Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, which the Daily Beast praised as an “ambitious and fearless” collection, and Still Come Home, a novel. Honors for her work include the Linda Flowers Literary Award, the Doris Betts Fiction Prize, IndieFab Book of the Year, a Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America, four Pushcart nominations, and writing fellowships in eight states. Her fiction set in Afghanistan and Iraq has been studied by university students and literary organizations from Germany to the United States Air Force Academy. She lives in Celo, North Carolina and is the founder of Maximum Impact, a transformative mentoring service for creative writers that has been recognized by both CNBC and the What Works Network.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

The First Time I Found a Title For My Novel

What you’re seeing here is the very first photo of Fobbit when it lived on a thumb drive and was called Fobber.

I recently stumbled across this image on my computer and it was as unrecognizable to me as a grainy ultrasound photo is to parents after their child is finally born, weaned, and raised to be a walking, giggling toddler. For starters, that name, that work-in-progress title! How wrong-headed could I have been?

I imagine I wrote the term “Fobber” on a slip of a Post-It note and bound it in tape to the thumb drive even before I’d left Iraq in December 2005, back when the manuscript was still a messy jumble of words and when—then, as now—I struggled with the correct grammatical usage of “that” and “which.” In its infant years, Fobbit suffered from an identity crisis, starting with its title.

Some of you are perhaps wondering about the definition of either of those words. That’s okay; before I joined the Army in 1988, I couldn’t have told you the difference between a military colonel and Colonel Sanders. For the un-militarized, a Fobbit is someone in a war zone who rarely goes “outside the wire” into the “real war.” It’s a portmanteau that (or “which”?) marries Forward Operating Base (FOB) with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbits who, as those who’ve read The Lord of the Rings know, were reluctant to leave the safety of their shire. In another time and another war, Fobbits were known as pogues or REMFs (whose full meaning rhymes with “rear echelon brother truckers”). I know all about the derogatory slang term because, between January and December of 2005, I was a Fobbit with the 3rd Infantry Division serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. As I wrote of my main character (a thinly-veiled version of yours truly) in the novel published by Grove/Atlantic in 2012,

As a Fobbit, Chance Gooding Jr. saw the war through a telescope, the bloody snarl of combat remained at a safe, sanitized distance from his air-conditioned cubicle. And yet, here he was on a FOB at the edge of Baghdad, geographically central to gunfire. To paraphrase the New Testament, he was in the war but he was not of the war.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to that baby photo of the novel. The sight of it on my computer the other day prompted me to look up my errant use of the word “Fobber” in my journal and that sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole of memory. Here is the first time I ever typed the word in my diary:

February 6, 2005:  I read a newspaper story today featuring some Louisiana Guardsmen who were out on street patrols in Baghdad when their Bradley Fighting Vehicle was hit and two of their comrades died. In it, these hardcore infantrymen said they had nothing but scorn for the soldiers who never ventured outside the wire. They called them “Fobbers,” as in ones who never leave the FOB (Forward Operating Base). As far as I’m concerned, they can sneer in my direction and label me a Fobber all they want—if I have the opportunity to stay hunkered down inside the camp up there, I plan on staying there. I don’t need to see all the tourist sites of downtown Baghdad. I’d rather be a living Fobber than a dead hard-charger. Cowardly? No, just smart (and determined to return to my family in one piece). Hey...possible title for this book (if it ever makes it that far): Fobber: the Diary of a Soft Soldier.

Reading that now, I wither with mortification in much the same way I did when my mother trotted out the family photo album to show my fiancée nude photos of me taking a bath at four years old. I don’t know how I could have lived with myself if my first book had been called “The Diary of a Soft Soldier.”

I went back to my journal, flipped forward a half-dozen months and found the moment near the end of my deployment when I started to realize maybe I wasn’t using the correct term after all....

September 12, 2005:  I hear about some hardcore battalion commander with too much time and money on his hands who had a bunch of uniform patches made at his own expense. They looked just like Ranger tabs, but said “Fobbit.” He also had some that had “REMF” and “POAG” (another derogatory for us Fobbers).

