As expected, I find myself again at Aroma's. If this is anything like Lakota's, finding me will always be easy...just stop in at 554 E. Broadway in Alton, IL and there I'll be.
Anyway, today I actually got up at 9 am, which is something I have not managed to do since the start of the holidays (I've been sleeping later in order to make up for the lack of sleep I get during the night). So maybe I'm starting to get a foot up on my stupid sleep cycle.
You know, I was so excited to find this place yesterday that I had to ask myself why it was that big of a deal to me. And I think I know the answer- it's all the fault of my first college English professor, Dr. Greg Foster. Greg (he wanted us to call him that) was an awesome writer, and he demanded the best from his students. I came into the class knowing I could write well, but after receiving back the first couple papers completely (and I do mean completely) marked all in red with his comments, I began to question myself as an English major. There wasn't a single one of us who managed to escape his wrathful pen. But he realized that he was asking a lot from us, so he offered to meet us individually in various coffeeshops on campus to discuss how to improve a particular writing. At first I took him up on it for the sake of what I was sure would be an otherwise failing grade. Then, at one point he actually stepped outside of his usual constructively critical self and told me that I had the potential to be an interesting and good writer. He asked if I ever wrote anything of my own volition. I told him that I had (I used to write stories and poems). He told me he'd like to read some of them, and then we could meet and discuss them. Those meetings were some of the hardest and most exhilerating meetings I've ever had. It was hard because my writings were very personal, and most of them had never been seen by anyone else before (And I have to say that many were corny and over-emotional...I would be embarassed to claim them now). And he read them with the same critical eye that had marked all of my papers. But for every suggestion and criticism, he offered up something he particularly liked- some way that I had seen something differently that had really made him think, or some particular alliteration I'd used. Over the course of the semester, we spent more than a few hours at Osama's in Columbia (no longer there, unfortunately) talking about poetry and writing as a creative outlet for life...and I drank it all in like the eager young pupil that I was. It was what I had always imagined a university education would be. To this day, there are very few classes that have taught me as much (Honors Organic I with Dr. Ranier Glaser and Honors Calculus II are the only two others that come to mind). Anyway, at some point coffeehouses (thanks to Greg) became to me a symbol of learning and creativity, and I guess that's why to this day I still like them so much.
So, cheers to all the great college professors out there who impact students' lives in ways they never could have imagined.
P.S. I ended up with an A in the class. I think I was one of only 2 that semester.
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1 comment:
Laura,
Not only do I remember you, but my wife remembers me talking about you. Obviously, you made an impression. It's an neat coincidence that you live (for the moment) in Alton, since we just drove my wife's eldest daughter and her husband to the St. Louis area on their way to Alton last Sunday after a week of visiting us. And I'm delighted to hear such interesting things from you, from your switch to biology and, eventually, the PICU, to your plans for graduate work in Italy. I wish you the best.
A few updates and corrections [ :) ]--
I never actually left the University. I did get burned out on teaching, after ten years, by the end of the Winter 1999 semester, and spent three years working as a grant writer for cancer research for the School of Medicine. After that, I did some freelance editing, grant writing, web projects, and programming (including electronic editions of three 16th c. texts for Renascence Editions and an online Wallace Stevens concordance for the Wallace Stevens Journal), then last year returned to teaching, this time in the Honors Humanities Sequence for the Honors College, which has been an wonderful experience. As so often before--you would know--I've been lucky to have had terrific students.
Osama's still exists, but has consolidated its operations down the street in the other coffeeshop of the two Osama owned, now called Osama's Coffee Zone. This was after the fire at the Heidelberg (since reopened), in which Osama's was also damaged. Lakota is also still here, though I have mostly deserted it for a newer place called Cherry Street Artisan (where Shattered used to be, I think) and for the Uprise Bakery.
A point of detail: I'm almost certain I never used red ink on your papers, because I learned how much of a mistake that was my very first year as a teacher, in the late 80s at Washington University in St. Louis (where I was working on an MFA in poetry). To my naive dismay, I found out that students inevitably saw comments in red ink as "bleeding all over the page." I switched to other colors pronto. By the time you were in my class, I'm surprised I made handwritten comments at all, because by that time I was doing most of my responding to drafts online. Yours must have been one of the last non-electronic submission classes I taught.
I believe your blog validates my conviction about you being a writer. In any case, I don't remember your writing being corny or sentimental, not that it would matter (we all produce a lot of bad writing on the way to the good: "If something's worth doing, it's worth doing badly," said G. K. Chesterton). "Keep writing, and writing will keep you," as I used to say. As I still say.
Above all, thanks again for sending me this vote of confidence from the past. It took me completely by surprise, and, as it happens, also came at a difficult time for me personally. As you said yourself, you never know when your words are going to make a difference to someone else. Your email and your blog entry are the sort of thing that keeps teachers going--I mean that.
Good luck in Italy, and may you, yours, and all your projects flourish.
Best regards,
Greg Foster
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