I still have papers I wrote for school, one at hand from 45 years ago, a paper from a class in the experimental novel when I was an undergraduate at Black Hills State College in Spearfish, SD. I loved it there. I enjoyed my classes. This one, taught by Tom Herbeck, who I came to know as a brilliant scholar and writer, has stayed with me since that time.
The paper I wrote, dated May 8, 1981, for Tom's class was about The Stranger, by Albert Camus. It's nothing special, but here it is, near at hand, with Tom's comments pencilled in and a half-sheet of paper attached with a typewritten commentary on my attempt, xxxxed out mistakes and all.
I'm going to throw it away today. I valued those exercises, reading carefully for insights and big ideas. But nothing now will come of these papers. Once I had an idea that I would publish some of the later ones, not this undergraduate one, but others, later. I even sent one out, got positive comments back with suggestions for revision, but that's where it stopped.
From my attic these papers come as the wife and I try to clear that out. The other at hand is a paper from a seminar on the literature of the African diaspora, a course taught at the University of Kansas by Arthur Drayton, dated October 29, 1992. That was the fall I spent in Lawrence to qualify as two consecutive terms at KU necessary for completion of my PhD, which never happened. I couldn't finish. But the courses were good, and I was hopeful after my job ended when my school, St. Mary of the Plains College in Dodge City, closed that spring. February 17, 1992, I think, when the announcement came.
I got other jobs. I finished a PhD elsewhere, with other good professors.
Drayton too was positive in his comments. Maybe that could have been a publishable paper. It was printed on a dot matrix printer, so by that time I was using a computer. Maybe a digital version remains somewhere.
In that paper, I took on a topic that continues to intrigue me when I read, when I write. It's the pull between the community and the individual, adhering to the group or striking out on your own. I write here about three books we read that semester: Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe, Bridge of Beyond, by Simone Schwartz-Bart, and Praisesong for the Widow, by Paule Marshall. I have no memory of the second book, and little of the third, but Achebe's work stays with me.
It was hard work, writing those papers, especially the later one, when I was living in a motel room in Lawrence with my family across the state. My children were small. I was away all week, some weekends. It was hard.
But I enjoyed that life of study, of books, of sharing ideas, learning, reading. Tom Herbeck died years ago. Drayton is probably gone, too, along with many of my other great teachers.
It's all good. I can let these papers go, and with that, maybe I can put more in motion, toward the past, toward trash, saved in memory.