But still, I persisted in using the incorrect term, even after I returned stateside and started taking my first toddler steps toward writing what would eventually become the correctly-termed Fobbit. Truth be told, if I had not been an actual Fobbit, if I had been an infantry soldier patrolling the streets, I would have probably been calling myself by the right name from the get-go. After all, it was an infantryman who first let the word “Fobbit” (and not “Fobber”) fall from his lips (I am guessing the reporter who wrote that story of the Louisiana National Guard soldiers misheard the word, tangled on the tongue in a Southern accent). I should have gone straight to the source of the river of slang.

March 7, 2006: Mark this day! I think I might have—maybe, possibly, perhaps—gotten a start on my novel today. Tentatively calling it Fobber and tentatively starting it out with this sentence: “They were Fobbers because, at the core, they were nothing but marshmallow.” More to follow…

Somehow, miraculously, that first sentence (with the exception of the wrong F-word) survived all the way to publication.

But still I called my characters “Fobbers,” even as the fire of writing the novel waxed and waned. I was now living in Maryland during my final year in the Army when I was assigned to the U.S. Army Public Affairs office in the Pentagon (the ultimate Fobbit job).

As I leafed through my journal the other day, my curiosity about the use of the word “Fobber” had become something deeper: now I was on a journey to rediscover the writer I had been, with all his aches and joys, when he was deep in the process of wrestling with words.

July 9, 2008:  Whatever belly-fire I had for Fobber has vanished. I had been doing so well up until about three weeks ago: rising every day at 4:30 a.m., going for a morning run, then coming in and sitting down to work on the novel, getting in a solid hour’s writing on the book before I have to take the train in to the Pentagon. Now, I still rise at 4:30, but I accomplish nothing. I meander across my desk like a nomad. I read e-mail, download music, putter with household chores. All the while, the words—still at that same stopping place—stare back at me from the laptop’s screen. The cursor blinks. I do not advance, I do not pile more words into the vast blank space—or, if I do, the sentences are limp, vague, and ultimately go nowhere. Even this, writing in the journal, is a means of distraction to keep me from my work.

I flipped ahead in my diary (of a soft soldier) to the year after I retired from the Army and was living in Montana and started a new career with the Bureau of Land Management (where I still work to this day). I clicked the search bar for the next instance of “Fobber.”

August 9, 2009:  My enthusiasm for Fobber started to go into a tailspin today. Engines screaming, smoke streaming past the cockpit, ground rushing up at me, I was only able to pull up out of it when I decided to look to the past for inspiration. For years, I’ve been making flirty eyes at Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead on my bookshelf, the white words on the black spine of the hardback calling to me, but have never had the time to start reading it. Today, I decided the day had come. I’m fifty pages into it and I know this is the right book for me to read right now. Mailer’s narrative moves like a camera across his big cast of characters—something which I’d been fretting about with Fobber. Mailer reassures me in his growly voice: You can do this. I tinkered a little more with what I’ve already written. I'm still not totally happy with it, but at least I’m sitting down at the keyboard and trying my best.

I drew inspiration from Norman Mailer as I pounded away at what I was now thinking was an Impossible Novel. Here is what I wrote in my journal one day while I was fretting over the tone and scope of Fobber/Fobbit. I remember worrying about whether I had the authority to write about war in all its gory glory when I’d spent my entire year bathed in air-conditioning and sipping lattes at my desk. Mailer reassured me I was on the right path:

