master class (How lucky can a bastard get? You get paid to learn). Six years of workshops and lectures—no longer as student but as copanelist sitting in front—and I was still a freaking fan. I never got tired of those lectures even if I’ve heard them a thousand times before. It was like listening to jazz—the more you hear it, the more it becomes fascinatingly different each time. Six years’ worth of notes—I would occasionally scan through them and hardly do you ever repeat yourself. Not all great poets can teach. In the same way, not all great teachers can write poetry. I had the marvelous fortune of having my first creative writing workshop under you and, that time, I thought all writers by natural consequence were excel- lent educators, with outstanding elocution skills that matched
“Do not begrudge the labor of the file,” you counseled us, mouthing some dead Roman.
their command of words on the written page. Not so. Some of them can be spiritless, cheerless pedantic bores, skilled only in the construction of words and worlds within the anterooms of their own solipsistic minds. You were dean of the UST College of Arts and Letters for nine years, and that was a fruitful period of Thomasian literature on campus. That particular time showed how open institutional support for student writers can generate truly miraculous results. The school as petri dish for literary industry—so many
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