Over the weekend, I became more familiar with a writer that I had known about for some time - had even passed several times in the narrow corridors of Flowers Hall, the English building back at Southwest Texas State. As I finished what is arguably his greatest work to date, I felt a bit guilty.
The writer, Tim O'Brien, had become a guest instructor in the graduate-level creative writing program back at SWT, and though I did not end up applying for the program (which was one of the reasons I enrolled there as an undergrad) and therefore never sat in one of Mr. O'Brien's classes, it was hard to avoid his literary work. Besides giving many public readings, back in 2000 he was a celebrated, yet still burgeoning, writer producing some wonderful pieces of contemporary literature and my professors spoke well of his skill in crafting stories and novels. His most famous short story, "The Things They Carried," (which is also the title of his Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel and the lead chapter within it), was quoted and/or assigned in many a literature or writing class.
Did I read The Things They Carried? No, not at the time. It wasn't because it was a daunting, thick-bound book heavy to carry and even heavier to read. Actually, O'Brien's books are quite succinct, and astonishingly gripping and readable given his choice of themes and subject matter. And it wasn't because The Things They Carried was about Vietnam and was heavily autobiographical. As much as I was not interested in that war-before-my-time, it turns out that I avoided O'Brien's work simply because I was already overwhelmed with a host of writers and titles newly-introduced to me. It was around the same time that my jaw dropped, as if weighted with an anvil, when I read E. Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" for an assignment, and I realized I was a long way from the neat n' tidy, PG, Christian-genre literature of my middle school and high school days. In short, I was already taken aback by this strange new literary genre - which I was discovering was no actual "genre " at all, but real, real fiction - that swirled around me throughout my pursuit for an English degree.
It took me years to fall in love with the real stuff, but I'm so glad that I have, and the times when, in talking about other genre fiction, I seem like a snob, it is only because this real fiction has become my Juliet, and those genres that came before were merely my Rosalyn's. I am now completely smitten by another.
This past weekend, I read The Things They Carried. I embraced the book, knowing hardly anything about Vietnam, and coming away feeling as if, while still not understanding the reasons or strategies of that war, I have come face-to-face with the heartbeat of the 'Nam soldier, and the angst of all that went before his tour and pummeled him after he returned.
In the same vein, I have been reminded of my own passion to write. On my computer both here at work as well as on my personal laptop, there sits fragments of stories, and chapters of two different novels. Beside me now, in my filing cabinet, there is a whole drawer full of stories, novel excerpts, and vignettes from my college years up until now. In two different cardboard boxes at home, there are stacks of older writing pages, from second grade (when I first found my life's dream) through high school.
Moving, marrying, and making a home has kept me quite busy, but today, I hear those pages calling. I cannot avoid them, and I will not ignore them any longer.
Let the stories return to me, and let them roll on...
No comments:
Post a Comment