When you talk about the difference between real experience and the experience you put into a book, you touch on perhaps the single most basic difficulty. For some young writers it’s very disturbing not to tell the story exactly the way it happened. For others it’s equally disturbing to tell it the way it happened. They want to exaggerate it. They want to make it larger. That could be good or bad. If you are truly an ambitious writer it’s not necessarily so bad to exaggerate, because that enables you to dare to take on themes larger than yourself.....I had a lot of experience in the war, but it was not as intense as the experience of the people who were the characters in my book [The Naked and the Dead]. Nonetheless, it was close enough so I could extrapolate a bit. I could exaggerate to a degree, because I had a sense of what the outer possibilities were, as you do when you get a little bit of combat. You get a very good idea of what a lot of combat might be like. Not necessarily a true idea, but a bigger idea. I came late to my outfit in the Philippines, and most of those guys went over for a couple of years already. They had been in other campaigns, so I picked up all the stories of battles that they had been in before I ever joined them. So you could say The Naked and the Dead was on the one hand realistic, and on the other hand it was an exaggeration of experiences I had.

I wrote in my journal: “Someday, when I’m being criticized for not ‘telling it like it was’ in Fobber, I’ll pull out this quote to remind myself that what I’ve done is okay.”

This was no longer an investigation into why I’d mistitled my novel; it was an autopsy of my insecurities and all the fears and doubts I’d had while working on the book. Norman Mailer gave me permission to tell a war story in my own way, through my own lens of a “stay-back, stay-safe soldier.” I will forever be grateful to him for writing The Naked and the Dead which served as a brightly-lit lamppost on my path as I worked on the book from my home in Montana. I needed his words of encouragement because my writing days were a rollercoaster of peaks and valleys. Mostly, as my journal now reminded me, I seemed to live in the valleys.

August 31, 2009:  Fobber continues apace. I rise at 4:30 every morning, work out on the elliptical for 45 minutes, then sit down and write for anywhere between one and two hours. Some days, it’s writing; other days, it’s just typing. Today, I was distracted and the words had a hard time coming. Tomorrow will be better. Today’s total word count: 60,324.

October 14, 2009:  A piss-poor Fobber day. Got up at 4:20, as usual. Showered right away without working out, since I have to be to work early this morning. Got coffee, came downstairs and was immediately distracted by the Internet. Mindless surfing for far too long drained the batteries and so I only typed (wouldn’t even qualify it as “wrote”) 51 words today. Overall, the word count stands at 93,923.

October 25, 2009:  While I’m typing a particular funny scene in Fobber, I get a “Breaking News” e-mail from the Washington Post reporting on two suicide car bomb attacks in Baghdad: “At least 132 people were killed and 520 wounded…The blasts, which the Interior Ministry said were carried out by suicide bombers, detonated under a pale gray sky, shattering windows more than a mile away. Broken water mains sent water coursing through the street, strewn with debris. Pools of water mixed with blood gathered along the curbs, ashened detritus floating on the surface. Cars caught in traffic jams were turned into tombs, the bodies of passengers incinerated inside. The smell of diesel mixed with the stench of burning flesh. ‘Bodies were hurled into the air,’ said Mohammed Fadhil, a 19-year-old bystander. ‘I saw women and children cut in half.’ He looked down at a curb smeared with blood. ‘What’s the sin that those people committed? They are so innocent.’” There’s nothing particular funny about this kind of déjà vu. I squirm while writing similar scenes in Fobber. How can I make readers laugh about the U.S. in Baghdad while blasts are still cutting children in half? I can only hope my intent is in the right place.

January 23, 2010:  After nearly a month’s hiatus from Fobber, I was back at it again yesterday. I’m on the home stretch now and getting impatient, but still overwhelmed by all that needs to be done in the months and months of rewrites. After today’s three-hour session, the word count stands at 143,774. Pages: 479.

January 29, 2010:  Fobber word count: 153,230. Page count: 510. Yes, I’ve been writing like a motherfucker lately.

February 19, 2010:  I’ve hit a dry spell. Work on Fobber has stalled during the past two weeks. I’ve been distracting myself—mostly with the Internet—and have not been writing, which in turn has sent me into a spiraling depression. I know what I should be doing, but I don’t do it. I hem, I haw, I mope. Last night in bed, I said to Jean, “Tomorrow will be the day. I have to do it. To paraphrase that song in Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town: Put one word in front of the other and soon you’ll be walking across the page.” Today, I am determined.

