In Praise of Good Mentors and Gruff Men
Remembering Jack Driscoll, 1946-2024
Hello, friends—thank you so much for your beautiful messages in response to Riffs & Rants #10. I believe I'll be able to keep from dissolving tomorrow and will endeavor to respond with the full measure of my gratitude, which is huge. In the meantime, this week I want to tell you a little bit about a great writer and teacher who’s just moved on to whatever comes next. Here's to Jack.
I have never known exactly how old Jack was until this week, when I got the message from a friend that he had died at 78. My phone buzzed with the text just as I was breaking into a cabin on the wooded campus of the boarding school where Jack was a founding instructor of the creative writing program in 1975 and, more than a little absurdly, where I’m teaching at the summer camp this year. I'd locked myself out of the cabin, but I've broken into these cabins before, so I climbed onto the cab of my truck, jimmied open the screen, loosened the screws on the hinge, fell in the window, landed on the bed, and looked at my phone.
Dammit, Driscoll, I thought.
I grabbed my backpack and stormed off to teach the same poems at the same school in the same room where Jack taught me, 35 years ago this fall.
Jack had a grizzled beard and wore a baseball cap all the time. I don't know that I ever saw him without it. He should have looked fierce, but he had this round nose, snub and friendly, under the slanted shadow cast by the bill of his cap, that gave away the fact that he had once been young and impish—or at least, that's what his face gives away to me now, in memory. The superimposition of what we know now on what we knew then inevitably blurs past and present into pastiche; details I likely noticed later have been added to the Jack I met when I sat down and opened my notebook in his poetry class in 1989, when I was 15.
I believe I thought him to be gruff, which made me like him; at least I knew he wouldn't lie. I believe I knew him to be kind; there is no memory of a sense of him as anything else. Even when he was fierce, he was kind, and when he was fierce, it was about words, which I understood, and which seemed right; if words are at stake, fierceness may rightly follow. I liked his hat, though like everything else, I noted it and looked away. Mostly when grownups were around, I looked at the floor. I assumed he was old; I assumed all of them were old, the group of gruff men with grizzled beards and boots and hats who went fishing early in the morning on Green Lake.
There were four of them—the writing teachers—but really, back then, they were one gruff kind quiet force, you turned a corner and another of them would pop up, grizzled and gruff, and bark at you, "Punk!" and you'd grin at your shoes and mumble, "Hi" and clutch your books and if you were very lucky they'd ask what you were reading and you would tell them and they would stop and listen and scowl because it really mattered to them what you had to say about Chekhov's stories, and because you were a little kid, when they nodded once and said something important about stories or Chekhov and told you what to read next, you'd smile at the floor and say, "I will," and you'd gallop away down the long hallway like a pony and bust out the doors into the open air.
They looked sturdy, the hats and the vests they wore, with many pockets, and the men, they looked sturdy, durable, and they understood something about us, something important that we did not ourselves understand, but understood to be central and vital to who we were and what we were here to do, something core to the work that we'd arrived in the world to complete. And at that bruised, fragile age, the fact that someone understands what you are here for is all it takes to win the heart of a child, even children who have taught themselves not to trust anyone. Those children will trust you.
They were not old; they were younger than I am now. When Jack stood at the head of the class in his ballcap and grey beard, arms crossed over his chest, and I looked up out of the corner of my eye to show him I was listening without lifting my head, and he nodded to let me know he knew, he was 43.
I looked back down and kept carving away at the sentence I was trying to shape and whittle into something more clear, more right, something more powerful and precise, with my ballpoint pen. I kept at it, scratching out a word and scribbling in another word, crossing out a line here and drawing a frustrated X across a whole page there, crumpling up a story and throwing it in the trash and sitting back down and turning to a fresh blank page and holding my pen above it to try again, to try to write one true thing.
He had told us that was all we needed to do, and he cited his source, though I never really cared about the source, because the source was Jack, who told me all I ever really had to do was write one true thing, and I believed him, and I still believe him, and that is what I think of every day when I sit down at my desk, and in fact that is all I have ever wanted to do.
