Then a terrible thing happened. My mother found my scribbled pages. She was ecstatic. Naturally I didn’t believe her when she said she couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. I mean, come on! She was my mother.
I never finished that first novel. I kept a journal and wrote some essays, but I didn’t write fiction again until I was in college. I suspect part of the problem was that, until that time, I’d never read a badly written book. Mostly I read the classics: The Three Musketeers, Madame Bovary, Vanity Fair, Anna Karenina, and Wuthering Heights were my favorites.
I didn’t find the nerve to try writing again until I was a sophomore at Agnes Scott College. Suet Lim, who lived next door on the first floor of Walters Dormitory, was taking a creative writing class. She read her stories to me, and I was fascinated as her work evolved through subsequent drafts. But I still shied from trying it myself. Then there came a quarter when I couldn’t fit a single English course into my schedule, a disaster for someone who’d decided on an English major simply because she liked it, not because she had any idea what to do with it.
“So take Bo’s class,” Suet said. “That’ll fit.”
Bo Ball taught creative writing and Shakespeare. He was intimidating as hell, the kind of professor who spawned rumors that reduced freshmen to quivering jelly. The most famous of these oft-repeated tales told how he had supposedly returned a student’s story, climbed up onto the table around which his class met, and stomped up and down the table, all the while chanting: “Dangling modifiers! Dangling modifiers!” Then, so goes the story, he sat down, smoothed his shirt and looked the girl dead in the eye.
"Have I made myself absolutely clear?” he reportedly asked her.
I didn’t tell Suet I was afraid of Bo Ball. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could tell Suet. She had come to Agnes Scott from Malaysia and often wandered into Walter’s lobby wearing only what she called “a respectable piece of cloth” wrapped around her skinny bronze body. In 1981, this raised a few eyebrows, but Suet’s real claim to fame was the morning she showed up in the dining hall with a bona-fide Mohawk. Even I, already developing a reputation for non-conformity among my peers, was in awe of Suet.
