Ms. Holladay, emphasis on the “mizz,” explained we didn’t need to call her Dr. Holladay because she only had her Masters. “But!” She had equivalent experience, she assured us, often, and hinted at ‘publications” – a baiting remark I didn’t understand at the time that I was meant to be curious about. Then she winked and said in a voice like waggling eyebrows, “Too bad I’m depriving you of the privilege of addressing me as Doc Holladay, eh?”
I let her reference hang in the air and float away on its own. I didn’t need to impress the professor; I just needed the credit for a class I had already taken that didn’t transfer to the junior college where I found myself at night and in the summer.
And Ms. Holladay didn’t need to impress her captive night-school audience; she just needed to pay her bills – but it didn’t keep her from trying. Then again, maybe it wasn’t us for whom she held court – just as I would do one day: making little jokes to an audience of myself when my own students were summer-stunned and breathing steam.
All of us, instructors and students of ‘Harvard on the Highway,’ were just making the most of it all. What else could you do? It was a place to pass through.
She wore her left arm in a sling the entire summer session, wincing every time she grazed it against the wall. Too close to that wall was crammed a small wooden table aspiring to be a desk. A stack of books clattered to the floor when her hip bumped into them. She managed to rescue a folder that threatened to jump, but in this act of altruism, she hit her elbow again against the edge of the whiteboard. I wondered at the topography of that table – folders sandwiched among books stacked at weird angles; a small handbag and a large book tote; a sandwich and a 42 oz drink sweating like the rest of us in that sticky July heat. How could a one-armed woman of questionable grace erect such a landscape in the few minutes between her arrival and the start of class?
She never explained why her arm was in a sling. Her demeanor, often attempting to throw her arms wide in oratory gravitas, suggested that the injury was fresh enough to be surprising to her.
Ms. Holladay was the first to introduce me to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She said of Yellow Wallpaper, “It’s about how not every woman wants to be a mom and what happens when we can’t be honest about that. If …”
She flushed slightly, like an aunt who stood up too quickly after sitting too long outside with her wine.
“If … ,“ she continued, but stuttered out mid-thought to frown at a pair of mockingbirds quarrelling outside the window for several yawning seconds.
I would learn that this was not unusual. She would be lecturing and then suddenly she would take fewer breaths in between sentences and her voice would pinch in pitch. She would be on the precipice of the fervor of her thoughts and then she’d just as suddenly ..
… stop.
I dismissed this for the dramatics that professors often succumbed to. If this was the case, it was successful as I grew more curious about this twist on idiosyncrasy. I observed that hers was a ritual of fragile restraint. Was she biting her tongue and counting to ten?
Ms. Holladay also introduced me to Flannery O’Connor. It wasn’t difficult to parse Ms. Holladay’s opinion about anything – except for Flannery O’Connor. Her ambivalence seemed odd to me. She was certain of O’Connor’s place in literature but found it hard to reconcile the racism. She was reluctant to give it the pass of, “them were just the times.”
This surprised me – and not just because southern ladies like Ms. Holladay tended to forgive a little idle racism. It was because I had made an assumption. Ms. Holladay wasn’t my first English professor; they all had stalwart opinions on all things literary. Her “I’m not sure what I think on this yet,” was refreshing. Until that moment in my young life, I’m not sure I knew you were allowed to be unsure of your own opinion. I had learned, however, how to stay my opinion as a means of survival – just as Ms. Holladay had learned.
“But!” It was true that she had fit an archetype I had already met and would meet again – often – in my careers. It’s humbling now: to think of how in my early 20s, I was so solipsistic that I thought of people I didn’t personally know as archetypes. I was less than generous, back then, in my own opinions of desperate and disappointed writers-turned English teachers. I’ve since learned some sympathy, humility, irony … .
I also fit a stereotype she’d already met and would meet again – a disinterested, yet desperate know-at-all who didn’t know enough to not get herself into whatever mess she was in then. Sometimes life throws unexpected obligations at you, such as night classes in the summer.
