Storytime

I -- Nathaniel Bartholomew (achoo) Hippopotamus Brown -- am an English major. We’ve been over this, right? We all know that my prospects are limited.

According to the Teagle Foundation Funded Report on what American English graduates end up doing for a living, if I follow in the footsteps of my fore-comrades, I may join the ranks of the:

15% elementary and secondary school teachers (Probably shouldn’t because I still think children are gross.) 14% artists/journalists/publishers (I’d like to think I already am one? Maybe?) 10% into marketing and sales (What’s that?) 10% office managers/secretarial of some sort (I’d make a cute secretary.) 7% lawyers (Only if I can be a vampire lawyer. Wouldn’t that be such an effective arguing tool?)

7% some kind of general "manager" (would “Manager of Hot Dog Stand” count? Because I’ve already done that.) 4% teaching at the college level (I wouldn’t trust myself with people like myself.) 3.3% are in insurance, securities, real estate and business services (I still wouldn’t trust myself with people like myself or anyone else.) 3.1% are nurse practitioners, nurses or medical workers (I get too queasy.)

1.5% are librarians/archivists (As long as it’s a clean library. I’m allergic to dust mites.) 0.7 are "top-level executives" (woh, so I could have financial security some day? And possibly a mean streak?)

0.5% food preparation and services (Already there, Mr. Barista.)

0.2% clergy and religious workers (You never know when faith will strike?)

Despite all of these glorious opportunities lighting my way to a stunning future, I still have very little idea of what I want to do after college. (It’s a good thing I have approximately 382 days, 22 hours, 31 minutes, and 54 seconds left!)

But an incident that occurred earlier this week may have helped me edge a little closer to a discovery.

I’m in Creative Writing 200 -- you know, creative writing for those students with enough tenacity to stick around after surviving the blind bashing of Creative Writing 100 in case the water gets warmer. Soon these innocent grasshoppers -- who are more like cicadas -- will find themselves hooked into writing a novel as a thesis and training desperately to be the next Algren or Atwood (Chicago, Canada, Tomato, Tomato). But until then, my winsome classmates and I are writing short stories. We had a semi-final draft due on Tuesday and after doing a “public” reading (to each other), in an environment comparable to a lecture hall for the accomplished (amongst undergrads, this equals hell), we had to stand there, answering questions and critiques.

I’m not a formidable young man. Like my father and my grandfather before him, I have trouble with women and jobs and most things. At the charming height of 5’8’’, I take after Japanese maples and Danielle Radcliffe. So I dressed up for the occasion to make more of an impression. I wore my favorite (only) tweed jacket and red elbow patches (re-attachable for any ensemble via velcro), blue jeans, button up blue shirt, and red bow tie. I even attempted to comb my hair, though this accomplished absolutely nothing. I looked every inch like I belonged in the higher up literary circle (or so I believed) and if I didn’t look up at the audience, I wouldn’t stumble over any of my words. This was all going terrifically for me, until Anderson (my professor), told me to stop mumbling a paragraph in. I gauged my head from my electric words and focused instead on my classmates’ sweaty foreheads.

“Thank you, Nathaniel.” I made it all the way to the end and decided to finish there. I bowed to polite applause, feeling like Frodo after he finally chucks the ring and saves all life on Middle Earth: small, but proud. That is, until the critique began.

“Why did Emily leave?” asked Lucifer -- I’ve given all my classmates pen names in this story to make them anonymous and perhaps more relatable.

“Hm?”

“Emily -- that’s your protagonist, right?” Lucifer tapped his fancy new archaic fountain pen on the desk.

I grimaced.

“If you want to label human beings, then yes.”

“Why did she just leave at the end?”

“She was overwhelmed with emotion and needed to leave!” I had started feeling overwhelmed and wished my jittery feet could find the momentum to walk out.

“But where will she go? What happens next? There’s no resolution!”

“You’ll find out in the next chapter.”

“This is a short story. There is no next chapter.” Even my bow tie was shaking at that point. No wonder people have always told me I wear my heart on my sleeve. Except it would be more accurate to say I break my heart like a raw egg on my sleeve and throw the yolk at everyone else. I was about to step forward and break a ruler over Lucifer’s head -- as soon as I found a ruler -- when Anderson jumped in.

