A Story to Tell
When I was a year out of college and unable to find a job, I decided to apply to grad school. I picked University of Mississippi because William Faulkner was from there. My wife and I took a road trip to Oxford to check it out. After spending a few minutes in Square Books, I knew this is where I wanted to be. You could tell by the smell of the books: This was a place where writing mattered.
On the way out of town, I stopped by the English Department to introduce myself. I told them I was applying to the Master’s program, and that I was a writer. The department head asked if I was a Barry Hannah fan. Barry Hannah was the writer-in-residence at the time. I said no, I don’t know who that is.
When I got home, I looked him up. He was from Mississippi. Pretty well-known in literary circles. One of his stories made the anthology we used for my Southern Lit class as an undergrad, but we weren’t assigned to read it. Well I read it, “Water Liars.” It was good.
I still had lending privileges at the college library, so I went down there to see what they had by Barry Hannah. They had everything.
I started with his first novel, Geronimo Rex. A freewheeling tale, told by a guy named Harriman Monroe. He has all sorts of adventures, sometimes involving guns or disposal of a peacock carcass. It was one of those books that you never want to end, one whose world you want to stay in because it feels more real than your own. As I went through my mundane life, I imagined I was Harry Monroe, with a pistol in my pocket and a flask of whiskey in my hand. What would old Harry do right now, eh? Something unpredictable.
After Geronimo Rex, I devoured everything he’d ever written. By the time I got my acceptance from Mississippi, Barry Hannah was my favorite writer.
My first semester, Barry Hannah was teaching a graduate fiction workshop; you bet I signed up for it. When I walked into the room, I was disappointed. It wasn’t laid out like a workshop but a classroom: thirty desks, all full. Some of the people were clearly not grad students. They were older, and I’d never seen them in the halls of the English building. Locals, most likely, who’d sweet-talked their way into this class. It wasn’t going to be a writing workshop, more like a Barry Hannah fan convention.
At the appointed hour, Barry Hannah made his appearance. All I could think was, This is what it’s like to be in the presence of a great writer. He was the best writer I’d ever seen in person. And he did not disappoint. His speech had the same infectious rhythm found in his fiction.
The best writers aren’t always the best teachers. That’s what they say. But Barry Hannah did okay under the circumstances. Everyone in there wanted him to validate their dreams of being a writer. We wanted him to read our writing and be moved by it as much as we’d been moved by his. He brought as much enthusiasm as he could. He carefully read everything we submitted.
A few weeks into the semester, he collected the first group of stories. I’d been writing and rewriting a story called “One of us Has Gone over to the Other Side.” It was based on my friend Tom, whose girlfriend had broken up with him to date a guy she worked with at Applebee’s, kind of a frat-boy type from what I heard. I guess it was about the different kinds of people there are in the world. And how you get frustrated with someone for not seeing which kind was the better kind. I don’t remember it that well, but I’m certain it was bad. Not quite bad enough to be horrible, just profoundly uninteresting. But at the time it was the best I could do, so I put on my blinders and handed it in.
I’ve been a teacher of writing for about twenty years now. Not creative writing; freshman English. English 1101. For their first paper, I have my students write a personal essay to warm them up and to reset their relationship to writing. I tell them to forget everything they learned about writing in high school; all you have to do is be really detailed and you get an A!
Every now and then I’ll have a student who tells me they want to be a writer. Their essays are rarely any good. I remember one aspiring writer who was so excited for me to read her paper. It was about going to Six Flags. Her friend didn’t want to go on a ride, but she convinced her to go anyway. There was no subtext, nothing going on under the surface. That was the story. You could tell by the way she wrote it, how meaningful she wanted you to find it.
About three or four times a year, I will receive a truly remarkable essay. The students who write these essays don’t think of themselves as writers. They’re just kids taking a required class. You want details? I’ll give you details. I’ve read stories that broke my heart, that made me laugh out loud, that I got so involved in I forgot I was grading. Raw stories, told without pretense. The best of these essays are better than anything I ever came across in the myriad creative writing workshops I’ve taken at three different institutions of higher learning. Well, with one exception.
