Another Red Spot

The writer (& my mentor) Stephen Dixon passed away yesterday & I owe my life to him

[me in spring 2003 with classmates outside the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins, the day i found out i got a fellowship to return the next year]

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The writer plans to write certain things, but other things thanks to life come to you.

Here I am packing for my first trip in a long time, if you don’t count moving thirtysomething times in the past year to find a safe home. Months ago we made arrangements for me to do a reading at my old alma mater, Johns Hopkins, where I got my MA 16 years ago. There are many places in the world I would mark with a red spot for being places of deep emotional pain for me and Hopkins is one. Baltimore I always loved and loved many times after, but Hopkins was something else. I survived Hopkins all thanks to one man, my great mentor and professor Stephen Dixon.

It happened that he passed away yesterday. I got the email with the instructions to not say anything until the family did. Then they did and on twitter the writer J. Robert Lennon was sharing his memories. I know him because he visited our class in the winter of 2003 at the invitation of Dixon. Anyone Dixon considered great you would never forget.

And as long as he did not consider you not-great, you were safe.

He was both the softest man and the most ferocious. You could not write about children being harmed—he could not stomach it, he had daughters. Nevermind the book that got me to apply to Johns Hopkins—frantically the month after 9/11 when I was sure the world was at its end so I knew I had to leave New York—was his novel Interstate and it replays the death of a child endlessly. He would get tears in his eyes that you were not supposed to see. But on the other end, he was known every year to pick out a student from a cohort and make them an example of what not to do. He did it with us in the first few weeks, the kid you’d call the “Southern writer,” a sweet guy with a gentle drawl who wrote in the key of Cormac McCarthy. Dixon was a New York writer and he had no time for that. He destroyed him the first time he was workshopped. It was a rant, truly, and he suggested this student reconsider being a writer. He was oddly one of the better writers in the group and so we assumed it was something else. It was personal. We found out later Dixon had been a Stegner fellow in Stanford at a time when Stegner was there or somehow he had had a run-in with Stegner. Or maybe it was just his writing. He hated that “cowboy stuff.” He felt marginalized there in California as an urban NYC writer and it was because of Stegner and he would never tolerate that again. So it went for our poor fellow student. I shuddered in the corner, always the class Ally Sheedy, frantically doodling, hair purposely swept in my face to avoid eye contact. 

I hated my class with all my heart. They were killing me, I was convinced. The alcoholic I was in love with, the mean girls who mocked my ever-dropping weight and my nervous stutter, the other California kid who hated everything I wrote. There I was actually not a California kid but a New York writer, the 9/11 refugee, the journalist who had fled that doomed city. I had been a bar columnist, a nightlife writer. So New York, they said. Everyone asked me about it but Dixon. He knew.

He thought I should return. In our final months together after many workshops where he defended me and my work, he came back to that. He thought I should drive a cab or bartend there, what he had done, to make ends meet, a much more interesting life for a writer than the other things he did like journalism. 

I remember coming into his office one evening the day after I had attempted suicide at Guilford Park. He sat watching me cry and he took out an orange from his desk drawer and did something I had never seen anyone do—he split it with his bare hands, just pulled the thing apart into two perfect pieces. He took one and handed me the other half. I didn’t know how to eat it that way and so I watched him bury his face into his half and I followed along. I could taste my tears against the bright sweetness of that orange. We sat talking our faces streaked in orange juice.

[me in 2003, days after my first suicide attempt]

He told me I was a good writer but I had to face it:  I was a novelist.

I resisted this until my fellowship year the next year. My first story for him, a story called “Spectacle,” later became my first novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects. That was what I worked on for my fellowship as I waitressed in town and tended to my old dying greyhound and dreamed of anything and everything else.

His notes always came in the form of single-spaced ink-stained typewriter notes and they were all line edits. He didn’t care about anything else but syntax and diction. 

He defended me in class I am sure not because I was the best writer—I definitely was not—but because I was the most broken. I was having a serious nervous breakdown and everyone knew. There was nowhere to hide in a cohort of ten. But Dixon loved underdogs and I was the underdog for sure.

