Part I : SFO to JFK

You can't be the first, but you can be alone.

Lish was not for everyone.

If you came to be coddled, if you came for support, if you wanted a parent, you were headed for disappointment. If you wanted to have your say but could not say it well, you would not be heard. If you had weak boundaries, you were in trouble: a woman passed out cold in one class, an editor from Esquire threw up in another. If you considered yourself politically correct or any category of citizen ending in ist, you'd likely leave by the end of the first class. If you thought you could top Lish, you were in for a surprise. If you did, if you could, he would be the first person to jump to his feet and sing your praises uptown and down.

If you can look at the world as no one else has seen it, then you've got something.

You sat for six to eight hours without a stretch or a piss. You listened to the teacher and artist at work, while ignoring or forgiving the man. You accepted 12-gauge evisceration of your work and returned to the next meeting with something new, and you hoped better, to offer.

There were gifts to be had. You learned - intellectually, acoustically, through absorption, osmosis. About fear and desire. About desire and Desire. Maybe one day you got it. You began to understand how replacing a single word, say finger with hand, converted a pedestrian sentence into one glorious with promise.

You knew why you came. You were in love with the infinite elasticity of language, could be moved to tears by a classmate's sentence ringing sweet and true, while still not possessing one yourself.

You knew why you stayed. There were gifts to be had. You were determined to have them. You just knew, and with that came the knowing that nothing Lish gave was really a gift, but as an artist you understood that everything was there for the taking.

Your only impediment is fear. Your only advantage is desire.

And of course, if you didn't know when to quit, you were hooked.

The first sentence is the catastrophic equation. . . is a sentential event. . . is congested. . . is dense with utterance. It comes from the body, not the mind and cannot be taught; the rest can.

You are trying to produce an opening . . . You have to find in yourself the bearing of a god . . . The best way to start is to build more fear of dying, cultivate an awareness of its omnipresence in your life; then the consequences of your act, your utterance, are more likely to reach farther . . .

You should have nothing but that object of your fascination . . . Go to an extreme of desire . . . Engage in an act of self-interrogation; what is the real mystery? Who is talking? Who has the need? Who sees? Who sees me? Who's talking when you talk? What do you see first? Go deeper, what aspect of this fascinates you? What language do you need to describe them?

Your task is to produce an illusion of the world beginning now . . . Don't write until the totality of the song is in your head as a total eruption . . . The sentence should not be a sentence that communicates, but one that presents. Not a sentence about the world, but one that is the world entire.

Four years ago, fresh out of a master of fine arts program and certain that if I never participated in a writing workshop again it would be too soon, I signed up for a Gordon Lish class. I knew of Lish only from my former writing teacher, Amy Hempel, whose work and methods I much admired, and whose piece on Lish, "Captain Fiction," I had read in Esquire and which inspired me. Still, a class was a workshop was a workshop, and as I drove toward the appointed room and time on a sunny June day in San Francisco, I was certain that I was about to spend three days of time in the same hole that had already swallowed my three-hundred dollar check.

On the first of the hundreds of pages of notes I took that Friday and in the succeeding eighteen months, I described him:

A man with cool blue eyes and a partially unzipped olive-tan jump suit emerges from a London Fog raincoat and Australian bush hat. White hair whipped up over his ears as if he blow-dries his hair with a leaf blower. He is wearing unusual high-top, maroon leather lace-up shoes, well worn but highly polished — the same style of shoes worn by the strange man I once followed across the Golden Gate bridge because I thought he was going to jump.

After perfunctory pleasantries and introductions, Lish went to the blackboard:

How do you go to the instrument and strike a note newly?

Without a glance at the dozen of us in attendance he began to answer his own question, beginning with a half-hour definition of what the question asked. Then, over the next three days, continuing for nearly twenty hours in six to eight hour stretches, he told us exactly, precisely, in great rhetorical swathes and in minute detail and at great length, the answer to his question, and how we might come to write something truly original and linguistically compelling.

With your language, you are looking for a new heart.

Pop culture is about the erosion of what we already have . . . your job is not to be consumed by them, but to lead them to a place they've never been.

When the voice isn't your voice, it's the voice of death.

Lish's style as speaker bore a dizzying disrespect for the protocol, political correctness, pop-truisms, and personal sensitivities that were the very foundation of the writing workshops I had grown to loathe in my then seven years of becoming a writer. He rarely took questions; it was up to you to figure it out. He was entertaining to boot. He spoke of his enjoyment of fucking with all the ease and nonchalance that we Californians talk about how many lattés a day we are up to. Over time, I wondered which parts of his stories were true. But with Lish, that sort of truth did not matter.

I'm not telling. I'm not teaching. I'm not hiding. I'm using words to reveal.