Jack assigned us a poem. I don't remember the exact parameters, or even the prompt. My friend Lora remembers exactly the assignment Jack gave her, the first one of probably many that lodged in her mind—I know because Lora was my roommate, and both of us studied with Jack. She was gangly and brilliant and a poet and I wrote stories and was awkward and always half on fire, and now it's 2024 and both of us write nonfiction and she's even more brilliant and not at all gangly and I am still awkward and always half on fire, and a week ago, when I was sitting at her kitchen table very late at night, about to get in the car and drive all the way back to the school where we met 35 years ago, we talked about the fact that Jack was getting ready to leave this world, and we wondered if he knew how powerfully he shaped us, or how many of our lives he transformed, or how wholly we trusted him, and we both think he did know, and I was thinking of how we used to bounce on our side-by-side single beds in our dorm room shouting to Queen's "We Are the Champions," and as I listened to her laugh the way she’s always laughed, I admired the way the kitchen table light caught the silver in her hair.
But the poem Jack assigned took me ages, maybe, or maybe it only took a day or two, but I remember the writing process as almost physically painful, and difficult and cumbersome and unwieldy, like trying to pull your own aching tooth with a pliers, or splint your right wrist with your left. In any case, I turned the poem in with a sense of exhaustion that I would only later realize comes when you've written the best true thing you're capable of right then, and it might not be any good or worth beans to the world but it's the best you've got so it'll have to do.
I will tell you, having taught for as long as I have, the thought of having to do what the gruff kind men did—read poem after poem and story after story, week after week and year after year, by teenagers, no matter how bright and strange—makes me want to lie down on the floor and go to sleep right now.
But they did it, and they did it patiently and with kindness, and when Jack passed our poems back to us, he dropped mine on my desk and knocked once, the way a bartender does when you tip, and kept walking down the row.
The poem was a sea of green ink. Lines and scribbles and scratches and the little mark that means "cut" and the squiggle that means "move." I peered at the page, trying to hear the poem as he'd heard it, the poem as I'd tried to get it down but didn't yet know how, but he did.
At the bottom of the nearly unreadable, thickly inked page, he'd written, "Good poem."
I tell my students the story of that poem to this day. It's a story about learning that your task is to find the the piece, to hear it, to feel your way toward it, to dig and burn till you can get at it. The piece won’t spring fully formed from your skull; the words won't just appear. Finding the work is the work.
The other story I tell about revision is about Delp, Jack's best friend, who has crazy white hair and taught in the room across the hall, and has been known to nail a poem to a tree, take 20 paces, turn around, and shoot the poem full of holes to see if it reads better that way.
I had no idea Jack would be the phone call I'd make when I got a job as a professor and was assigned a class I didn't have the faintest idea how to teach. I had no idea he would send me a box of assignments and poems and stories on physical paper, some so old they were marked with a telltale smear of Xerox ink, the ghost of a thumbprint from where he'd clutched a sheaf of papers just like these as he leaned on a desk—I picture this, but did he?—at the front of the room, telling us how poems worked, and stories, and lines and words and the world, before passing them out and leaving us to sit with our heads bent, poring over them, reading, soaking up the pages with our little sponge brains. I had no idea I'd tear open that box like it was a care package from the beyond and sit on the floor of my office poring over those same pages, no less lost in the language than I was as a kid always one step away from getting kicked out of school, and sit on the phone with him while he walked me through the lessons and the assignments, scribbling in my notebook as furiously as I had when I was a kid, trying to get down every last word, certain that every word made a difference, because it did and it does.
He told me not to worry about the class, it'd be fine. I told them everything he told me, so it was.
I had no idea he'd call me in a temper when I was well past 40 about the fact that not only had I failed to tell him an essay of mine had gotten some kind of honor but that it was the second time I'd gotten the honor and not told him; and when I retorted, again, that I would have mentioned it but I didn't know until he called to tell me, he was in an even bigger temper, and told me I should keep better track of these things, but he was bluffing, and I could hear him grin.