And then, finally—after five years of typing the wrong word—I got it right. The novel received a new title and wore it like a tailored jacket. Here is the day when I typed “Fobber” in my journal for the last time:

March 27, 2010:  Today, a revelation—which must surely lead to a revolution. I have a daily Google News alert which sends me links to mentions of the word “Fobber” in news articles, webpages, and blogs. Today, one of the links led me to a blog where an infantry soldier, scorning the REMFs of today’s war, defined a “Fobber” as someone who moves from FOB to FOB—completely distinct from a “Fobbit” (a soldier who stays in the protection of the FOB, either willingly or unwillingly). Doing my own Google search, I discover that “Fobbit” is the common term for the people who populate my novel. Damn! I’m glad I caught that before it was too late. But now, I must rename everything and get my head trained in the right direction. Fobbit it is from now on. Of course, some agent or publisher will probably come up with a better title when the day arrives.

As some of you know by now, my bleeding-agony struggle eventually had a happy ending. Neither my agent nor my editor had any qualms about calling the book Fobbit (unlike the tug-of-war we went through over what to call my second novel, Brave Deeds. But that’s another story for another day...).

Now, the only thing that remains of “Fobber” is an old baby photo of a book that was still wondering what it wanted to be when it grew up. I look on it now and smile at that thumb drive with a mixture of pity and amusement.


My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

My First Time: Nancy Freund Bills

The First Time My Creative Writing Was Affirmed

My undergraduate experiences at Colorado College and then at Montana State University were frustrating. As an English major, there were so many required classes and few opportunities to read or write anything of my own choice. My memory is of reading, reading, reading and then writing essay after essay. By the time I began taking classes at the University of Rochester, I was a wife and mother of a young boy. My husband’s work on his doctorate always took priority over my studies. I probably volunteered to edit and type his doctoral thesis in psychology. That was typical of me in those days.

My master’s degree in Humanities, specifically Twentieth-Century American Literature and Art, offered me more freedom than I had ever had in an academic setting. I loved being able to take an art history class and a film class at the Eastman School; my husband and I went on outings to nearby art museums. But what I remember from those days is the weariness of feeling overwhelmed with the juggling of being a good mother and wife and being a good student. And once I determined the subject of my master’s thesis, I felt hemmed in again. I loved my topic at first but by my thesis defense, I was exhausted. As I look back on those experiences, I am amazed that during those years of hard work, I had little to no chance to do any creative writing. After writing endless essays about the classics and contemporary literature, and churning out a master’s thesis about Saul Bellow’s early novels and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, my initial enthusiasm had waned.

I won’t write about my second master’s in clinical social work. By then, I needed to be employable. I wasn’t expecting a professor to ask me to write a poem or short story. Once I had my MSW and LCSW, I held valuable credentials. But during my twenty years as a psychotherapist and a psychiatric social worker, my only creative outlet was when I wrote in patients’ charts!

My chance to write to my heart’s content came when I moved to Portland, Maine. I was nearing retirement and working part-time. My first forays into creative writing included a memoir class through Portland’s adult education, a library-sponsored writing group, and continuing education classes through the University of Southern Maine. The feedback I received was encouraging, but somehow I doubted that I had anything special to offer.

By age 60, I gave myself permission to take a “real” writing class and registered for a memoir class at USM. My professor was a woman my age, but all the students were college juniors and seniors in their twenties and thirties. I began work on a story about my younger son who was hit by lightning. The piece was not directly about “the lightning accident,” but instead about how art has the capacity to be a healing force when individuals are faced with unbearable loss. “The Emptying and Filling of the Drawer” began as a short memoir piece, a story about a 20-year-old son told from the perspective of his mother. The reader only learns about the accident and the death of the father indirectly; the focus is on the son’s building of a sculpture or an assemblage.