One sweltering evening, Ms. Holladay rhapsodized about Cormac McCarthy. I was lost outside the window – mesmerized by the ghosts of heat fumes still rising from the concrete tomb of the expansive parking lot that sprawled the distance between our classroom and Spencer Highway. I was only vaguely aware that she was now talking about how McCarthy wrote the best villains.
“I want you to understand something.”
I waited for her to trail off and watch the birds flit like paper kites rising up from the heat, but she didn’t. I do not know what it was that I heard in her voice at that moment, but it grabbed me by the shoulders and shook. She was looking directly at me. And in that moment, I was an audience of one.
“You can never write a character eviler than yourself.”
Then, to anyone else who might be listening, “or smarter, or braver or more intelligent … than you yourself have the capacity to be.”
Something in my mind stirred up and began to hum as I understood that Ms. Holladay was giving me some of the best writing advice I would ever receive. I was never quite sure what to think about it, but I thought about it so often that it became almost a mantra. I’ve turned it over in my mind for so long that the thought has a little groove in it from where my thumb has passed a thousand times. It was an invitation to know myself better; that I might summon honest characters from the dirt. It was a challenge to be unflinching at the sight of my own imagination and of the sinners and saints who occupy it – each one carrying some of my own DNA. It’s taken years and will take some more, but it is how I learned empathy – which is the main ingredient in good character writing.
When Ms. Holladay introduced Kate Chopin, she talked about how Chopin, and other female writers, struggled. Her voice hastened and rose but stayed steady.
“When I say struggle, you might think I mean that it was difficult for these feminist writers writing the female experience for audiences who were taught that it was taboo to be a woman. With her own mind, her own … desires. That’s obvious. But .. “
“When I say ‘struggle … .”
“… Chopin, Gilman, Plath, Woolf, Parker, … Sexton … ,” she listed names out like intentions to the saintless humid void.
The striped wings of a pair Nightwings, stark against the heavy firmament, disappeared in the periphery of my attention. Ms. Holladay did not notice them.
“Art can NOT be created in the middle of struggle.” Her voice was heat lightning – some quiet friction far away behind the smear of summer’s omnipresent orange and grey clouds.
Her declaration dared to be defied. Surely, art was contemporaneous to every imaginable disaster! How else would we have stories of noble spirits, feverishly writing verse from prison cells while bombs tore through holy banners? Wasn’t that our American story? Indomitable better angels? Victors … spoils.
“But!” What if I only knew the victor’s stories? History is a spoil. What were the stories the defeated might have told? What if … What if I didn’t know what I thought about this yet.
Heavy thunky drops of summer rain plunked down through her words, dragging down months of drought in a muddy veil between Ms. Holladay’s wisdom and my opinion of it.
Like the worry dolls of characters eviler than me or the prayer beads of those who were better, I gnawed on her meaning for years. That summer I remember disbelieving her as deliberately as I could. Struggle made art, I thought. At one naïve time, I was so sure that a little madness was requisite for all the greatest works; but luckily, I outgrew that around the same time I outgrew thinking I knew what struggle meant. Then, for years, I was complacent in my ambivalence.
Now, as I watch birds outside my window, I might understand what Ms. Holladay meant.
I’ve wanted to share this story for years because it is a tattoo on my practice. I must have half-a-dozen half-starts wadded up in the wire mesh wastebin in my mind. I think the reason I never finished it was because I hadn’t solved the mystery. Yet.
This is the first thing I’ve finished in nearly two years. There were little droplets of inspiration or ambition occasionally, but they turned to steam before hitting the pavement, and the clouds they fell from just passed on through.
I was struggling.
The good days were the ones when I wrote – and on all those other days, I longed to feel passionate about anything at all, but keeping my shit together was the best I could do. When you keep saying the same things over and over again, they become prayers to gods that might not exist. “It’s been a rough few years.” “It’s been a rough few years.” “It’s been a rough few years.” I denounce it all – best as I can; some cultures are hard to escape.
An ancient obstinance vibrates in me lately, like the verdant audacity of all those oaks in the refinery smoke of State Highway 225. And all I want to do is write. Today.
My conclusions on “Art can NOT be created in the middle of a struggle ..”:
… I’ve never seen scissortails before.
Gerund Girl Name 