How the hell did I get here?!
by Scottie Patrick
I’m not in it for the money or the fame or the personal glory. I can’t even say that I’m in it for the good of humanity. I’m not here because my parents expect me to be or because the English department is a great place to meet guys or because Creative Writing looks great on a resume.
Hsu says that we tell stories because as humans we are, by nature, social creatures. I am here, however, because I am, by nature, shy. Painfully shy. In fact, I sometimes find that going to class is good practice in social interaction; yet people and cultures fascinate me. Writing and reading is the only way I have ever found to get that fly-on-the-wall perspective of life.
It’s important, too, regardless of what Lee Siegel may have said. Literature is one of the few ways for humans understand who we are and why. It records our history, even the fiction, helps us recognize and remember mistakes and enables us to embrace each other with empathy and compassion.
I am part of a generation whose high school English teachers use the video version to teach “Romeo and Juliet,” the same teachers who encourage their students to “read” Cliff’s Notes. I am part of the text messaging, e-mailing, hands-free and wireless generation—punctuation, grammar, and the appreciation of language have given way to speed and cheap communication—and I am a critic. However, I am not a pessimist: I don’t think I am a relic of a more romantic time, born too late, or that I am diluted. Now more than ever it is important for writers to persist, to slow down and make beauty of our culture. But my generation has the specific task of melding two clashing worlds, helping the inhabitants of both sides make sense of this new world.
And I hope that someone comes along who might be able to do that for my sappy young peers. Really, I’m just trying my damnedest to disappoint my father. Not only do I have the specific goal of graduating from the fine University of Idaho (he’s a BSU alumni), but also I tried to imagine the furthest place away from the business school that I could get and I found myself in Brink Hall. I ended up staying here, where I relish the life of a consummate underachiever.
But seriously: When I was sixteen, by some cosmic stroke of luck, a truly horrible alternative school English teacher (but very decent human, nonetheless) dropped in my lap a copy of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. There was no particular reason to read it—the Kuna Evening School did not demand its 12th graders to read or analyze past a 7th grade level—but it wasn’t very long, so I gave it a try. Much like Siegel, I was taken captive (unlike Siegel, I did not let fiction take control of common sense). Next was Nabokov, then Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Woolf. Before I knew it, my peers—with whom I shared only a mutual dislike—were paying me to write their essays. It was then that I learned that English was the most potentially lucrative degree available at my local state college.
Of course, I am only kidding, but I feel that I found passion in literature. Every time I would turn the final page of a novel, the only thing I could truly understand, if there was anything at all, was that I wanted to do that. I want to put life on blank pages and as well as I can understand it, that’s why I’m here.