Recently I sat down with Sena Jeter Naslund, my former teacher, in her beautiful Victorian home overlooking the fountain of Venus emerging from her bronze half-shell in St. James Court in Louisville, Kentucky, my hometown. I brought flowers, and we had tea and chatted about her forthcoming novel, about my messy manuscript in process, about our shared memories of her writing workshop, about her memories of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the sixties, where she learned from R.V. Cassill and Paul Engle, who told her she reminded him of Flannery O’Connor. After an hour I left with a promise to return. I left energized to write. I still am.
When you feel stuck or uninspired or overwhelmed with the kind of work that keeps pulling your attention from the work you want to be doing on your poem, your essay, your story, your novel, seek out an old teacher or mentor—not for the sake of asking their advice or picking their brain, but for the sake of remembering and reconnecting with a past version of yourself, a self inspired and eager, someone who didn’t know what they didn’t know, someone seeking the promise of unseen vistas.
—Jeremy Schraffenberger, editor, North American Review
Photo credit: Kim Groninga