When he had called me to tell me I was accepted to the program the year before—I couldn’t believe he made the calls, I was already his huge fan, obsessed with his experimental hyperrealism—he told me I was not getting a scholarship as I was probably not good enough to be there but one of my recommendation letters from my old undergraduate mentor Melvin Jules Bukiet was so strong he could not resist admitting me. He said Bukiet wrote an extremely well-written letter—he was even workshopping a recc!—and that it was all about me being a great New York writer upon just arriving there as an undergrad and all about my New York literary adventures like ending up at Allen Ginsberg’s private funeral. Something about that made him think he had to meet me, he said.

I was speechless as I often was around him. He was bigger than everyone. He invited the program’s professor emeritus John Barth and even he became shy and quiet around Dixon.

One time I discussed professional stuff with him and you could tell this was a sore spot. He said he couldn’t keep an agent, couldn’t even keep a publisher. He was rumored to be the most published American writer at that point, The New Yorkerbeing the only place that he had never been published in (he was in all the obscure hip indies too). He mentioned though that he had almost made it big—a student of his had told him he was in the original script of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Charlie Kaufman was a fan and had written him three times. Apparently Joel turns Clementine onto his work, with The Play, and they share a love of him. That had gotten cut from the final. Another close call. He’d had a few. He was National Book Award nominates twice for Frogand Interstate, two of my favorite books of his. 

He told us he wrote a story every day and that we should try it. At that point McSweeney’s had just put out his collectionIand every story there seemed like a personal essay about his life. We all knew about his beloved wide Anne who had MS, who he cared for when he wasn’t teaching or reading for us. The stories in that book had her and even us in it. His books were crawling with students and endless obligations. They seemed entirely real and he emphasized they often were. He saw no real division between it all. He wrote daily because he wrote his life daily—there was always material. That wasn’t the point—it was the sentences that mattered.

I had always gravitated to stream-of-consciousness, obsessed with the Modernists. And you could argue he was the last great Modernist. Rarely were there paragraphs or section breaks or periods even.  It was so much interiority, even flashbacks full of action processed through the filter of extreme interior reflection. I often recommend Gouldto my students, “A Novel in Two Novels,” and it’s the writing that gets them just as much as reading Bookbinder’s endless escapades in causing abortion after abortion as he chases women after women.

He was the first Modernist I met who was also a New Yorker. He somehow made being an incredible capital-A artist the least pretentious thing in the world. He was not privileged and I think he could see neither was I.

I lost touch with him because we knew him as someone who did not email. It had been 2002-2003 after all and it was not unusual for your sixtysomething-year-old professor to avoid email. But it turns out he did email with other students more recently. I wish I had written him. I wish I had told him. Though I know he knew. I mentioned him often. He was always and forever my captain.

I returned to Hopkins one other time: while on book tour for my first novel in 2007. I went in the same hall we used to watch other writer guests, packed with students and professors as usual. Dixon was not there but my other beloved professor Alice McDermott was. I was sweating bullets and as I read I suddenly began line-editing myself. Every sentence was altered. I wondered if anything made sense. I was in effect Dixoning myself live. It was a mess.

I left that place knowing I would return again but I did not imagine it would be the day after my great teacher’s death. He was alive yesterday morning and this morning I pack, still ill, but recovering, putting pills in plastic baggies and worrying about everything, about to board a bus that will take me back to that red spot place but that now has a whole other meaning. I am hearing his voice, both tender at turns and frustrated at others, as the sun comes up over Queens. He would be happy I lived here. He would be surprised by my broken body that now has replaced the old broken mind. He would gruffy applaud my survival but never acknowledge his own. He was a lion of a man, too big for any room or any page really. The other world keeps proving itself to be a better place.  I hope he is with his wife who died over a decade ago.  I hope he can still write, that somewhere there is still a typewriter and papers he saves and then types on other side of. 

[the sunrise view outside my Queens apt today]

The day after I attempted suicide for the first though not last time I walked through the world like I was new again but not convinced I could stick around. After we talked bathed in orange juice by the end, life came to me again slowly. I had work to do, he told me. Think of the work. There is always the work.