I didn't know, as I gnawed my pen at my desk in his classroom, my hair in my face and my nose an inch from the page as I tried to decode the impossible, truculent, stubborn, glorious, terrible 28-letter code of this language we use, that Jack drank Grey Goose martinis. I didn't know that he'd raise one to me, grinning, decades later, when the school flew me back to give a reading, by which time my own martini days had come and gone, and I raised my club soda in return and thought in terror, I cannot possibly give a reading in front of these men. I will collapse of mortification. Why are they all wearing real shirts. Where are their flannels and vests. I will trip on my way up to the podium. I will faint. I will die. Is it too late to leave? I can't give this reading. I have never written anything worth reading in my entire life. By then I'd given readings all over the world; by then everything they'd taught me had been so deeply absorbed it was part of my marrow, part of my cells. And in the end it didn't matter anyway, because it was too late to leave, it was too late to be a plumber, too late to be a serious person, much too late to get a real job, and there was a crowd at the reading, and someone introduced me, and there was clapping, and sadly I did not fall through the floor, and I had to go up to the podium, and since I am now somehow even shorter than I was at 15, I couldn't see over it, and no one could see me.
I shouted, "Is there a box I can stand on?" and someone shouted back, "There are boxes of your books!" and I said, "Bring me a couple of those," and the students gasped, delighted, aghast, and I muttered, "They're just books," and I climbed onto a box of my own books and read an essay that I was working on because I knew Jack would like it, and I could see him—he was standing in the very back, in the shadows, his arms crossed over his chest, grinning out from under his hat.
The most troublesome fact about humans is that we do not know each other all that well, if we can really be said to know each other at all. I can't write about Jack, not really; I can write about who Jack was to me. Any of his students could, and can, and have, and will. He taught thousands of us; many of us went on to be writers, and anyone who ever studied with Jack or Delp or Caszatt can tell you stories about them that are not about them; they are stories about us, and who those men were to us, and what they did for us, and how we drew on their wisdom, how we sat at their feet or in their boats or at their bonfires or in their classes or across the table from them, and what they told us, and how we were changed by all we took from them, and all that they gave, and gave, and gave.
A hungry student is the only thing more selfish, more demanding, than your own child. If a student is lucky, they will know a teacher long enough to see glimpses of that person in the round, outside the context of their own lives, their own desire to soak up all the wisdom that teacher is willing to give.
Jack saw me, before I was even fully visible. He also saw that I did not entirely wish to be seen, so he let me think I was invisible for a long time. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that is part of a teacher’s burden, and their task; they have to see you, even when you are invisible to yourself.
When Jack's wife Lois died, a few years ago, I wrote him a letter. I said what little it was my place to say—that I was sorry, that I knew he was hurting, that I did not expect a reply. And I wrote something it was not my place to say, because he was and would remain my teacher, not a peer or an equal or a friend. I wrote, "You were a good husband to Lois, Jack, and she knew that you loved her, and that is rare."
I let Jack think he was invisible to me, to us, for all those years. Just once, I wanted him to know we saw him back.
Years ago, I was asked to give a eulogy for a man who had been a deeply generous mentor to me. It took hours to think of even a way to begin; what did I even know about the man, an editor who took a chance on a wisp of a kid with big glasses and more story ideas than she had sense, that was worth saying? He was my boss, not my friend; I sensed he'd taken pity on me, and over the years I likewise sensed that he was always rescuing my career from certain disaster due to my apparently incurable habit of saying exactly what I think out loud. I hurried past his office door so he wouldn't ask me any questions because he was always asking how I was, and I was always wading into the weeds of some damn idea, and then once again I'm babbling about something irrelevant, the garishness of cruise wear, the shoddy editing of Moby Dick, and then he's giving me the same look Jack always gave me, like I'm a weird little animal who's wandered in and they don't know what I am but they're very protective of me and other animals like me, and the whole thing is embarrassing and we never discuss it, which is really for the best.
The editor's eulogy began, "I did not know him well so much as sense him clearly."
I did not know Jack well. I sensed him clearly.
I sense that Jack saw his students—all of us, every single one—with a precision and an accuracy that must have broken his heart a thousand times a day.
