(The beginning of this memoir goes back to 1949 for those scrolling back)

                                                         CREATIVE WRITING 101

     At Cerritos, I decided to take only classes I liked—creative writing, English Literature, and a liberal arts agenda. I was now strictly a student. The only person I associated with on campus was my ex baseball team mate, Fred Dyer. My writing class, which was comprised of students who had been writing fiction, poetry and journalism in the past, and a few older people wishing to learn to write, was taught by a mop-haired, youthful man around 30 named David Lewellen Edwards. He was rather shapeless, with a broad, sensitive face. He wore baggy slacks and short-sleeve shirts. On our first day of class he delivered a detailed account of who he was and what he was about. He grew up in Hollywood. His dear friend was Richard Chamberlain, star of the TV series, Dr. Kildare, and Edwards was “very happy for his success,” though Chamberlain was an accomplished “stage actor.”

     Edwards was proud of his Welch ancestry and spent a summer at an estate in Wales partying and studying for his sabbatical with Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, whom “one

could listen to for hours” as they recited Shakespeare or carried on between themselves while downing prodigious amounts of booze. Burton’s memory, even in a drunken state, was pure genius and his aura spellbinding. Edwards’ writing mentors were F. Scott Fitzgerald, “who wrote the truest sentences,” Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller. He shambled about in an un-athletic gait and used his hands when he talked, seldom raised his voice, did not lecture, wished to be called Dave, and NOT, God forbid, Mr. Edwards!

     Our first assignments were to write about anything that came to our minds, so I dashed out a ridiculous vignette of a southerner named Virgil Pilch who was so lazy he “did less than nothing if humanly possible,” and spent most of his time vegetating on the front porch with his dog, who was lazier than Pilch and rose up one evening to bite him on the ass after he expelled a ceaseless barrage of foul flatus.  

     I had no idea where such drivel originated, but I was nevertheless proud of my piece and read it over and over with increasing approval and self-congratulation. Mr. Edwards

spent each class discussing writers and writing but taught no structure or plot, suggested no self-help books, renounced formulas, and instead urged us to read the great writers and the underground writers and learn from them, and, after we grew weary of imitating them, continue writing until we “found our own voice and style.”

     To my shock and mortification, after Edwards eloquently read a few clever short stories by students who I suspected sat up front and appeared AVANT GARDE and dressed in garish if utilitarian apparel, and whose pieces were accepted with relative civility, lukewarm praise and guarded criticism, he picked up a sheaf of papers and began reading my Virgil Pilch nonsense.

     I instantly felt exposed and ten times the fear than the day I was to face Don Drysdale as a 15 year old. My stomach turned to battery acid. My face grew red-hot. I broke into a cold sweat. I couldn’t breathe. And although Edwards did not announce my name before reading my piece, heads began to swivel around to peer at the ex baseball player scrunched down in his chair in the back of the room. By the third sentence I was ready to sprint out the door and never return. People frowned at each other with quizzical expressions, as if to ask “who the hell could write this retarded bullshit?” Gruesome stuff. No story. No plot. No theme. Some coherency, yes, but no beginning, middle or end. A southern accent hokey and stolen from Thomas Wolfe. Mr. Edwards finished, smiled, placed my assignment on his desk, then sat on the corner of his desk, and asked the class for commentary.

     I was unprepared totally for the humiliation and excoriation I knew was about to come, and which was deserved.

     (Next Sunday Installment: Big Moe—“Tuna Fish.”)