When I get to heaven, I’m gonna have to have a word with Barry Hannah about how he teaches Aristotle.
Sean Ennis was the first lecturer on day two of the McMullin Writer’s Workshop at Millsaps College. Sean and Casey are contemporaries, but he might be a year younger. Sean was part of the legendary writer’s colony at Ole Miss, where he was one of Barry Hannah's last students.
I misjudged Sean’s age, thinking he was ten years older than he was. Joining the Oxford writer’s community after the turn of the century was sort of like taking classes from Lance Goss in the nineties or joining the Argonauts after Hercules left to find Hylas. He was still an argonaut, but Larry Brown and Willie Morris were dead by a few years.
The first thing Sean did was write “Poetics” on the whiteboard. I laughed to myself. In the building where we were, I’d been to lectures on the Poetics delivered by Mitias, Freis 1 and Freis 2, Goss, Lefavor, and in the next building by Hardin and Wilson and now by Sean Ennis.
Poetics is a great way to teach writing and theater because it gives you a structure on which to build your ideas. Writing, particularly creative writing, needs structure. Otherwise, the experience becomes something like listening to Jazz when you’re very drunk.
Most people teach one of two theories to structure stories. There’s the Poetics by Aristotle and Hero’s Journey by Campbell, who admits he bases much of his work on Aristotle.
There are two sections to the McMullin Writer’s Workshop. The larger section is young adult writers. Old enough to spend a week living in the dorm at Millsaps without a parent but too young to get an apartment. The second section is about people old enough to realize that they can’t escape this writing thing. That’s the one I’m in.
Sean spoke to the younger ones when he brought up how drugs and alcohol aren’t the answer. For my generation, the one just before his, writing and alcoholism went together like hotdogs and mustard. Except for Eudora Welty and Ray Bradbury, most of the great writers I’ve ever met were at places where drinks were served.
When I was very young, I sat alone at the bar at George Street Grocery. Bert Case was hotboxing a member of the house at the other end. Willie Morris and his entourage sat at a table by the door, laughing, generally having a much better night than me. In a mood, I told Cotton to “Ask Morris if I’m doing this right.” gesturing to my drink.
Hopefully, that’s the most bitter thing I’ll write today. When I was young, I could be a real bitch about people who led the life I coveted. Ennis is right. Drugs and alcohol aren’t the answer. Faulkner, Williams, Hemmingway, and Morris would all have lived another fifteen years had they not been drunk.
Ennis said that he moved from God knows where in Yankee town to Oxford, Mississippi because he had read Barry Hannah's Airships. I asked him, “Why Airships?” Out of all the many things Hannah wrote, why that one? He didn’t have an answer, which I took to mean he was being authentic.
When his lecture ended, I saw Jeannie Luckett sitting with Catherine Freis on my way out. My first thought was, “Son, you got a lotta goddamn gall teaching “Poetics” to Catherine Freis. I asked her what she thought. She thought he did pretty well, only he got “catharsis” wrong. I agreed. That’s ok; Arthur Miller got it wrong, too. Trying to communicate catharsis to a modern audience is why I’ve tried unsuccessfully to write a play about Richard Nixon for thirty years.
There are stories about Olympians disguised as mortals who sat among them and quietly watched their commerce. Watching Jeannie and Catherine sit there talking about their grandchildren and great-grandchildren probably didn’t register with the younger participants of the workshop who and what they were in the fields they were steering their young lives into. That’s ok. That’s part of the process.
I hope Sean enjoyed his time at the McMullin Writer’s Workshop. I think he’s a good fit. I think a solid lecture about structure is important to young writers.
Tuesday night's headliner was C. Liegh McInnis. Six years younger than myself, I was comforted to know that our generation was at least invited to the party. McInnis claims to be retired, but scanning over the things he’s done just this year, he may not be teaching anymore, but he is not retired.
A black man in his fifties from Mississippi who went to Jackson State to become a writer is a story in itself. Most of the members of the younger session of the McMullin Writer’s Workshop were from what I would describe as marginalized communities—several different ones.
Many people from marginalized communities are drawn to writing because writing gives you your power back and does it in a way that can’t ever be taken away from you. You may not get the publishing deal if you’re not straight, white, and middle class, but your words are your words, and nobody can change that.
I don’t know if young people are still taught the book or film version of Roots. It was close to the bible for black men in McInnis’s generation. There’s a scene in Roots where the young Kunta Kinte can’t communicate with the other enslaved people on the ship from Africa because they don’t speak the same language. McInnis pointed out that one of the first things slavers did to disarm the enslaved was to separate them from their stories by mixing up who they sat next to on the ship so they wouldn’t find anyone who spoke their language.
I’ve attended four or five lectures by McInnis. His energy is not different from that of an alive and energized minister. It connected with the kids in the class with power. One young trans student was fairly dancing in their seat while McInnis read his poetry. Finding someone you connect with who’s doing what you want to do is important when you’re young.
At the beginning of his lecture, McInnis asked us to write down a work of art that haunted us. Figuring that most people would list novels, I decided to list just songs. That was more difficult than I thought.
Going into this election, I’ve been listening to Cabaret often. That portends more than I’d like to get into this morning. So, I wrote down “I Don’t Care Much,” but decided that was too pessimistic. From a certain perspective, Cabaret can be devastating.
Scratching that out, I wrote Watermelon Man by Herbie Hancock and So What by Miles Davis. Then, it occurred to me that neither of those had words, so I struck them out. Next, I started to write down Father and Son by Cat Stevens, but I struck it out because I really needed to start growing beyond this childhood trauma business, and a song about two generations in a Russian Communist family probably isn’t what’s haunting me.
Finally, I ended up with Kid Charlemagne and Deacon Blues by Steely Dan and Lullaby and Goodnight My Angel by Billy Joel. I don’t know why I included a song about a Los Angeles drug dealer in the list, but that was my list.
For his parting words, McInnis earnestly pleaded with the students to listen to some album by Prince other than Purple Rain. I laughed and said, “There’s Batman.” I laughed because if you didn’t get Prince’s Batman album when it first came out, you didn’t get it because its rights were tied up in court for twenty-five years. You can get it now. Get it while you can. Bat-dance is not his best song, but it will pump your blood.