In Barry’s class the next week, I was a bundle of nerves. I got there early and tried to compose a face that would be appropriate for a promising young writer. Barry showed up with a folder full of papers. He said he’d finished our stories and would give them back. But first he wanted to read us one.
Was it going to be my story? My heart was racing.
It was a story called “Force of Nature,” about this Hawaiian kid, a wild man who tried to hide his sensitive side from everyone except his best friend, the narrator. It was a straightforward narrative, seemingly ignorant of all the techniques I knew about how to write literary fiction. But it pulled you in; you cared about this friend of his. He was always getting into trouble that the narrator tried to help him out of. It ended with the guy getting into a fight with someone outside a bar; the other guy pulls out a knife and stabs him. The narrator watches helplessly as the life drains from his friend. It ends with the line “...until his old heart finally said, enough.”
Funny that I still remember that line, twenty-five years later. It’s a great line. A great story. It made me see how childish my story was.
Barry congratulated the writer. He handed the paper to a guy who sat a couple seats over from me, who I hadn’t noticed before. You could see something in Barry’s eyes: admiration.
The guy’s name was Walker Hansen.* The reason I hadn’t noticed him is because he didn’t look like a writer. He looked like a guy who played quarterback in high school (which he did), almost went to college on a football scholarship, but somehow ended up as an English grad student.
Barry handed out the rest of the papers, saying there were some other good stories in there too. I took mine eagerly. Nothing on the first page. Then a couple check marks (yes!). At the end he’d written a few lines of encouragement. Just enough for my ego not to be destroyed.
A few weeks later, Barry collected our second story. When he returned them, he said there were some pretty good stories, but one stood out from the rest, and he wanted to read it to us. The name of the story was “Junk.” It was about a guy and his deadbeat dad who owns a junk shop. The dad wants to be a good father, but he keeps fucking up until the narrator has to accept that’s just who his dad is. I was completely sucked in. It felt like I was being shown something about life: something simple, but a thing that was real. A thing that mattered.
It was Walker’s story.
While I was at Mississippi, I was in several classes with Walker. But he rarely hung out with the rest of us grad students. Probably because we were nerds. He seemed older than the rest of us, who had lived most of our lives inside a classroom.
My second semester, me and some friends formed a writers’ group. I asked Walker to join. He laughed. “Are there Betty’s?”
“What’s a Betty?” I asked.
“You know, like surfer girls? But for writing?”
“Oh. No, there’s no women in the group.”
He didn’t bother to say no; it was implied.
My second year, I was editor of the literary magazine, the Yalobusha Review. It was a brand-new journal, so we weren’t getting a lot of submissions. I asked Walker to submit something. He sent me a two-page story about how he got his name; one of his father’s friends killed himself by driving his car off a cliff; when his baby boy was born a few months later, he gave him his name. The writing was excellent, but it wasn’t on the level of his stories that Barry had read to us. I thought about it for a while, then emailed him back: This story is pretty good. But would you consider sending us “Junk?”
I didn’t hear back. So, the day of the submission deadline, I emailed him again. He told me he’d submitted the story to the Sewanee Review months ago, and he’d been waiting to hear back. He called Sewanee Review to check on it. They hadn’t read it yet, and they couldn’t tell him when they would get to it.
“It’s like when I submitted a tape of quarterback highlights to Tulane. I went to talk to the coach,” he said. “There was this room full of tapes, he couldn’t even find mine.” “Junk” was ours if we wanted it.
One time I got together with a bunch of grad students to study for a final in a Contemporary American Lit class that all the cool kids took. We met at a classmate’s house; I think his name was Matt. Matt’s roommate was Walker. Walker made an appearance. He clowned around a bit before the study session started. But when we got down to business, he disappeared.