The son who is named Teddy begins with an empty drawer and adds one carefully-chosen object at a time over a number of days; each has significance for him, and the reader is invited into his intimate space. The objects include a broken turntable, his father’s favorite record that he breaks, one of the father’s running shoes, a snapped lacrosse stick, and a medal from WWII, a gift from his grandfather. The last item is a teddy bear’s nose that he had saved. When the son is done adding items to the assemblage, he spills black enamel over the contents of the drawer. With the son’s permission, the mother adds the white silk and seeds of a milkweed pod. The sculpture is complete.

As a therapist, I knew the writing of the piece was cathartic for me, but I didn’t know if it would hold any interest for the members of my class, and I didn’t know what my professor would think about my writing ability. We had a habit in the class of sitting in a circle; when I read my piece, the class members were quiet and attentive. One young man seemed to get tearful. After my reading, the students told me they had found my work moving; they congratulated me on writing my first “real” memoir piece.

Near the end of the spring semester, our professor surprised us with the news that there would be an end-of-year celebration and that each writing class would be choosing one member to read his or her work. After our coffee break, she asked us to consider who we wanted to represent the class, to read in front of a gathering of all the English classes. As we sat in the circle, I looked at the young men and women around me; each student had found the courage to write about a significant life event and each had written well. Our professor asked me to begin, and I suggested a young woman whose work was articulate and brave. The other members of the class smiled at me. And then each and every one of them voted for me. I was genuinely surprised and honored. My eyes filled with tears of appreciation. These fellow writers, all younger than I was, wanted me to represent the class. And so I did.

On the evening of the readings, I was excited and anxious, but I managed to rise and read my piece with feeling. The experience marked a turning point in my writing life. I began to believe in my ability to affect others.

Nancy Freund Bills is the author of The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss, released earlier this year from She Writes Press. She is currently on the faculty of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine where she facilitates the fiction-writing workshop. “The Myth,” Chapter 19 of The Red Ribbon, received first place in the memoir/personal essay category of the 83rd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Her memoir, fiction, and poetry have been published in Reflections, The Maine Review, The LLI Review, and The Goose River Anthology. A member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, she lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with her two Maine Coon cats. Find her online at nancybills-memoir.com.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

My First Time: Christopher Swann

My First Time Meeting an Author

When I was an undergraduate student at Washington and Lee, the author Richard Ford (pictured above) visited campus. I had read his short story “Rock Springs” and his most recent novel at the time, The Sportswriter, and I vaguely understood that he was a Serious American Author, an up-and-coming big deal in the world of American literary fiction. One of my professors, Jim Warren, invited me and another creative writing student, Traci Lazenby, to dinner with Richard Ford. Moreover, we would each submit a piece of writing for Ford to read, and he would give us feedback in a subsequent one-on-one workshop with him the next day.

We had dinner at one of the fancier restaurants in Lexington, Virginia, the kind of place you only went to when your parents were in town and could take you out to dinner. Richard Ford was wearing khakis and a white shirt and a dark tie and a lived-in blazer, the kind he probably wore when he sat down at his typewriter and pushed his sleeves back to the elbows before writing. I immediately regretted my own blazer, which had brass buttons and made me look, I was certain, like a little boy going to church for the first time. I remember Ford asked the waitress for a Bombay and tonic. This made an impression on me because my dad drank gin and tonics, and Bombay was his preferred gin. However, the waitress didn’t know what Bombay was, and Ford had to explain it to her. The waitress went to the bar but returned and said she was sorry, they didn’t have Bombay, but they had Tanqueray. Ford politely said that would be fine. I don’t remember much else about the dinner, except that Richard Ford epitomized East Coast cool while I mostly remained mute because I was afraid I’d make a fool of myself.

The next day I met Richard Ford in an empty classroom in Payne Hall—the House of Payne, we called it. I was nervous because this was the first time an actual, serious author who was not my instructor was going to read and evaluate my writing.