I sense that there was never a time he would not rather have been writing, or fishing with Delp, or spending time with Lois.
I sense Jack understood us as a burden that he had to love, so he did, the way only a few people can love a thing that burdens them.
I sense he understood that we were his not because he asked for us but because we were not equipped to survive without him in the wild.
Today I leaned on the table at the head of Jack's classroom with my arms crossed and watched my class of tiny, sullen, fragile, furious, half-flaming writers in blue uniforms bend their faces so close to their notebooks some of them leave with pencil smudges on their nose.
At 3:48, I said, All right, wrap it up. Come to class tomorrow with the opening sentence of a story about your seatmate's character. We're going to get ready for the open mic.
A flurry of excitement. Scarlet is all a-frizzle. Sarah wants to know if there's a piano. Jane whispers something to Noreen. Lorenzo is sleepy, but when I say, "Lorenzo, what's the assignment?" he says, "What?" and I say, "What?" and John says, "What?" and Lorenzo gets the giggles and Magnolia says, "Who's on first?" and I tell everybody they did good work, because they did, and they leave, and I pack up my bag.
Maybe I listen to the silence that settled over Jack when we left his classroom, arguing about Emily Dickenson and whether there's pizza for dinner and what's so great about Galway Kinnell. Maybe I think about the students who worry me the way we worried Jack. Maybe I hit same lights Jack hit on his way out the door.
How would I know? I know a few things about writing, a lot less about Jack. I only know what he taught me.
Jack taught me to see my students, to see which ones needed me and which did not, which ones were listening even when it looked like they weren't. He showed me how to let the angry ones push back at me as much as they want without giving way, how to make a little nest of pages where the lost ones can curl up. He taught me how to tell, almost at a glance, which student was born with a bone-deep sense of story, which one can find the place the line should break by feel, eyes closed, without even looking at the page.
Yesterday, I told my older class that narrative is all about causality. I said, Stories have to have movement; they can’t just be a collection of facts. Something happens, something else happens—that's not a story. Those are just facts. The queen died. The king died. See? Just facts.
But if something happens, and therefore something else happens—now we've got causality, a thing that causes another thing, and the story begins to gain momentum, it takes on dimension, reason, logic, shape.
Like this, I said. ‘The queen died, and the king died of a broken heart.’ That's a story.
Jane, who had been sitting under her headphones and her eyeliner and her leg warmers and her bracelets and the weight of whatever she carries and her scowl, looked up as if she’d heard something no one else could hear. She looked elated, alive. She looked right at me, her eyes alight. She bent her head and started writing as if her life depended upon it.
Who knows? Maybe it does.
There was a great writer and teacher; there were some students who became writers.
That's not a story. This is the story:
There was a great writer who taught us. Therefore we write.
Remembering Jack Driscoll: Interlochen
Jack Driscoll interviewed on Mitzi Rapkin's podcast "First Draft"
You’ve endured so much grief in a shot glass of time. A dog and a mentor in a matter of weeks sounds like the best kind of the worst country songs. And still, you write an amazing, engrossing tribute. This rendering of your mentor and friend left me a bit woozy at times—in the best way. The last couple of weeks’ meditations gave great perspective on love, loss, art, and companionship. I’ve learned, and very much enjoyed, so much. And this from a kid that lost his mother to cancer at 14. Just from what you’ve said here, Jack would be proud. Elated.
"The most troublesome fact about humans is that we do not know each other all that well, if we can really be said to know each other at all." Oh this line brought the sting of tears to my eyes. Your words were like a fish hook snagging that exact sentiment from my innermost being. And your tribute to Jack, beautiful.
I got the feeling by the end that if he had the ability to reply, he would have said something with a gruff tone but a smile in his eyes. I felt your love and admiration and respect for Jack shine through.
Thank you for always making your writing the best it can be for us readers. I don't need to know you to value it, appreciate it, and fold it into meaningfulness within my own life.
I'd say to some people that I wish them peace and healing during a difficult time of personal loss, but I don't think that's you, even though I maybe don't know you at all. I'll say I hope you stay half-afire and keep throwing your flames and tears into the world without too much constraint. ❤️