omorka | Thank You, Dr. S, Dr. G, and Dr. B

So, there I was in undergrad, and I encountered this wonderfully daffy professor in the English department. Dr. S had prematurely white hair, left just long enough to be unkempt, in that manner I associate, whether fairly or not, with guys who did too much LSD in the '60s. He was liberal, but in a quirky, past-worshipping way. He was deeply invested in the trappings and praxis of Christianity, but deeply suspicious of actual Christian theology. He was one of those guys who is aware of gender issues in Western literature, although it wasn't really his area of study; he didn't usually bring them up in class unless they were way out in front, but he always encouraged the women in his classes to bring them up and explore them, either in discussion or in writing.

But what he really taught me was writing. He wasn't into the two-tests-and-two-papers thing that so many of my EngLit profs were. He wanted us to write for every class, and to write about what we were reading. He was also one of those guys who believes in the primacy of the text. He taught us how to do close reading, to ask why that comma is there and not there instead, to interrogate word choices. Unlike a lot of text-primary literary analysts, he didn't try to edit out the reader or the author; he was very into the idea of one era talking to another through the text via the writer and reader. But he kept us looking for details, for choice moments and extra flavor. And he wanted us to comment on them, to write about them outselves. He wanted us to journal about the text as we read it with that close focus. It was a natural approach to me, and it's a habit I gladly kept. This journal-blog is, in large part, an outgrowth of his classes.

At about the same time, I took a couple of classes from another professor - older, earthier, and coarser - whose approach could not have been more different. Dr. G was all about literary history, the life of the author and the world they lived in, and how the text was completely a product of that. He had little patience for nitpickery; an eye for detail was not always a blessing in his classes. And he believed in more testing and less writing, although he did expect us to write and write well.

The blessing I got from him was an incredible tolerance for, and even appreciation for, ambiguity in a text. He refused to believe in any single interpretation of a text, because for him the only person who knew what a text 'really' meant was the author, and they were usually dead. Worse, sometimes they changed their minds. When the highest possible authority was flawed, there was incredible play in potential meaning. (He also introduced me to the Romantic Poets, just because he happened to be teaching that class, and I owe him big for that, even as I question the wisdom of letting a hardcore Freudian teach a class involving Blake.)

Much later, I landed in a class that was not so much about literature as about teaching literature. Dr. B was the first reader-response theorist I ever read. Where Dr. S held the text up before a light, and Dr. G interrogated the author's time and place, Dr. B pointed at the reader as the maker-of-meaning. It is a miracle that we can talk to each other, write to each other across incredible spans of time and space, at all; it is nothing short of magick in the purest sense that the writer can spill ink on paper or pixels on phosphor, and someone else utterly other can behold them and make understanding out of it. And yet it's an everyday wonder, and we expect every schoolchild to master this deep wizardry by third grade.

From her, I learned that every text is half a mirror, that we see in the story not only what the author left there but what we bring to it ourselves. It is one of my weaknesses as an author that I do not always pay attention to the mirrored surface, instead running around planting tiny seeds. But part of the sorcery is that I don't have to, in the end; every reader will see what she brought to the work whether I polish it or not.

Sky, Land, and Sea. For these three gifts, o my teachers, I give thanks.