I've been thinking a lot lately about the enormous influence teachers/mentors can have over students and how we can unintentionally cause damage even when we're trying to encourage or shape. I had an incident as a grad student that's stuck with me for almost 25 years.
When I was in my final year of my MFA, we had a visiting writer as a guest who read stories and did one-on-one conferences with all graduating 3rd years. It was a rare opportunity for that kind of encounter.
This writer was already well-accomplished and has gone on to become one of the most beloved figures in the wider literary world (for good reason), and I'm certain they meant me no harm, but their response to my story was essentially, "You can't pull off what you're attempting."
Granted, the story I'd submitted was odd. It started from a comedic premise of a putt-putt golf franchise across the street from a mini-golf place (there is a difference) and how the putt-putt guy was resentful of the mini-golf guy's fancy windmills and so forth.
I gets pretty dark when the putt-putt guy imprisons the mini-golf guy (who is a Holocaust survivor) in the tower of the windmill. Lots of other shit happened, but suffice to say, the tone is tricky and there's no doubt that the story as it was didn't work.
Which is fine. Lots of stories don't work, and it's possible that story was never going to work (it didn't), but the visiting writer's response (as I took it) essentially signaled that I was wasting my time in general, trying to make stories like that work.
The visiting writer's remark, indelible in my mind, delivered with a tone of genuine incomprehension was, "Why would you want to spend your time on this?" I didn't have a response, but this far more accomplished, not all that much older writer was dismissing my whole world view.
It shook me pretty badly, mostly because I had plenty of doubts about my writing to begin with. Again, this person meant no harm. they were trying to put me on what they thought was a better path, but it rattled me to the point where I couldn't write for about 8 months.
Fortunately my thesis was already basically done, but I recall assembling its final version as a kind of funeral for my own ambitions. It was the end, not the beginning.
Eventually, a notion for a story came to me that I couldn't shake and I started writing again and that story became the first story I ever published and it did marry a kind of overt comedic and very dark tone at least somewhat successfully.
Even with some success, though, I have to say that I've doubted my own artistic impulse ever since. The visiting writer was correct in a sense that even when I pull off what I'm attempting, there's a very limited audience for it, but they were wrong that it couldn't be done.
The doubt that encounter sowed hasn't stopped me, but there's no doubt its held me back. Obviously, I'm responsible for overcoming those doubts, but I sometimes wonder what would've happened if I'd been engaged in a conversation about what I wanted to do...
and got help in figuring out how to pull it off. I know that I may have done similar things to students along the way, particularly early on. I think that's why I'm much more open about allowing students to go in the direction that calls to them. That's where their best work is.