“I think what Lucifer is trying to get at, Nathaniel, is that Emily doesn’t show enough emotional stakes to leave when she does. We could use more insight into her character.” My anger broke like the light rain that follows a storm. Anderson had the soothing voice of a therapist mixed with the organization of a secretary: he always began class promptly at 10 a.m. and ended at exactly 11:50 a.m. Needless to say, we got along well.

“I see what you mean, Anderson.”

I whipped out my perfectly fine and practical ballpoint pen and started taking notes on my story, using the whiteboard as a surface.

“Yeah, what if we got Emily’s side!” exclaimed Athena, a girl with blue streaks in her hair and a dynamite personality (at least in this moment). “Have her confront Jordan and then when he reveals himself, flashback to her story and then end it.”

“Oh that’s so much better!” I answered, scribbling legibly; I have impeccable handwriting, thank you very much.

“Let’s see some of her past too,” added Excalibur, an asexual male who has been writing a graphic novel about a lonely tree stump for the last ten years. “Give us some textured history.” I nodded emphatically.

“Maybe she had a brother who died!” cried Athena.

Though I felt a twinge of hesitation at this suggestion, I still replied with an enthusiastic, “Yeah!”

“Or an abusive uncle!”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Or a haunting dream from her childhood of an abandoned toy store with no toys!”

“Wow!”

“Nathaniel,” said Anderson, “you know you don’t have to say yes to every idea. This is your story.” But Athena kept shouting sparks of insight and I kept nodding yes and writing fire with friction into my paper until she said,

“Or maybe Emily has cheating parents!”

“Yea-what?” All the positive fuel I’d been guzzling evaporated like fine stardust. “Why?” I asked.

“Well--” Athena paused, staring hard at her desk, “it would give you some interesting layers to work with?”

“But why is that relevant at all? It’s a story about her own break up.”

“Maybe her parents broke up because of the infidelity!”

“I still don’t see why that’s important.”

“It made her flash back to the moment when she heard about it. You know, that first wave of confusion, parents falling off pedestals, broken trust--”

Anderson coughed.

“All right, Nathaniel, you’ve got some good ideas to brainstorm. Why don’t we move on.” Could he see me shaking as I walked slowly back to my desk by the window? When did I start shaking?

“Thank you for sharing and I think that was a good example of showing us how to get ideas flowing.”

I scraped back my chair and fell into it like a ragdoll after being thrown aside after a long tea party.

“It’s good to take note of all your feedback but then -- as Nathaniel showed us -- to apply it to your story to see if it makes sense.”

I leaned back and glanced out the window. My eyes focused on a fuzzy shape moving behind a large oak tree across Michigan Avenue on the outskirts of Grant Park.

“We should all take example from Nathaniel and be as positive in receiving critique. People prodding holes in our beloved stories can feel something like criticizing one’s children.”

What was that thing? It resembled a mouldy human: largish, sheepish around the edges, and green. I realized my glasses had fallen down my nose and pushed them up again.

“But don’t take it too personally. Unless your story really does suck. Then you probably shouldn’t be here.” Everyone laughed and I snapped out of my reverie. The foggy human was only a worker in a green suit, probably working on the sewer. But they’d made me think of zombies. What if I wrote a zombie novel, but a good one. There’s still potential in that area, right?

My watch flashed 11:30 a.m. 30 minutes to the end of this class. An hour and a half to being on time for my next. Was that enough to start writing in the park? I wanted to follow this train of thought but something had torn inside of me -- just a small tear, nothing a good coffee couldn’t fix. I couldn’t place its location or origin, but I felt so sad all of a sudden, like I’d been trodden on by an elephant wearing another elephant as a scarf. Somehow I’d survived the trampling of those massive grey feet enough to feel the sadness of being overlooked and stepped on.

That’s when I made something of a discovery. I couldn’t follow the 20 % of my brethren majors who become teachers. I’m too publicly emotional when it comes to getting close to my own feelings for that. And it would be a cop out -- like I was hiding from what I really wanted to do, which was to do something -- anything -- not to teach others how to do.

Anyway, how can you teach what you don’t know?

My classmates had stopped laughing and were shuffling their papers, avoiding Anderson’s gaze. I received a small jolt of surprise to see Athena smiling at me across the room. She winked before looking away. I turned back to the window, hoping for more zombie inspiration and less real life befuddlement.

“Come on, guys, you have to go sooner or later,” said Anderson. “Who’s next?”

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