The phone rang. This was in the days when you didn’t have your own phone. Matt answered it. He called to the back of the house, “Walker it’s for you.”
Walker took the call. When he heard the voice on the other end, his face changed. Gone was the class-clown mask, the football hero. He looked stricken. He carried the phone with him into the kitchen, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and took it outside.
He was out there for a long time. Eventually Matt went to check on him. He came back in and told us: “It’s his dad. I guess he hasn’t heard from him in a few years.”
Walker came back inside; he looked preoccupied. He poured himself a glass of whiskey and went back outside. You could see him out there, talking on the phone.
A half hour later, he came in to get another drink. The whiskey was doing its work; Walker regained his composure; now he was clowning again, calling us nerds for studying so hard, then taking his whiskey back outside to make another call. Maybe he was still talking to his father, or maybe he was conferring with someone else. His mother, perhaps. Or a sibling. I remember being aware of how much more important what he was doing was than what we were doing.
When we showed up for the exam the next day, the professor gave us back our seminar papers. He told us that anybody who made an A on their paper didn’t have to take the final. This was most of us, including me, and including Walker. We were free to go.
In the hall, Walker looked at the rest of us who’d spent all night studying, like Suckers.
Toward the end of my time in Mississippi, I got to know Barry. He was my thesis advisor; we’d meet in his office to go over the stories I was submitting for my thesis. I’d written some better stories my second year—not great, but the first things I’d written that had promise. One of these times in his office, I was feeling down. It was starting to hit me how far my stories were from where I wanted them to be. I told him I wanted to write more like Walker.
“Well, Walker’s got stories to tell,” Barry said, “He’s lived a lot more than most of y’all.”
I hung my head. This was the real issue: My stories felt made up; Walker’s felt real.
“But I’m sure you’ll have those stories too, someday,” Barry added.
Was he right? I’d like to think so. Or maybe I already had the stories, I just didn’t know how to recognize them.
At the end of my tenure at the University, I organized a launch party for the issue of Yalobusha Review that I’d edited. We held it at Square Books. It was a packed house. A few of the writers in the issue were local, so we had them read their work. Walker read his story last. Afterwards, people came up to him and told him how much they liked it. Not just random people, but writers. Good writers. Famous writers. Oxford was full of them. I even saw Larry Brown having a word with him.
I was certain that Walker would find a career in literature, that he would become one of those people who’s in Best American Short Stories every couple years.
But he did not. I heard he moved back to California and got a job as a high school English teacher. It left him so worn out that he quit writing.
I think of Walker every time I get an essay from a student who has a story to tell. I think of him too, when I see the opposite, the expectant eyes of a student who wants me to like their story so bad that I already know I’m not going to. That’s me, I think. Or it was me.
Sometimes, I think it still is. That I’ll always be the guy who wants to write a great story. And Walker will always be the one who writes it.
I just finished grading the latest batch of essays, so Walker was on my mind. I decided to Google him. The last time I Googled him was a decade ago. Back then, I found nothing. Not a single publication by Walker Hansen. Would that still be true?
Not exactly. Five years ago, he published a short story at a pretty good literary magazine, one that I’d submitted to myself a number of times, though I never got anything more than a form rejection.
I couldn’t read the story—it wasn’t available online—but I read Walker’s bio. It said this was his first published story. Did he forget that we’d published him twenty years earlier? Or did he just think it not worth mentioning?
I couldn’t find any other publications in his name. But on Amazon, there was a book about high school football written by a Walker Hansen. It was published in 2010.
I read an excerpt. It was good: engrossing and rich with detail. His bio didn’t mention a degree from Mississippi, but it said he teaches high school in California. I’m sure it was him.
I checked the sales rank. It was low. The customer reviews were positive, but there were only four of them, and the most recent one was two years old. The book, as good as it probably was, had sunk into obscurity.
Good, I thought.
* Not his real name.