I was also nervous because no one else had read what I had sent to the celebrated author for his feedback. It was the opening chapter to a novel I’d begun about a college student, a frat guy, who likes to party and cruises on his smarts but secretly wants to be a writer, except he’s afraid to admit it. There was a James Earl Jones-like instructor, Professor Worthington, and a beautiful girl, a poet in the same creative writing class as the protagonist. The title of this tour de force was Wasted Time. (No one is more certain of his own cleverness than a college undergraduate.)

Richard Ford wore the same blazer he’d worn the night before, although he had shed the tie and, I assumed, was wearing a different shirt and khakis. He greeted me and shook my hand, but he seemed a little out of sorts as he sat there looking at me. He asked me which contemporary authors I liked to read. I froze. I was into Shakespeare and Chaucer and medieval literature. Contemporary? Every title of every contemporary novel I’d ever read vanished from my mind. Ford sat there patiently. If I said “Richard Ford,” I’d look like the worst kind of sycophant. Then a memory dropped like a bright penny: my high school English teacher had assigned Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, which I had liked, so I said that. Richard Ford raised his eyebrows in surprise, and we chatted about Bright Lights, Big City for a minute. “I can’t believe we’re talking about Jay’s book,” Richard Ford said.

Jay’s book, I thought. He was on a first-name basis with Jay McInerney. It was like a hidden door to the world of authors had been opened. This was the real deal. And I wanted in. I wanted to write novels and to wear a lived-in blazer and to be able to say casually, some day, to a would-be writer, “Oh, you read Richard Ford’s book? Yeah, Rick and I were tossing back Bombay and tonics just last weekend. I can’t believe we’re talking about old Rick’s book.”

Then Richard Ford picked up the pages I had sent him to read and sort of looked at them, like there was something he wanted to say but he’d lost it in those pages. He leafed through them, then put the pages down and started talking. I don’t know what he said, because when he’d put the pages down, the last page was on top, and so I could read Richard Ford’s handwritten note on that last page. What he had written was, A really bad story.

Ford continued to talk, and somehow, through my embarrassment and basement-level self-esteem, I understood that he was talking about why my short story wasn’t working. When he paused to take a breath, I rushed into the opening. “This isn’t a short story,” I said.

“It’s not?” he said.

“No, sir,” I said. “It’s meant to be the opening chapter of a novel.”

“Oh,” he said, then looked down at the comment he’d written on the back page, A really bad story. He picked up a pen and reached over and crossed out the word really.

In the past, when I’ve shared this story, I’ve usually stopped there. I get to shrug and smile ruefully while my listeners laugh, and unlike real life that anecdote has a definitive zinger of an ending.

What actually happened was that, after a moment or two of looking down at my pages while I tried not to die of mortification, Richard Ford reached over again with his pen and crossed out the entire comment. He looked relieved, although nowhere near as relieved as I felt. And then he talked with me about the difference between short stories and novels, how to lay out a long narrative and use the opening to set up characters and conflicts.

I walked away from that meeting with a profound sense of relief that I had escaped unscathed. It was only much later that I came to appreciate what Richard Ford had done. He had shared his honest opinion of my writing, something all writers need to hear. When he learned that what I had written wasn’t a short story but the opening of a novel, he re-evaluated his opinion on the fly and offered his thoughts on how to approach writing novels. More than anything else, Richard Ford treated me seriously, as someone who wanted to write well and needed guidance on how to do so. He initiated me into the fellowship of writers.

In my long career as a high school teacher, I have met several students who want to write, all of them eager and anxious, all of them wanting to know if they are any good. An unthoughtful critique or a dismissive word from a teacher could be devastating. Richard Ford was kind enough to be both honest and encouraging, and so I hope to be able to pay that forward, to offer candid and supportive feedback, to help a young would-be writer think that he or she just might be able to do this after all.

Christopher Swann is a graduate of Woodberry Forest School in Virginia and hold a Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. In 2018, Chris was a Townsend Prize finalist, a finalist for a Georgia Author of the Year award, and longlisted for the Southern Book Prize with his debut novel, Shadow of the Lions. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School. He has finished a second novel and is currently writing a third.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.