How can I help you?

I bookmarked this image because of those ultra-cool paperclips. But now that I look at it, that "HELP" message coming from the D- is bugging me. I don't think a student would find that amusing. What if someone wrote on a draft of one of my poems: Help me! I'm trite and confusing and annoyingly obtuse and over-wordy and under-imaged and the only thing I'm clearly, clearly saying is: D-. (Not even a satisfying F. A hanging-by-my-pity D-.)

Not that I ever had a poetry professor that handed out that kind of nasty feedback. I only took one English class in college* ---(GASP)---because I majored in physics and that sucked up a lot of time and I could test out of the required freshman English rigmarole. Then I had the great idea to switch majors when I switched schools, and cramming all the requirements for that major (government) into two years left little time for English classes with reputations for requiring 10,000 pages of reading a week.

But the point of this story is that although I had but one English class, it apparently holds sway over the women of this family, because I recently discovered that my daughter is taking the exact same class with the exact same professor that I did.

ME: How's your Poetry Writing teacher? Interesting?

DAUGHTER: Yes, he's nice. Kind of eccentric. Wears an eye-patch.

ME: Eye-patch? (memories come flooding back)

We go to the college faculty page and look him up. Yup. Same professor. Same class. It's not confirmed yet, but I'm betting you it's the same syllabus, too.

I still have poems that I wrote for that class, but only one has teacher comments written on it. The feedback is gentle---checkmarks with "nice touch" beside a few lines, and then, several penciled comments, asking me to clarify and expand on my first attempt: "Good impulse, but I can't quite apprehend the comparison." "The penultimate section seems to promise more. Any strong possibilities?"

I remember being scared in that class. Scared of failing to produce a poem each week. Scared of what the other students would say about what I did scrape together. Scared of appearing ignorant when one boy called me up to discuss his opus to John Coltrane, and he went on and on about jazz, and I had no idea, no idea what he was talking about. But the teacher didn't give me reason to fear. And I'm grateful for that.

Years later, I've had the pleasure of working with a few different editors, and my agent, who've all given me feedback on my work. To a person, they have all been exquisitely polite, insightful, and kind. It's obvious that they care passionately about the words I've given them on the page, but they serve the greater good of the work by offering to me, the creator of that work, their best thoughts and support as I struggle to answer their questions for myself.

You might be afraid of editors or agents---they are wicked smart after all, and they hold the keys to publishing's doors---but I've never met one that would diss you like that paperclip talk bubble does. Sure, their honesty may hurt, sometimes---and they most definitely will turn down manuscripts that aren't right for them---but they are in the business of truly HELPING writers, and who else can you honestly say has the patience for that?


* I'm not counting Linguistics, although I loved it. And I did take one French literature course, but as it was taught entirely in French, I had to analyze the most amazing French poems in my horribly stumbling and inadequate French vocabulary. All in all, it was tragique.